typically between 12% and 20% of the solution set is ccs. one of the things the international energy agency made and point of in their 2014 outlook was to say we have come a long way on a bunch of other things, we could go even farther in the ccs space and in fact there is grounds for it. one of their ways of thinking about it is this. if you look at all those different equilibrium models and say what does take to hit the target, half the models don't converge if you take ccs off the table. a typical estimate from this kind of thing is if you take ccs off the table, the cost of hitting that target goes up about 150%.

so more than doubles. the international panel on climate change has actually put more emphasis in this. if you're trying to hit a 550 target and you take ccs off the table, the cost goes up about 50% or really goes up between sort of 30% and 80% for 550. if you want to hit a 450 target the cost triples. goes up between 200% and 400%. that's a lot of money, and it's just because in some markets coal with ccs is the cheap option. not everywhere, maybe not in california, maybe not in arizona, but in a whole bunch of markets, in a whole bunch of places in the country and around the world, ccs with coal is the cheapest option for deep abatement, and if you get rid of that cheapest option, you have to replace it with something more costly or less efficient. the good news is we've made a lot of progress on this. this slide is actually a little

old, but basically the lower two bars are stuff that's built and operating or will be operating soon because it's being built. so right now we're here at 2015, we're putting about 50 million tons of carbon dioxide a year underground. that has a decent volume. that's real abatement. that was co2 going into the atmosphere and is not anymore. by the end of the decade we should be roughly twice that. right now we have 20 large projects worldwide. we're on track to have another 20 or so by the end of this decade. that's awesome. we want that knowledge, we want that demonstration, we want the technical findings that come from that kind of an undertaking. it advises decision makers very, very well. this is an important one. this was the birth of a new species and i was happy enough to witness this october 1st a boundary dam in canada became the first place where someone's retrofit a coal plant to capture the emissions using basically off the shelf technology.

this is canadian technology, but it's very similar to mitsubishi's technology, similar to the norwegian technologies. basically the steam coming out the top means it's operating. that was venting 1.1 million tons a year. it's not anymore. that's all going underground now and they really like the idea of doing another one of these or another two of these. they've already learned enough from the first project to cut the cost by 30% on the second. that is a very important finding and it's something we find is robust across the portfolio. as people deploy these things they say we know how to cut the cost on the first project a lot. we'll just do the second project instead because the second project is always cheaper than the first by a lot. 20% to 30% is a very typical kind of number. i want to dwell on this for a moment because it helps make the point that i made earlier. an environmental group approached sas power and said you're going to spend $1.4 billion on this project, that's

a lot of money. how about you put a bunch of solar panels, put in a bunch of wind farms, you do a bunch of efficiency model and it will be better for your customers. reasoned, impassioned pitch. the president said you know we're in canada, right? it's dark here half the year, and when it's dark is when we need the energy. so solar isn't a really great solution for us. also we can't put up wind farms because we have chinooks that run 90, 100 miles an hour and they rip apart wind farms so we'd lose our capital and canada has already put through a lot of efficiency measures. for our customers this is the right solution. and i want to underscore that line. for our customers, this is the right solution.

not for everybody, not everywhere, but for some part of the world this is what clean coal looks like. virtually no sox, virtually no nox, no particulates, no mercury arsenic, and a 90% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions. we have not been idle about this in the united states. canada got there first, but it's been a good run and we've got a number of projects coming online which we've put a lot of money into. the total investment from the u.s. side on this so far is a commitment of about $4.5 billion. a substantial commitment to see these things up and running and the reason why is because it all comes down to projects. projects are the source of innovation, not just in technology, not just in engineering design, but in business, in policy, financial models, financing, all these things, it all comes into projects because when you put that kind of money on the table it focuses the mind and people get serious about trying to figure out how to make the thing work. let me give you a couple examples. this is one of our favorite

projects, the kemper project. this is a success in many ways. part of that is we're scaling up a useful technology. it took us 25 years to develop triggered gasifier. we're testing it now at scale. this is a 582 megawatt power plant, a big plant, and the thing i want to draw your attention to is really two things. one is that little black pile in the corner. they're mining local lignite and coal. they're mining that at $10 a ton. they've got an 80-year supply. it is an incredibly cheap source of fuel for this plant. and in this part of the country where they need to maintain resilience due to weather disruptions and all these other sorts of things, a southern company thought this was an important component of their portfolio. another thing that is not obvious from looking at this but it is a fact -- this is a net water positive power plant. this power plant produces water. it is a consequence of its function. part of the reason is they have to dry the coal to make it work. when they do they recover the water and return it to the environment.

we don't often think of fossil energy plant as sources of water but, in fact, they put water into the environment. that's one of those things we could consider and the d.o.e. is thinking about it in terms of its r & d portfolio. you may be familiar with the petronova project. it's a huge power plant. it's like 4,400 megawatts. half gas and half coal. they went and we gave them some money to do a 60 megawatt retrofit and they crunched the numbers and said 60 megawatts isn't going to cut it. we have to go big. let's make it four times as big. they did a 240 megawatt retrofit with no additional investment of government money but they innovated their business model. this is first vertically integrated power plant, merchant power plant. so these guys own the power plant. they also are owning the capture facility, that's all those blue things. those are being built right now. we broke ground in september and we're off to the races. they poured the concrete for the cooling tower but they also own

the co2 pipeline and a quarter of the oil field it's being injected into. so in fact they are able to make finances for this project work by trying a new business model. it's important to note that this is also a model of what the future looks like in terms of international partnerships. this project is 50% financed by japanese banks and, in fact, has japanese technology at its core. this is mitsubishi's technology for post combustion retro fits. we think there will be other projects like this with international financing and other projects of ours in which other governments are looking to play a role as well. this is a utilization project. it's one i'm kind of fond of. it's small by our standards, 750,000 tons a year, but i love this project. they are making baking soda. there's not a huge market for baking soda, but they're capturing the co2. their feed stock is salt which is very cheap and they're selling the baking soda and

hydrochloric acid.they're actua profit on this and they're looking forward to their second and their third and fourth plant. important to understand, once they saturate the baking soda market which they will basically do on their next plant, they're going to sell road aggregate. basically at 11 bucks a ton. it's a cheap product but it's thermodynamically favored and there's a market for it. they're being very straightforward and cagey about what they're going to do. it's another stimulus project. we were glad to see it built and operating. this is just outside of san antonio. i encourage all of you to check out the cement plant where they are capturing the co2 and putting it into the market. so when it comes to what the department of energy and particularly my program is doing, our top, top priority are projects like this. it's just getting these commercial demonstrations into operation. one of them is already working from an industrial source in texas, a refinery.

it's the air products project. we've put 1.6 million tons of co2 underground on that project, operating very, very well. part of what we have to do is deliver a deep rich set of public learnings from all these projects because this is what they're for. they're actually to advise the public. among our projects we have precombustion, post-combustion. we're injecting into saline formations. doing new builds and retrofits. carbon gnats and plastics. we're trying to deliver the richest set of public learnings back to the nation. we take that mission very, very seriously. second priority, we have to reimagine our r&d portfolio. if you want the nine-hour version of that talk, let me know. i'm happy to give it. but really our program was conceived in 1997. the world has changed a bit since then so we're busily going about trying to think what is actually important, how do we make the ccs and the clean coal

r and d portfolio what it needs to be. our research program was conceived in 1997 in which a unilateral united states seemed obvious to all. not so obvious these days. there are many international players in this space. there are many partners. the world has become more integrated, more complicated, more multinational in its actions, and we feel like that's an important part of making this situation work. i do want to take a moment and talk about the financing of these plants, and the primary reason why is because this is where if the focus is projects, then the issue with projects is financing. a lot of people come to me and say the issue with carbon capture and storage is about cost. my rejoinder is the issue with carbon capture and storage is about financing. i will unpack that in the next couple slides. it's i think fair to say that the cost of a plant with ccs is

more expensive than a cost of a plant without it, but we're not really talking about that. we're talking about something different. what clean energy alternatives are out there, how do we bend that emissions curve in an important way. it's also not just about the technology. a lot of people say to me that this is an unproven or untested basket of technology. it's hogwash. we have been capturing carbon dioxide since 1938. we have been storing it underground since 1972. at these large commercial scales. there's maybe a dozen vendors worldwide who will sell you a capture technology heavy equipment at a price with a performance guarantee. so the potential to improve is also very, very large. i'll just speak briefly to that. we'll talk about it more. right now we do these gas separations at about 15% over the thermodynamic efficiency. there's a lot of room to improve from an engineering basis, from an integration basis, from a material science basis, from a thermodynamics basis. and it means there's a lot of room to ratchet down the cost. with respect to finance, that's

really the issue. how do you finance these things? many options which are open to other clean energy technologies are not open to carbon capture and storage today. these include things like investment tax credits and production tax credits, renewable portfolio standards which allow you rate recovery, tax exempt debt financing, utilities that will provide that service, and i absolutely want to be clear on this, i do not have a dog in that hunt. i do not make or recommend policy, period. not what i do. but if you want to get the financing done, it's worth asking what kind of policy choices are available to us, and that's a conversation which we are very happy to have and eager

to discuss. the punch -- and other countries, they're actually pursuing that as well. in the united kingdom they have a different of contracts which they're exploring. white rose is the first off the block. and the european union, they have feed in tariffs. feed in tariffs have not been applied to carbon capture and storage yet. just the question is how do you get these things built? one of the ways we're trying to do it is through the loan program office. in addition to the $6 billion we spent on my program, we have approved $8 billion of loan authorities strictly for fossil energy projects. clean coal is very much at the top of those lists. and peter davidson, who is the new executive director of the loan program office is keen to get these proposals and is starting to get them now. now that that program is proving profitable, we are keen to see how it can be -- how the success of this program can be leveraged into clean fossil energy projects. i think the majority of which

will ultimately have ccs. to talk specifically about the cost issue, i wanted to show you this analysis. this is a levelized cost of electricity analysis. let me start by saying the obvious. these are thorny, divisive estimates. i don't want you to draw too much from the specific numbers here, but this is an analysis done by world resource institute and published in their seeing is believing document, back in october. this shows very nicely what all of the above actually looks like. if you look at the cost of this, there's coal without ccs and coal with ccs. natural gas without ccs and with ccs and a change of cost estimates for nuclear, geothermal, solar, photovoltaic, solar, thermal, all of these technologies.

to a first cut in some markets, some of these are the cheapest. in other markets they're not. you can see that here. one of the other things i want to draw your attention to is we don't have a lot of data points yet for ccs. one of the things we need to do is figure out the range around that, where will it be higher, where will it be lower as we start thinking about this going to different markets, what do the costs really look like? at this point basically you're talking about something that's a few cents per kilowatt additive maybe. there's a lot of assumptions that go into that, how much capture are you going to do? is it 50%, 90%? there's a lot of questions in terms of what technology to use. but when you look at the range of these costs, one story emerges which is it's all of the above. there isn't a silver bullet that you can point at and say this will always be that thing for the market. and you'll do efficiency to some extent and then you do all these things. and one of the things that comes

out of these kinds of analysis is the recognition that as a policy option, as an engineering option, as a deployment option, coal with carbon capture and storage is a very important one and a real one. one of the things that makes it work in the united states may be harder in other parts of the world is enhanced oil recovery. i can't overstate this enough. the low end estimates are many tens of billions of barrels of production that could come from co2 injection underground. that would provide tremendous revenues. if you look at the difference in cost associated with some of these projects, the tax revenues that come from eor basically are break even on the order of seven or eight years which means their net revenue positive to the government after that. you don't always think about it that way, but it's an important finding done by northbridge engineering. in terms of storage potential, when you do enhanced oil recovery, you store carbon dioxide. we're looking at something on the order of more than 25 billion tons of storage in conventional eor. that's a very large volume of carbon dioxide. that would be half the u.s. coal fleet for 20 years.

it's a lot of carbon dioxide, and, in fact, we are short about 100 million tons a year right now in terms of what the market would buy if you could supply it. so there's grounds to think that this would be helpful and it helps with the financing. again, if the financing is the issue, getting some of the financing done through co2 eor is a good thing to do. in that context, this is something that's being considered in the context of the epa's draft regulations. what's interesting about this, and i don't want to dwell on this, is that ccs and ccus with eor is a compliance option. especially under 111b, that's pretty straightforward and explicit, but also how this is treated is flexible. so the way that this is accounted for i think is something that's still being sorted. we're talking with the epa and trying to figure out how to make the best recommendations we can to what it is they do. they're a regulatory body, they take their jobs seriously, and we provide input to that. we hope it's received, but we

think having these successes with eor getting these projects built is important in thinking about opportunities in the power sector around compliance. something usually not spoken about is residual oil zones. for those of you who are oil and gas economists, you probably don't think about these because they're not resources and they're not reserves. if you inject water into a residual oil zone to produce it, you get nothing. so it actually only works when you inject carbon dioxide. something you might not know is people have been busily doing this around the country for about six years now. there's eight fields in the united states that are producing from their residual oil zones. a recent study done by advanced resources international looked at just four counties in texas. that's the yellow box. the blown-up box is one county in texas. that's the red box. their conservative estimate for how much oil could be produced from that is 109 billion barrels in those four counties.

one of the things that i'm glad to say is actually we've negotiated a way for them to continue and expand their studies to develop a methodology that could be applied to other parts of the country. one of the things that i care about in this is that those you residual oil stones would store between 60 and 100 billion tons of carbon dioxide. it is an enormous opportunity. also important in this is, in fact, that that would be net carbon negative oil. let me say that again, net carbon negative oil production. today when you do enhanced oil recovery, if you inject between 6,000 and 7,000 standard cubic feet of co2 that's close to break-even at about 7,500, 8,000 scuffs per barrel on a molecular basis, on a mass basis, on an energetic basis. that's decarbonized if you're using anthropogenic co2. however, if you're using more than 8,000 scuffs per barrel,

it's net carbon negative. i had the great pleasure of meeting with an oil company the other day which only using anthropogenic co2 for their enhanced oil recovery and typically injects between 10,000 and 15,000 standard cubic feet per barrel. they're actually producing fle t neglecttive carbon oil today. the oil they produce has a lower carbon volume than what they inject. it's an important finding, one of the things the department of energy wants to be more clear about and more demonstrable about in the coming years. but in thinking about these residual oil zones they're almost always going to be net carbon negative. i want to close with a short discussion about international partnerships. this is where a lot of the action is. these are required. the global environment is shared and one of the things that came out of lima is every country has a job. so we're trying to figure out what this looks like.

in my program we have things like the carbon sequestration leadership forum actively supporting not just information sharing but the development of new policies and the development of new projects. we've been very excited by the leadership the secretary has shown with this group and the leadership that other administers have shown in response. the next ministerial will actually be in the kingdom of saudi arabia next november. watch this space. there's going to be interesting things to come. international partnerships are also required for the commerce. at the end of the day, what will help the climate negotiations is good trade. and so if we can figure out ways to support commercial engagements through ccs projects and reductions, that will help everybody. things likes showcase projects for example in this country or in others. also international partnerships can accelerate the learning, sharing. can accelerate deployment. we don't have to build five kinds of plants in five different countries if we can just build one plant in one country and share the results, it saves money and saves time in a very useful way. the international landscape is also changing dramatically.

i'm sure many of you here watched the u.s./china accord that was announced in november. we were all very, very pleased with this. it includes, among other things, a large ccs project in china and a science project that is a joint international project shared by the united states, china, and other nations. we're thrilled with this outcome. there's also a new kind of project that the chinese are going to pilot, an enhanced water recovery project. like enhanced oil recovery except pulling out oil you pull out brines and you use the pressure you're using in injection to drive a reverse

osmosis process at the surface. we're ready to pilot. china is going to do a pilot and we're seeking a pilot in the united states. i'm happy to say many other countries have come to us and said, hey, that sounds like fun. we'd like to do a pilot, too. there is this new european accord. i don't know if you had clocked that one. october 23rd, the european union inked a deal. it was a very ambitious climate target, 40% reduction but one of the things that was interesting is they called for policy parity with ccs and with nuclear and they said these are also clean energy options and should be considered in the context of what we do. about the same time the united nations economic council -- was it economic council of advisers, unece, amended its statutes to include carbon capture and storage and ccs with eor as part of clean energy technology under the u.n. framework convention. so these policy shifts actually are materially important. in addition to that, they put forward an innovation fund. how that works, nobody quite knows yet but so far so good. it looks like that fund can be used to not only support the development of technology but hopefully to support projects as well and we're busy discussing with our european counterparts to find out what it all means and what's useful and how we can

help. there are new actors on the scene. the uk is putting forward this white rose project. we're very excited about that. they're pursuing a new business model with it and a new technology. two groups in the middle east, the kingdom of saudi arabia and the united arab emirates are in the process of building large projects. saudi arabia's will be online next year. they're capturing from refineries and steel plants. this will be the first industrial steel plant capture project. they're going to use the co2 for enhanced oil rec/xky saudi arabia is building two 500 megawatt igcc plants. they are also looking at coal as part of their future which is a )?q think. finally, with the energy reforms in mexico, we're seeing some interest from them also on ccs and eor that is also welcome. we just hosted the trilateral with canada and mexico and this was one of the things discussed. we're eager to continue to work with all countries to try to

figure out how we can further this kind of deployment. in many ways though china is the main event. china is the number one global emitter, uses half the world's coal, and they have to every once in a while shut down the freeway because people can't see the cars in front of them. so they are very serious about trying to figure out how to manage pollution in general but ccs is part of the conversation now. a lot of that is going forward under the climate change working group. i'm delighted to be part of that discussion and to help support that with state department and treasury as they move forward. and we are seeing them continue to invest and increase their investments in carbon capture and storage and enhanced oil recovery. they are really very serious about this, but they see coal even with a coal cap, even with diminished coal use, it's going to be a big part of their future. they are currently using 4 billion tons a year of coal. that's just a lot of coal, and they're going to be doing that for a long time. so they acknowledge that this is part of the thing they have to

do at some point and we're pleased they're really interested in doing this sooner rather than later. we continue to meet with them and talk with them. i'll be going to china next month in part to identify opportunities and discuss what can be done together. one example of this is the fact that we signed what we call a counterfacing projects. we identified a series of projects, some in the united states and some in china, which would serve as an opportunity to accelerate learning and share deployments and this is what success to a lot of people looks like. you have john podesta and the climate envoy, vice chairman of ndrc, and in front of them there's a commercial deal being inked by administrator zack. it's a commercial deal witnessed by governments and supported by governments. that's a lovely outcome and one we're trying to get more of. the last thing i want to say and trust me, again, i can do this all day but i'd rather have your questions, is part of the reason we are so committed to the

technology angle of this, the research, development, and demonstration piece, is that technology offer presages and does, in fact, inform policy decisions. just as an example, in 2010 the epa put forward their first class six regulatory framework. as we build these projects, as we develop technologies and demonstrate their efficiency, as we ratchet down the cost through things like advanced manufacturing technologies or development of new materials or using supercomputers, these things are all going to result in technical findings which decisionmakers can look at and think about. ultimately we have to build and deploy the large projects. that's the work. that's what's required. and there are real learning opportunities from doing that. opportunities to share that information, to build engineering prototypes of models

which can be picked up by industry for industry to lead the development of these projects and to tackle financing through the many potential paths that are out there to get these things across the finish line. there's a lot of second and third generation technologies we're enthusiastic about. i'm happy to talk about those. we realize we have to partner in many in the united states at state level, at local level, with industry, and, of course, internationally. coal will be used. the first part of my talk was that. coal will be used. it will continue to be used and co2 must be controlled. we have to take the climate issues very seriously while we acknowledge that first part. as a consequence now is the time to build. now is the time to get on with the work which we know we have to do. with that i thank you for the opportunity to talk and look forward to some questions. [ applause ] >> that was a really fantastic and wonderful conversation not only about the work that you're

doing but, you know, over the course of the conversation -- or your presentation i recall being in the power offices many years ago where they put forward their idea for this plant that was right for their customers. it was really an important part of their message and there was a lot of criticism of whether it was possible or whether it was the right choice, and, again, they said if we weren't the ones to do it, we won't see the cost reduction and so it's nice to hear about the outcome of some of that. we've got about ten minutes for questions, so if you do have some questions, please raise your hand. we have a couple ground rules. we have a number of cameras in the room so there are people watching on the web. we appreciate if you wait for the microphone so they can hear your question, state your name and affiliation and your question in the form of a what i'd like to start with really quickly, there is often a component between sort of these demonstration projects and

creating a market for clean coal and especially ccs. and those broader visions of having a significant enough scalable version of ccs to have the cost reduction it would have for any decarbonization pathway. a lot of that is about transportation. right? transportation of the co2 from consumption centers to places where it can ultimately be captured. i know a lot of what your program does is focus on the learnings that can be had to inform policies around those issues. i wonder if you could speak a little bit about that transportation issue. >> thank you. this is actually one of my favorite topics. from a technology st nonology s there's almost nothing to talk about. we have 3,000 miles of co2 pipelines in this country already. the department of transportation has been managing them for 30 years. the issue is actually about the infrastructure itself. if you want to take co2 from where it is omitted to where i wish to store it, pipelines are

almost always a large part of what you'll do. even in cases where there are opportunities to finance a project, trying to get those pipelines built is kind of a different issue. one of the questions i think we are asking ourselves at the department of energy and elsewhere is since we know we have to do those things, what are the options we have to get those up. what is the appropriate role for states. what is the appropriate role for banks. it's not actually obvious. the issue with pipelines is that on a per ton basis over the lifetime of the project it is pretty cheap. it is maybe $1, maybe $2 a ton. but it is all capital up front. somebody has to build the thing day one before you inject the co2. so the up-front costs are high and people are reluctant to carry those costs. so i think we as a nation need to think harder about that. i'm delighted that the department of energy not only has a topic of the secretary's interest, they're passionately interested in it and we are with other topics associated

with national infrastructure in the energy sector. >> you probably get this question every day but right w now, is there a risk that cheap petro gas is just kill the interest in peak oil investments except for projects that are underwriting by the d.o.e. how do you make sure investment in clean coal in a country with an unlimited supply of cheap gas, what is the plan for that? >> right. so you're correct. this is a constant and frequent topic of conversation in our office. we do see the emergence of low-cost abundant natural gas. it is not just a real market phenomenon but the market shows us we are likely to have a lot of it for a long time.

broadly speaking i think that's served the nation well. we those plants. we have looked at plants from a heat rate perspective, from a permit perspective, from a space available perspective, from an engineering design, from a vintage perspective, and you do end up actually retro fitting some of those plants. i think we also learned from the

polar vortex last year that gas prices can spike and even do in an area of abundance. a lot of our utility partners are building more gas but they're still worried about those price shocks and they see keeping coal in the mix as one of the ways that they can avoid those kinds of shocks as part of what they do. last thing i'll say, of course, is that's the united states' story. in other countries coal is much more prevalent and the availability of gas much more limited. and so from a global -- >> just a couple of minutes left in this program. we'll leave it here. you can see it in its entirety if you go to our website, c-span.org. live now for a conversation on the role of special envoys in diplomacy, we're going to hear from several former envoys and ambassadors who served in egypt, israel, sudan and bosnia. this is live from the u.s. institute of peace. it is just getting under way. >> -- strengthening american diplomacy and it works fairly hard at that. so we were delighted to have the opportunity to work with u.s.

s.i.p. in sponsoring this project which is certainly right in the mainstream of issues of american diplomacy, particularly since there are a great many special envoys and great many people who have strong opinions about that subject and we thought it would be an interesting challenge to add facts to opinion. so i congratulate princeton, the generator of this project. it is also important to remember that princeton is a member of the academy. as many of you who work in washington know, there is an incestuous intertwining of personalities beyond the non-governmental organization of international affairs and we represent that here. but this was a match that was, if not made in heaven, certainly well made. i want to say a special thanks to, first of all, amy stoltz on my own staff who did a lot of back-up and leg work, and

particularly to hanna bush of u.s. i.p. who got us all here aamong a great many other tasks and we are very grateful to her. i'm not going to introduce the individuals because that would use up the entire time of the panel. but i will turn it over to bob and let them get started with serious -- no, tom. i turn it over to you first. you're on and i'm off. >> thank you much, ambassador. i'm a very special representative at the state department for ot quadrennial diplomacy and development review and the american academy of diplomats has been an invaluable partner as we've looked at a series of strategic questions related to the state department and usaid. this is a topic that's come up from a few angles, both the issue of proper use of special enjoys and representatives, and also the issue about overall

operations in areas of conflict has certainly been a topic that's come up a great deal. i'm going to hand it over with very brief bios to the authors, starting with ambassador lyman, former ambassador to nigeria and many places, assistant secretary for african affairs. with that, tell us the findings and the wisdom. >> well, thanks very much, tom. i'm princeton lyman, a senior advisor here, assistant secretary of io. i want to talk about the origin of this study a little bit and the methodology. then we'll get into the substance. but as both ron and tom have mentioned, the use of special envoys, particularly in conflict situations, is a fact of life. it is something that administrations have used in the past, they will use it in the future. while there is some controversy over the amount of effort, the use or overuse of special

enjoys, the fact is they are an important instrument of u.s. foreign policy and what we wanted to get at this study together or to institutions is how do we make that more effective, what are the issues that arise, how do you make the use of envoys more effective. i came off of two years as the u.s. special enjoy for sudan and south sudan so i had some thoughts on this. but in our doing this study, what we did together, bob and i, was to first develop a set of issues that we thought were the relevant issues. we then convened two roundtables of diplomats, former envoys, military officers, et cetera, to review those terms of reference, if you will, and make sure that we will targeting the right issues. and then following that and revising it, we then sent out the interview. more than 20 people, former

envoys, people who had worked or selected envoys, and others. and then we reviewed a lot of the memoirs of envoys who had worked on conflict situations. now i want to mention that we focused on special envoys in conflict situations. there are a lot of other special envoys. some for islamic outreach, for climate change, et cetera. some of our recommendations may be relevant to those, but we focus on conflicts because there are some special characteristics. they're dealing with life and death situations. and they usually attract very high level of both political and public attention. after our interviews and our review of memoirs of several of the envoys, we covered a lot of conflict areas from northern ireland, the middle east, the balkans, south asia, and several

situations in africa. a perspective from people dealing with these issues over more than one administration, and in various parts of the world. so let me turn to bob who will talk about the basic elements of the study. >> thank you. let me begin by thanking the u.s. institute of peace and prince tons the opportunity to work with him has been really great. and i do appreciate it. the opp work with him has been really great. and i do appreciate it.ton the work with him has been really great. and i do appreciate it. just tuouching briefly on the structure of the report and what we tried to cover. i served as special envoy to the bosnian federation at the end of the bosnian war just a little under 20 years ago now. i later went back to bosnia as ambassador as head of the uscoe mission. we look at purpose, empowerment and authority.

in brief terms, what's the mandate. it is broad or narrow, is it clear or vague, are the goals evident. and we looked at a number of cases. we then looked at empowerment. what's the authority that the special envoy has or wishes that he or she had. what is the relationship to foreign governments. and what are the relationships with the u.s. government. after empowerment, we turn to policy authority. what is the role in policy formulation that the special envoy has or does not have. what are his or her channels in to the decision making process. the next issue we looked at was dealing with what we called unfavorables. sometimes it's the special envoy's responsibility to deal with people that the u.s.

government ordinarily would not touch with a ten-foot pole. but when you are in an immediate post-conflict situation, these are the people who are still relevant and the question is how you define the relationship with these people and how much you tell washington about what you're doing. i dealt with some later indicted war criminals in bosnia, but it was necessary to get past the conflict. we go into that at some length. then there is the issue of structure and turf t bbattles. exactly what kind of team can a special envoy put together, if any. where is the special envoy going to be working from? we say in the report that in almost every case, special envoys are physically located at the state department. i was physically located in a broom closet in sarajevo.

but i did have a window. and i got to know everybody at the embassy because my broom closet was the only access to the bathroom. so either you have a staff -- in my case, i served both as special envoy and ar charas cha deaffairs. we played that game i think pretty well. so turf battles. there are turf battles taking place in washington. there are battles between authorities in washington and in the field. and there are battles locally. all of this required a certain amount of creativity and fast footwork, at times. and then there is the question of state nsc rivalry which is another kind of turf battle which we can talk about later. finally, outreach. whom do we reach out to.

there's congress. there are advocacy groups. and there is civil society when there is civil society in the conflict areas. the concept of civil society basically doesn't play very well -- or didn't 20 years ago in the former yugoslavia. but we had to work with all of these people, and in some cases create at least the bases of a civil society who would then, we hope, take root on its own. so those were the areas that the report covered. as princeton said, we had the opportunity to talk to current and former special envoys and learn from them about how they did their jobs and compare it against our own experiences. >> bob and i might just share some of our experiences. then ask dan and david do the

same. >> exlen . >> excellent. >> let me start with this question of power, mandate and thourt. if you're a presidential envoy, what everybody wants to know is, are you really the president's envoy. that is, are you speaking for the president, do you have the president's backing, does the president look to you as the key person in that regard. and that comes from both the substantive relationships but also comes from appearances. one of the first things i did when i -- even before i became the full envoy but the assistant envoy is when president obama went up to new york, the general assembly. it was important i was sitting right behind him. the visible characteristics are important. we have cases where envoys are appointed and not empowered. they're forgotten. they don't show up. but then the question of authority and mandate.

because authority comes, yes, in part from empowerment, but it comes from much baltimore. if you're going to have authority as the leader in the policy situation, you have to have credibility. you have to show respect for all the other actors in that situation, the bureaucratic actors, substantive actors. and then you have to come up with credible policy recommendations. in sudan's case, we had two policies running at the same time. on the one hand, the president and several senior people in the sudan government were indicted war criminals. i wasn't even allowed to talk to the president or those so indicted. on the other hand, my mandate as the president repeated every time he introduced me, this is principleston lyman, he's working to prevent sudan, south sudan from going back to war. and to do that we had to get sudan's cooperation to allow for the independence of south sudan. walking those two lines of policy meant we had a lot of

differences, overshading, et cetera. and it was important to respect the interests of the war crimes office in the department, the democracy people, the human rights people, and at the same time, give me enough leeway to be credible with the sudanese government that what we were looking for was going to be in the long-term interests of that country as well as south sudan. so how you get authority, use authority, create authority has a lot to do with how you act in those situations, but also starting with the empowerment you get from the president or in some cases from the secretary of state. >> that contrasts interestingly with the situation that i encountered in sarajevo when i arrived there in the summer of 1996. the war had just ended. there was still some shooting going on. the u.s. military had come in heavy. we had 50,000 american troops in

bosnia and herzegovina, with a population of 4 million. also 1 million refugees and 200,000 casualties. we also had a holy writ. it is called the dayton accords. the dayton accords, which were the product of the will of one single person, the very special envoy, dick holbrooke, in effect outlined a government which did not exist. in fact, the dayton accords were signed in 2 cases out of 3 by non-bosnians. they were signed by slobodan milosevic in belgrade and someone else. the only bosnian to sign them was the muslim bosnian leader. what we basically had done was given ourselves cover because the neighbors signed it.

but we didn't want to deal with the local war criminals. at least as a government. i, however, was in a position where i dealt with indictables, as we called them, all the time. and a number of them were later indicted, and ended up in the hague. which, in most cases, was a richly deserved location for them. but in other words, we had a structure, we the united states, we the so-called peace implementation council, which was the u.s., plus canada, plus the european union, plus russia and turkey, representing the organization of the islamic conference, to put together a country which did not exist. and so we didn't have to worry much about purpose. the purpose was to, we in this country tend to call it nation building. i prefer to call it state building. to build a viable state. as for empowerment, the state department led the process. working hand in hand with the

u.s. military, i worked very closely with a then two-star general named david petraeus who was the first one in. to enforce the peace and prevent a re-igniting of the conflict. as for policy authority, it was all here. we had the authority. dick holbrooke called the shots from washington, once a month would come out to sarajevo and scare everybody. but we worked together very well, and i was his man on the ground, and spent my time shuttling between mainly the croats and the bosnians, that is to say between the catholics and the muslims, and then when i game charge as well asked the serbs to the list of people to shuttle to. it was a jaw-boning exercise. because there was no resistance. we called all the shots. very different. >> let me talk a little bit more about this question of dealing with what we call unfavorables.

it's one of the chapters in the report that i think is one of the most important. there are risks in dealing with people who are either indicted or war criminals, or in some cases terrorists, and it is important to weigh those risks, and have an understanding of whether it's worthwhile or not to engage. it's not necessarily the thing to do in every case. i was not allowed to speak to the president of sudan. it clearly limited to a large extent our role in the situation. i reserved the right to ask for that policy to be reviewed if i felt it essential. i never reached that point, because there were risks in opening that door. but i think it had to be an issue on the table. there were others out there who were also indicted, that i found it necessary to engage with. and that comes to another question. if you're going to be a special envoy you have to take some risks.

if you feel you have the right authority, and you feel this is necessary, you have to take some risks, doing things that may not have received all the blessings in the world. if you take those risks you ought to be ready to take the blowback if they go sour. but i think some risk, and giving the special envoy some latitude in that regard, is one of the uses you could make of a special envoy, because that person is not in the line of normal diplomatic representation and activity. and therefore, it doesn't convey the same, necessarily, recognition of the interlocutor with whom you're engaging. let me go on to this question of relationships within the bureaucracy. now this comes up all the time. and one of the most sensitive areas with the special envoy, especially a presidential one, but even sometimes a secretarial special envoy, is the

relationship to the department of state, to those mechanisms that are there all the time, dealing with that conflict, and our diplomacy. and particularly the regional assistant secretary and the regional bureau. there's no cookie cutter way to resolve those issues. it depends a lot on the structure of the situation, et cetera. what we found in all our interviews was chemistry matters. and chemistry means that you respect each other, you respect the importance of roles that embassies play, and there's -- it's, as we indicate in the report, where people, envoys, did not involve the embassies, and pay the price for it. respecting the role of the department, and, in my case, i was recruited by the assistant secretary. i know this guy, he won't give me too much trouble. and we worked very, very closely. the other thing that we were able to do at the request of the

department was actually to help in the state white house rivalry over who controlled sudan policy. and after we made it clear -- i made it clear that i wasn't going to engage in that very much in one side off the other, the state department said, well then would you coordinate our representation at the embassy on these issues? which i did. and that facilitated the state department's role with the nse and i worked very closely, of course, with the assistant set. it's important that that relationship be understood, that it has inherent rivalries, but they can be overcome if people really make an effort to do so. >> again, an interesting contrast. in the case of bosnia, there was little nsc or white house direct engagement. i think it's fair to say that president clinton had hesitated to engage in the balkan wars until the events of the summer

of 1995, srebrenica, and the bombing of the market in sarajevo. in that -- at that point it became the first television war. and we saw a whole lot of christiane amanpour all the time. the consequence was that there was pressure to, quote, do something, unquote. and that's when dick holbrooke got the players together in -- at wright patterson air force base in dayton, ohio. so the objectives were basically defined by holbrooke and his people. he was the assistant sect for european affairs. and execution was left to him based in washington, mostly in general terms, and to me on the ground for the specific execution of what we had envisaged. this change when john kornblum

succeeded dick holbrooke in 1996, dick stayed on for awhile as special envoy but john kornblum was the assistant secretary. holbrooke came out once in awhile every couple of months in a c-20. my job was to create what was called the federation forum. which was a group of croats a s bosnians, so catholics and muslims, because these things are always seen in confessional terms in the balkans, who had been fighting each other. having started out as allies, they ended up fighting each other, and this was to get that half of bosnia working again. and the federation forum met virtually every week. my staff consisted mainly of me and embassy officers. i'll leave it at that for now. >> can i just deal with one more. the next question of the structure of the envoy's office

within the state department, and as bob mentioned, he had very few staff. we looked at various envoy situations. some had staff from the regional bureau. some had little. there are three instances we deal with in the report of significantly autonomous officers under the special envoy. currently the special representative for afghanistan and pakistan. and the office that i directed, the u.s. office on sudan and south sudan. in my case the desk officers were under my office, as well as a cadre of regional specialists and others, contracted by the conflict and stabilization bureau. i had tens of millions of dollars of resources to dispense. i had a lot of control over the machinery of policy, and support, which is very helpful. but there's a danger in that degree of autonomy. you can get separated too much from the rest of the structure.

as i mentioned, the importance of the embassy's role. my case i found strong embassies were critical. but in some cases, those offices don't pay enough attention, and second, resources are helpful. they were helpful in my case. but i found we also strayed into areas that were better done by u.s.aid. and that we sometimes didn't lack the oversight for running projects in the field from washington. so i think there are pluses to that kind of an office but there are warnings, as well. >> why don't we shift to you and get some reaction to the report and a little bit of your experience on how we might carry it out. >> sure. first of all, this is a very important report. and i want to commend them giving us something to work with that's now organized and very well structured. it raises the issues that need to be thought about, and in a

sense can provide a guide path for an administration thinking about deploying an envoy. what it also needs to do, however, is to stimulate case studies. what we've had today, even, are two examples of successful envoys. but they're successful in part, i would think, because of both of these gentlemen came up through the system. they were both experts before being appointed envoys. they were experts in the fields that they were asked to focus on. they had experience in the field. and they knew how washington and the department of state, and the interagency system worked. that has not always been the case. in all of the conflict situations where envoys have been appointed, as suggested in the report itself. so therefore, a series of case studies on the way envoys worked

in different situations could be quite helpful. as some of you know, i spent most of my career in the middle east, particularly focused in the arab/israeli conflict area ambassador to egypt, ambassador to israel, and i saw 15, count them, 15, envoys over the course of about 30 years. if you review the names of those envoys you're talking about what we would call an all-star list, boy@erson, don rumsfeld, jim leonard, maury draper, richard fairbanks, dick murphy, dennis ross, tony zinni, john wolf, george mitchell, martin endick, and now frank leon steen. you would expect with this kind of a lineup if we're using our baseball anal joy, that the scoreboard would look pretty good. but the scoreboard actually shows no hits, no runs, and lots

of errors, which suggests that this is one of the case studies which needs to be undertaken to find out whether or not it's the idea of an envoy in this situation, or the individual selected as the envoy, the conflict itself, or the criteria that the report has suggested. was it an absence of empowerment by a president? was it an absence of authority? were there turf battles in washington? and i think you'd find if we did this case study and we haven't done it yet, but certainly this report should simulate it and i may grab the opportunity and do it myself, i think you'd find that there are a combination of factors at play here that suggest that even some of the smartest and most senior people selected for this job, were not necessarily the right choice, and not necessarily the right choice for this conflict. after all, if you look back at

the last 35, a little more than 35 years, in the arab/israeli conflict resolution process, there have been three american successes. but they have all been shepherded by secretaries of states, and by presidents. they have not been shepherded by envoys. now, part of this may be a problem that we have created ourselves. we have raised the level of engagement in this conflict to a point where the parties simply envoy below the level of secretary of state, and sometimes not even to a secretary of state. waiting for the president. and that may be a major factor at play in the arab/s railly conflict. but it also suggests that context specificity, and i would add, and i want to say this carefully, because we're talking about smart envoys, understanding of nuance and details.

not all of our envoys enter the job knowing what the arab/israeli conflict is all about and many of them left the job not knowing what the arab/israeli conflict was all about. and what that does is not only a waste of an american asset, which is the power to do diplomacy, but it also weakens our ability to then pick up the conflict resolution process once that envoy has left the job. i had an experience when i was serving as ambassador in israel. we had an envoy who was appointed to monitor the compliance of the parties with the road map. you mentioned his name, john wolf, a senior state department official who was asked to drop his job in political military affairs and come out for a few months and john was a strong diplomat but had no background at all in the arab/israeli conflict and no background at all in trying to resolve the

arab/israeli conflict. and it was a series of errors, and problems over the course of three months, some of which actually impeded the efforts of israelis and palestinians to reach small agreements on what we called then the road map that president george w. bush had unveiled a short time before. now during that period i came back to washington for a couple of days, went in to see the then-deputy secretary of state rich armitage and i said, rich, i like john wolf, why did you appoint somebody who didn't know anything at all about this conflict or this job? and for those of you who know rich armitage he said, that was exactly why i did it. he wanted somebody who would be tab lar ross is a. in some situations make it works. it doesn't work when you're dealing with two entrenched parties in a protracted conflict. they've been at this thing for decades. they know each other far better

than they know us. and they deal with each other far better than we assume they deal with each other. and in walks somebody a babe in the woods, and doesn't really help resolve issues. i could go on. we've had other situations referenced in this report. for example is the fact that when dennis ross was appointed the special middle east coordinator one of the things that he demanded was that that office be taken out of the normal bureaucracy of the state department. and in fact, in 1992 '93, '93 actually when that office was created, i was serving as a deputy asithsant secretary in the near east bury, i went in to see our assistant secretary and i said ed, i'm sorry you're leaving your post. ed said why, i'm not leaving my post. i said wait they've just taken one of the heartbeats, one of the jewels of your portfolio,

away from you. why would you remain as the assistant secretary when you no longer have responsibility for one of the most critical issues and it suggests to you that this bifurcation of responsibilities was a problem from the outset. and it became a more pronounced problem over time. because, what nea had to offer was the expertise and experience of a lot of very good officers who had served in the field, but who now became separate d from the conflict resolution process. i think it ended up hurting that process over time. on the issue of latitude to deal with unfavorables, we're still living with this problem. we had envoys who who could not deal with the representative of the palestinian people,

palestine liberation organization because of american policy. in fact, the united states government for many of these years was talking to the plo, but through the cia. not through the state department. so we had a channel with an organization that was an unfavorable but it was a channel that was not helping us at all deal with the conflict resolution process. we have the same issue today with hamas. where if you're going to appoint an envoy to deal with the arab/israeli issue, for example, as martin endick was appointed or now frank lohan steen is acting, does it make sense for that envoy not to be able to talk to all palestinians? doesn't mean we like them. doesn't mean we support those who are engaged in terrorism, which hamas is engaged in terrorism. but if the envoy doesn't have the mandate or the scope of responsibility to reach out to all elements within the two societies in which he or she is

working, how effective is that going to be in trying to produce an agreement that can be agreed and indicated. there are a number of issues taking the israeli case as a case study which suggest that using the five categories or five criteria that this very useful report has given us could be very important in understanding whether or not this thing works. whether the envoy works in conflict situations. i would as an opposing sentence my own bias that is in the arab/israeli conflict, presidents and secretary of states will be fooling themselves to believe that they can outsource this conflict resolution process to an envoy. it doesn't mean that the secretary has to run out to the region every week or two.

may want to comprise a team of his own experts to pursue this, but we've created a situation in which arabs and israelis are stating to see that the president and the secretary of state are engaged in that process and an envoy is simply not going to substitute for the presidential power, and the secretary's prestige. thank you. >> thank you so much. david we'll go to you. you've seen this from the inside, from the advocacy community. you know some of the hill dynamics on it as well. talk a little bit about what lessons you feel we've learned over the last however many years looking at this and any reactions to the report as well? >> thanks so much. and thanks so much for usip for inviting me to participate in this panel and thanks to the authors for laying out some very interesting ideas. and i actually came away from the report feeling somewhat like dan did that there was a lot of very interesting nuggets, and

descriptions of case studies, but to really understand some of these issues you really have to go more in-depth. and i think that one issue that really needs to be on the table is why do we have special representatives and special envoys? the report does talk about that to some degree. but, if you go back and look at diplomatic history we've always had special envoys and special representatives. if you go back to 1789, george washington had a personal representative who went to the court of st. james to represent the united states with what had to be the most important relationship that the u.s. had at the time and congress didn't even know about it until a year and a half later. similarly you could go to woodrow wilson who had a bad relationship with his secretary of state, and who sent colonel edward house to try to negotiate peace in europe in 1950. this was a central issue to try to keep the u.s. out of the war, and the president said i'm basically a private figure, someone who was working for the white house, but who did not have relationships with the state department in any significant way. of course, harry hopkins is an

example that, i won't spend time talking about. i think that the report does raise a number of issues. and, dan, i think that while i accept what you say about trying to dig deeply into the arab/israeli conflict, but i think that the arab/israeli conflict in some ways is unique in this kind of context because of the very deep, domestic political dynamics that are involved. the great deal of energy that has been invested by the united states, and over the time since the '70s, at least in particular, so i think that it's -- it's an important one to look at, but perhaps not the best one to measure these criteria again. so for example, one of the areas that i have been involved with was the democratic republic of congo and the appointment of senator feingold as a special envoy there. if you look at what was happening before that, our policy with respect to the drc was somewhat in disarray. we had very conflicting views within the administration

regarding what was the role of rwanda, how do we approach president kagame, what was the right view, and approach. and you had some significant dysfunction, and in that context, as pressure was building from the advocacy community, and congressional members of congress, who were interested in this issue, to appoint a special adviser, as was reflected, ambassador johnny carson who was assistant secretary at the time appointed a very skilled diplomat, but someone who was not very well-known in the region. he had served there. didn't have a huge amount of stature, and was considered a special adviser. and was, frankly, not the kind of dynamic individual that was needed. so there was a big push to have a more significant individual brought in line. and, in fact, people were very surprised when senator feingold agreed to take on that position. and i think that someone like senator feingold, in that position, can do things that are important. so if you look at the effort of

the bureau and their scope of jurisdiction there are some huge problems the assistant secretary has to deal with. they've got nigeria which could perhaps the entire continent if it goes down. it's got zimbabwe, which is a huge human rights problem we've spent a lot of time on. kenya was on the cusp of violence and came on the cusp of violence again. of course you have sudan, south sudan and look what happened to the central african republic just last year. in the context with an assistant secretary have multiple crises that have significant political attention, bringing in a special envoy can sometimes, i think, be a constructive approach to try to deal with it. in the case of drc, though, i think something that the report indicated happened that was very important. which was, when senator feingold came in, he had a policy structure to go forward with similar to what bob beecroft was saying. you have the peace and security koop ration framework that basically was the road map. was it a detailed road map? no. implementation of that road map

was going to be critical in order for it to succeed, and therefore, having someone who could go in with the stature, indicate that he had a personal relationship with the president, and to dan's point, had been studying these issues for a long time, as a longtime member of 9 senate foreign relations committee did understand the building, at least to some degree, and was able to fit in within the bureaucracy in a way which i think most people see as fairly constructive. so i think that that contrasts the before and the after in a context where there are multiple different pieces is important to think about. on the other hand we've seen envoys who have had mandates constructed for them in part because of advocacy from the advocacy community that were real failures. so it's interesting to look at the list of envoys that are on the american foreign service associations list of 25 envoys, and we have two envoys for north korea. we have an envoy that's supposed to negotiate on the issues around north korean nuclear

section, but because congress felt that there was not enough attention for human rights, you have a north korean ambassador for human rights. special representative for human rights. so how does that work? or in the case of sudan, as i'm sure princeton will remember, the -- in the context of the north/south negotiations that was the real focus offer the special envoy's view, there was very little attention being played to darfur which was kind of an intractable situation in many ways at that time. and so there was a big push to have a senior adviser or special representative on darfur. that was not a very successful or wise advocacy push in my mind in hindsight. there were reasons for it. i think reasonable people could differ about whether it was a good idea when we were pushing for it. and at the end there was a good result because the u.s., when pressing for implementation of the separate darfur peace agreement saw that that would never go anywhere actually helped, i think, get the united states to the point where it was looking at what the right solution was with respect to sudan, which was a comprehensive

approach to deal with all its conflicts. nonetheless, i think that there was a significant waste of time and ef for and i really am not sure that it was a positive thing. there is something strange about the whole special envoy field. so, people come in and say, look the state department don't have focus on this issue, it's such a fragmented system, we need someone to bring people together, and the white house, there's fighting our answer is to create more fragmentation, with a new office with a new person with new staff who may not actually be very significantly knowledgeable about the area. latitude. so latitude is very interesting, and i was interested to hear the emphasis that our presenters put on it today. i think that there's a challenge, or there's an internal tension in the paper about this. so, if you believe that the only way to have an effective envoy is to have someone who's really empowered, who is seen as

important, who is sitting behind the president at the meetings, and who has the policy authority, then how is it that they're really outside of the chain of command, or outside of the political challenges that can be faced if they meet with the unfavorables? and i think that this points to, you know, a challenge that i think goes very much, i agree with princeton in his analysis, that there's a risk/reward issue here. so we had a big debate between the two of us about the visit of one of president basher's advisers. who was an adviser to the president who had been involved or we believe, most people believe was involved in the darfur genocide. princeton had met him in khartoum. most of us, i can't speak for the advocacy community, but most of us had no problem with him meeting with nafi. but when there was a suggestion that the administration would invite nafi to the united

states, people got very much in arms, and, in fact, the founder of my organization called me in an irate fashion. and i think the question in meeting with unfavorables is what's the risk or the reward? what's the strategy? if you're going to bring an unfavorable here to the united states, what are we getting for it? are you going to actually be able to do something constructive and productive with him? because it is going to confer legitimacy on that individual. it is going to be a propaganda coup for a regime that the whole strategy is around isolation. so i think this is a tough issue. and i think that the -- it's one of the reasons why i think there has to be some significant conversations around what are the right kind of individuals for these kinds of positions, who are willing to take these risks. because, is it the case that it's only professionals who have been in the field and so on who are able to do these jobs because of all the things dan

said? you need people who have an inside knowledge of the department. you need people who've had negotiating experience. you need people who have had field or international experience. you need people who are willing to collaborate. you need people who had multinational experience. i think one of the things that princeton benefited from was his time as assistant secretary for international organizations. because in the context of the very complicated way sudan was being dealt with, the u.n. system had a very important role, peacekeeping missions in both countries, very kachable special representative, so that experience which is often very common not in the arab/israeli conflict, because there the notion is let's keep the u.n. out because of various political dynamics, but in most of these conflict situations, view as really critical, do a lot of for service experts career ambassadors or retired ambassadors have that kind of experience. but at the same time, individuals who are outside the system, as we say, also lack

some of those key experiences that i mentioned. the front part. so i think it really goes to how do we select individuals. maybe i'll just make a couple of brief comments. with respect to turf battles, i really think there's no right answer on structure, and so on. it really is very personal. i think the chemistry matters issue is very big. i think there is something very interesting about where there are conflicts in dynamics between the white house and the state department over the issue because of its political volatility, because of its importance domestically and so on. it is a real question about whether it's an addition or a subtraction to have a special ambassador. i was in meetings in during the peace process when dan was deputy assistant secretary. if you see smoke coming out of my ears because i'm not sure if they're talking about my experience in state or on the hill or in the advocacy

community. but there was some very frosty meetings. and they weren't just frosty because the state department had response iblgtds in this area, it was also because those in the nsc who had responsibility in those areas were chafing under the kind of structure that dennis was able to build for himself. and sometimes it could work out. because you had three sort of power centers, and you could kind of negotiate through. sometimes it didn't. so, i think that those that have a lot of personality issues that really need to be thought through, and the kind of tethering that has been talked about. we can perhaps talk more about that. i think the outreach issue is significant. i think it's another piece of if you're going to have a special envoy, particularly in an area that's politically volatile or there's a lot of political interest or a huge amount of civic interest, being able to negotiate the halls of congress is really critical. being able to talk to the members of congress in both the

house and the senate, as well as civil society, that's a skill set that not everyone has. that, you know, i think that scott glecian who was special envoy had his challenges on both those scores and that really undermined his role in being able to be effective. and so, having the right skills in that area can be really critical. let me just leave it at that and see whether you have any questions, tom, to kick us off or you want to go to the audience. >> i do. i have some questions but i really want to open it up and give folks a chance. because before we end. and i want to come back to again this issue of turf. there's a certain sense, i'll just ask one question and then hand it over. is it too simplistic to say that part of the message here is when it comes to envoys, go big or go home, that this tension of saying if it's just another seat at the table? there seems to be an inherent tension here which is these are

buildings that really believe in working things up through the building, working through a clearance process, et cetera, sort of consensus or what sometimes seems like coconcone us is, building up through, and the effect is, as you noted you've got to be able to sit down with the head of state or foreign minister and people know that you're in charge. so is this one of these things where if you're not willing to give it that authority, you may end up just with the -- another cook in the kitchen? if you're going to appoint an envoy you don't give him authority, you shouldn't bother. i don't know what the point would be to do that. we have cases that allude to them in the report where that's happened. where the authority or the empowerment has been undercut. by the secretary or the president, or otherwise. i think in dealing with this question of turf and structures, it depends a lot on the nature of the conflict you're dealing with. in the sudan case, the issues on

the ground bilaterally were a integral to the peace process. in other cases, that isn't necessarily the case. so, in the sudan case, i found it very valuable that the structures and the outreach to the ambassador system came through my office. but there may be other cases where that is not quite the case, and that the bureau supports the envoy is sufficient. so i think when we look at that in terms of what is the nature of the conflict, and the mandate. >> i would go along with that. my experience was that the european bureau played a very big role, in the post-conflict situation in bosnia, for example. and that was fine. secretary of state was comfortable with it. the president and the nsc were very comfortable with it. and as i said before, we had a clear road map on what we were supposed to be doing there.

and it was a situation in which the united states largely called the shots. so, in that situation, it was more executing a policy, but doing it on the ground, and understanding the issues. and in effect building the country, which didn't exist in 1996. [ inaudible ] >> question as to iran. do you think those two -- special envoy? >> i would -- i don't pretend to be an expert in those two areas. but i would have thought on the question of iran, where you already have a major negotiation

under way on the nuclear, that to have a separate envoy on the overall issue probably gets in the way. but beyond that, or leading up to that, perhaps a special envoy might have been useful. a special envoy in cuba might have been useful beforehand. but now that we are in the process of establishing a regular structure and diplomatic relations, i'm not sure that that would be necessary. >> well, i would just underscore what princeton said. you're talking two different types of issues. the cuba issue seems to me is a nixon china question. it's reversing a many decades long policy, and so in a sense, there had to be not only complete coherence in how you're going to run it but the policy issues really do need to be run out of the white house until the

point where the president has now announced the change where it can enter in to a more normal building of a diplomatic infrastructure. with iran, and we're still in the middle of that, you've had so far an interesting case study of the utility of multiple tracks that are very well integrated at the source. you had the professional negotiations through the p5 plus 1 that were proceeding along a certain track, and you had a secret channel also run out of the state department by the deputy secretary of state bill burns, with white house involvement, and the two were connected at the hip. so if we did our case studies this might prove to be one of the most efficient issues of a variety of envoy types but it would also, i think, prove the idea that you need people with

the experience, the expertise, and familiarity within the system to be able to maintain that integrity of the effort. >> just let me put a punctuation point on that particular comment, because i think it's something that we haven't talked about. there was a special envoy for cuba. it just was an unnamed national security council official until we found out about it. and that's what happened. is that they ran it out of the national security council. there was obviously some coordination with the state department and secretary kerry was involved. but in terms of some of the key meetings, that were at sort of the operating level, it was really the nsc that did it. i think that the -- you know the iran example i would agree with dan. there was a special envoy for iran. his name was bill burns. he was within the system, he was not named, he had, you know, all the authority. he had the undersecretary for political affairs also back him up. we had a huge amount of senior attention there. and i think that it was an effective model that you have to

look at. i just don't think that every situation in which the u.s. can make a real difference can have that kind of involvement from senior officials. but i think that it's a really important case, and you see this in other cases. i think that one of the warnings that is in the paper is about just don't do something because congress says you should do it. that you know, you really need to look at how you do it. but i think there is a way of dealing with those issues, through the double hatting concept that is mentioned in the paper. for example in our china relations, of course tibet always gets short shrift. that is the nature of the u.s. relationship with china. it isn't there aren't people who think it's important, there are people working on it within the u.s. government. but it always gets short shrift. so the u.s. congress said there has to be a special coordinator on tibet. what did the bush administration do? they appointed paula dobriansky as the special coordinator for tibet and i think that did help politically for the

administration as well as internally to say, yes, we need to think more about these issues and how we deal with those issues. i think that kind of fusion approach is something that is useful to consider. >> there has to be a decision taken at the outset. is the special envoy, especially when it's a publicly known envoy, therefore symbolic purposes, or to actually do stuff? >> you concede that there can be some value in the symbolic? >> depends on the situation. >> yeah, but it's also -- it's also -- it's also somewhat deceptive to your international interlocutors. you're pretending to have a stake in it, and you're going to deliver something, and you really don't have the support behind it to do so. you know, it highlights an issue, but i've known people in that situation, and i -- i describe it like it is, so walking naked into the jungle. i mean you're out there with nothing behind you. and i don't recommend it. >> you know, princeton, there's

a reality show about that. so -- >> tom -- >> a little bit of diplomatic experience -- >> tom if i could just add one thing to princeton? when the 2006 lebanon/israel war broke out i was asked to go on cnn there one of those cases where they had four little boxes, you know, four talking heads. three from congress, and me. and the three from congress were all very upset that we had not appointed an envoy to solve the problem. and they got to me, i said, i don't have a problem appointing an envoy. i first would like to see what our policy is. and it kind of struck everybody as strange that we would ask that question. but i think that gets the point princeton made. what is the envoy being asked to do. and if it's symbolic just to kind of wave the flag it actually hurts our interests in these conflicts. >> if i may address the congress question but we'll go with a question first. >> thank you, tom. i just had two brief points, and

question. one is, i'm very supportive of the idea that dan kurtzer raised that you've now opened the door, i think it's an excellent report but it's very clear that there is a next level, if i could put it this way, of understanding, and indeed of detail that would be enormously valuable as this process goes ahead. and particularly in the area of conflict resolution, and i would strongly second him. i think that the rest of you up there are probably tilted in that direction. the second question is the broader question. for a number of you slid into the question of envoys who are not there to deal with conflicts. as we understand the word conflict. and they raise a different sort of set of situations. some of which are very much parallel to what the report has considered and some go beyond that. and some of them, i think, transgress a number of the lines that you have drawn, that in some ways would be very useful. and so i raise the question,

isn't it time now for somebody, whether it's the academy of diplomacy, the qddr process, contracting people from outside, whatever we want to do, obviously paying attention to the knowledge to do that. in many ways over the years, there was a process of the state department of being light on these kinds of people, and often gathering them up to create a new bureau. and in some cases the absorption of these people into the structure was the natural element of what had to be done. if people think the state department wasn't paying attention and wanted a special envoy, over a period of time we probably needed a bureau with deep experience working in the subject rather than the, what i would call, attention light factor of the special envoy. there is also finally the question of, how does the special envoy relationship, particularly in conflict

resolution, accord with the rest of our policies? you've touched on some of that, and the natural conflict, if i could put it this way, between the functional bureaus, particularly those that deal with democracy and human rights. and some of the more difficult questions that arise in conflict resolution. but, i'd be grateful if you would address the two questions. the broadening question to other special kinds of appointments, and the other question in how and what way the special envoys have to take care and attention to look at the rest of u.s. foreign policy, and how it fits in to the context in which they work. thank you. >> i hope you'll community from your work on the qddr, in particular. we didn't try to take on the whole envoy question for -- because the conflict ones had special characteristics. but tom you're putting your finger on a problem. because if you looked at the number of special envoys, and it's almost the same from one

administration to another, you're talking about 25 or more special envoys, and if they're all supposed to report to the secretary of state, you realize, in addition to all the regular structures, you really have an unworkable structure. [ inaudible ] >> yeah. so it's not bad to put these under some of them under a structured bureau, and therefore have an undersecretary who is handling more of that. and i think we have to be very careful about the proliferation in to areas that, again, sometimes become more symbolic. and i think deserves more attention. on the conflict with other policies, this is very important. we tried to deal with it a little bit, richard haass' experience working on cyprus in relationship to our relationship with turkey and nato and we touch on that in the report. i experienced it in needing the

cooperation of ethiopia, absolutely critical to our policy, but we had other issues with ethiopia over democracy and human rights. and balancing that with the rest of the u.s. government, those are legitimate concerns. these aren't illegitimate when you're running up against it. was a challenge. and we had to work it out, and find out where the balance should be. but, those happen all the time, and that's where you need a policy process that will get us those, address it, and come to an agreement. i'll just give you one quick example. sorry. we needed a tough police -- peacekeeping operation in the area. the u.n. had failed there, and the only ones we could go to were ethiopia. now, you know, for people who had all these other details, my god, is there one more thing that we are dependent on them? but we worked it through, we

looked at it, secretary, everybody said the balance is right, we need them. so you have to go through a process, and assess it. >> i'll just say something briefly about diplomatic envoys. i think it's a great point, and i was left thinking about whether i should talk about thematic envoys or not. i decided not to because of the focus of the paper. but i think it's a challenge if you look at the 25 envoys alone who are on the apfsa page they're for all kinds of different things. we were very much -- i come to this issue in the context of the human rights issues. where the bureau of democracy, human rights and labor, which some would challenge shouldn't exist in any case and there should be part of a thematic piece of every regional bureau but they themselves were very upset about the fragmentation of the various human rights issues, for example, the office of religious freedom, or the trafficking office, which is something that i know most about. and i think that it's difficult.

because, you know, the -- mike posener used to complain to me that he would come to new delhi, and the first thing that the ambassador would complain about was that damn trafficking office, and why were they were creating such problems? and he was unable to talk about his agenda. at the same time, the trafficking office didn't exist, i wonder where the human trafficking, modern slavery issue would be on his talking points with the ambassador. like never mentioned. so you know, i think that this is the kind of challenge that has to be worked through and thought about, and i think that it's -- it's tough. and you know, you probably have to look at it on a case by case basis to figure out what's the right answer. i agree with you that we should broaden this conversation to try to figure out when it makes sense and when it doesn't. >> so, a couple of quick comments, and i appear to be losing my voice somehow in the middle of this imagine. i'm just so moved by the wisdom. one, i think to pick up the case studies we actually thought about doing the qddr on a case

study model, it's really much more effective and useful, i think, from the outside than from the inside. there is a tendency for every after-action report to say nothing went wrong, everything was perfect, nothing to see here, and these are really only useful if we're going to be honest, and really even getting willing to talk about individuals, because i think there can be a tendency to not want to criticize folks, and if we're going to learn from this, and this is something we're looking at with qddr, how do we become more of a learning institution at state, where you are more capable of taking some risks if you understand that if things don't go right it's an opportunity to learn and be better the next time. and this is, of course, the essence of what we preach in terms of entrepreneurship and innovation in the private sector. it's not about succeeding 100% of the time. it's about taking risks, and having them pay off over time. and we know all the reasons in terms of -- we don't know all the reasons but we know many of the reasons in terms of general bureaucracy, in terms of how the

hill reacts, and the media often with gotcha kind of things. if you're basically trying to manage against failure, instead of manage for success, it is a deadening environment. and we know we still attract the best and the brightest in to this -- in to these institutions. but how do we do that? and i think that being able to get more comfortable inside and out with case studies, and being able to say, yes, this was the right thing to try, it did not work out, but here's why it was the right thing to try, will be wlerned from it. so we're really trying to look at that. i want to echo on the policy issue. i mean, something i wrote something about when i was in the think tank world before i came in so it's a matter of public record, you look at something like syria emerging. for that first year and a half. and structurally speaking, you not only have at state and nsc and other entities, you have jordan, turkey, and israel, and

lebanon, all having slightly different attitudes towards this. so, and i think there was not, i think it's fair to say, clarity from the white house on what the policy was. that question of was the problem a structural problem, was rob ford empowered to do it, et cetera, i think we can look at these case studies both where an envoy came in and they didn't come in. on the congress thing for those who don't know i am a former member of congress. so let me speak both ill of my kind, and defend them a little bit. i think congress is bored. they don't pass a lot of laws anymore. and when they do, it's usually at midnight in december, when they're trying to go home. and so i think this makes the ability to play in some of the sandboxes more appealing. and so whether that's calling people up for oversight or issues or whether it's, you

know, wanting to show that they're doing something on a particular crisis around the world. in their defense, however, and i've made this clear with my colleagues at state, state does not always do the best job of really engaging with the hill respectfully and substantively. i think that it can be sort of a a -- you know, we're trying to save the world here and you're going to call us out for the 37th hearing so we're going to give vague answers, and try to get back to doing what we're doing. well, when congress acts in a way that they're essentially only showing up for their three minutes of questioning to be able to show that they were tough on state and wait for you to possibly misstate something and then that becomes the head line, of course you start, again, to manage against failure instead of for success. so i think that cycle is not great. there's also been the history over the years of feeling like, particularly on some of the issues of human rights and corruption that state has sometimes erred on the side of a favorable bilateral relationship, and from the

standpoint of the hill. but, there has been more and more attempts to leverage in whether it's drl or envoys or other things because the sense is, this is getting short shrift. which means you are having -- you're having some policy coherence because a set of elected officials who write your budget have basically made a decision that you're not getting the balance right and those who are actually running the policy from state, believe that this is the right policy. so, you know, we often think about the nsc/state split or a functional regional split on this but we do preach democracy around the world and members of congress were elected, granted some of that is to the highest bidder and totally manufactured redistricted mayhem, but nonetheless elected. and there. and you see this come up in other context. one issue that's certainly come up a lot in the qddr for obviously reasons has been the issue of physical security. and this is relevant in this

context because obviously we're talking about conflict areas to some extent. this is an issue before bengh i benghazi, before the kenya mall attack. but it certainly spiked up. you can see from humanitarian organizations the complex risk even outside of the political dynamics has gone up considerably in the last few years. number of countries facing complex conflict et cetera and how we operate. and then you have again with the relationship, if i were still up there, and the people were wise enough to not have that be the case, people in my district, and i was being asked to vote to train a group of people i'd probably want to go meet them. i'd want to look them in the eye and say are these people i want to support? i'm the one who has to cast that vote. i'm the one who has to effectively write that check. and at the same time, if you're state i understand why the last thing you want is a bunch of yahoo congress people coming down and playing around on the syrian border. i think in all of these things, you know, there really is genuine understanding, there are good arguments on both sides,

and i think the attitude probably has not -- has been escalating, and i think that is part of where the special rep phenomenon comes from, more reports. because the fact is congress, only has a limited set of tools in the tool set. we can demand a report, to some extent we can earmark funding. that requires them to get a budget passed. this is, i think, something where again, as someone who did have to represent people and people worked their tails off to pay their taxes and those are the taxes that pay for state operations and aid operations, you know that's got to be an important part of the conversation. >> qddr -- >> quadrennial diplomacy and development review. >> okay. >> just to push back a little bit, i do think that there is an opportunity for a special envoy. you know i think one of the things that princeton could talk about was he had good relations on the hill.

he had good relations in civil society. and you could make those places a force multiplier if you used them in the right way. and i think that a lot of times, secretary even the deputy assistant secretary which we haven't talked about, the assistant secretaries are effective special envoys, some of these smaller cases might be good to talk about that at some point but there are a lot of issues with the assistant secretary that a particular member has that they want to raise with them, that they want to talk about their own pet rock and a special envoy can go up and talk to members of congress. and they do travel, they can reenvoers messages, there is utility that can be done, i think you're right. sometimes state doesn't always that in the most effective way. >> no. i will add to that. i find it surprising that more chief submissions don't see every special rep as an opportunity. it's an opportunity to bring someone in. you can get press coverage. you can get meetings with civil society. you can emphasize an issue. in a world where government to government traditional diplomatic contact is less and

less the whole equation. and how things play out in the media. how they play out in social media, you know, i do think there is an opportunity to use each one of these offices and say, hey, i'm the ambassador to sri lanka did a lot of this. saying hey, i see 12 assets there that i can bring in. and use creatively to push a message that i'm pro-actively doing. that's different than when you've actually decided on a message in your country and then someone wants to come in and mess with that strategy. but these can, i think, huge opportunities. >> one other point and it cuts to your current work and that is the state department being decades behind in internal structural reform. as david said earlier in today's program, the tendency has been always just to add on additional layers, rather than take a hard look at the way the building is structured to do what we're supposed to do. so that if an ambassador feels that he or she is being bothered

by the work that has been decided, it's important for policy, then it's a reflection both of the ambassador's failure, but also the bidding's failure. years ago, there was a discussion about doing in the state department what the military had done in the '80s, which is to empower regional assistant secretaries to become kind of undersecretaries. who would then be able to make policy choices on how conflict resolution, human rights, labor issues, trafficking, all fit in, and to be able to call on resources the way that our regional commanders do in the military. and i think until we start to take a look at that, we're going to be confronted not only with problems in the department but problems with special envoys, because they in a sense almost need to proliferate when you haven't made basic policy priority choices. and i thinks connection between

policy priorities and structure has not been looked at sufficiently. >> let me make one -- go ahead. >> do you consider the possibility that there are some conflicts in which the united states is viewed by both of t the -- as so biased in favor of one that it has insignificant influence with both? and if our real interest is peace, we might refrain from diplomatic initiatives which are likely to prove futile and give quiet support to others that might have more chance of succe success? >> i'll let dan talk about that. >> to some extent that -- situations since there was a great deal of sympathy in the united states, in the congress, in the administration of what south sudan's long wars and

desire for independence and problems on the other side with what happen happened in darfur, et cetera, and sudan, so it posed an issue, but on the other hand it was not a conflict in which we could really step back entirely. we did in that case in part because we didn't talk to the president of sudan, rely as the principal negotiating body the africa union's panel for this purpose headed by south africa former president mbeki. so we did in that case need to, in effect, use our force in support of that process. but we had spent, as i testified before congress, between 2005 and 2010, spent $10 billion on the sudan/south sudan conflict, and we had a big stake in it. we couldn't quite just walk away. >> on the bosnia side, it was a different situation.

most of our diplomacy was aimed at other europeans. we had a situation -- we had created what was called the office of the high representative, the first one of whom was carl built, former farm minister of sweden, and our problem was not so much keeping the bosnians in line as it was more or less we were on the same page with the europeans. since that also involved russia, that was at times very difficult. and the office of the high representative, people still called him the u.n. high representative. he was not the u.n. high representative because eur and the u.s. government in general had a healthy distrust of u.n. peacekeeping operations in the past. so it was intentionally kept separate from the united nations and still is. >> i would add usually when people ask the question they are thinking about the arab/israeli

conflict, so i'm not trying to read your mind, but i think it's probably a fair reading of the question. and my own view has always been that the united states should get involved in this conflict resolution process to the extent that both sides want us involved. and the reality has been, even though we have a special relationship with the state of israel that we do not have with palestine liberation organization, the reality has always been that both sides have wanted us to be at least involved if not actually the primary third party. that may be changing. and i think today we're now coping with -- dealing with a minian move iaia iaian -- pale the united nations. i think it's healthy for this to be taken up in multilateral fora, but when it comes down to actual negotiating between israelis and palestinians, the go-to party has been the united states. my complaint substantively on the issue has been that as much

as we talk about being serious as a third-party mediator, we really haven't been, and we have a policy problem where we haven't imbued the secretary of state or the envoy with enough authority and power to actually go out and do what a united states national interest would dictate our envoy trying to do. >> i want to give the authors the last word here, but i will say one thing in teeing that up which is, you know, i think that one of the things that i am hopeful about with special envoys and with the state department in general is getting people -- and this will sound cheesy -- getting people excited about peace building. we are a war-weary country. you see that on the right and the left. i think the isolationist fever isn't as bad as it was a couple years ago. but people -- i think it is an

important moment for us to talk about diplomacy and development as part of the answer to the question, well, is there just going to be another isis five years from now or ten years from now. diplomacy and development is part of the answer to that in the context of individual conflicts and otherwise. in some cases that can be the deputy secretary, it can be a das, but this is something where i actually want to capture the imagination of the american people to believe in this, and i think there has been a tendency of at stake and aid, probably less so in aid in the last few years that if your name is in the paper that somehow wrong. that you're not supposed to bring attention to yourself. holbrook wrote a book to end a war. people like me read it and it had a huge impact on our lives. that's not because he was a perfect man and everyone got along with him perfectly. it was about an aspiration in this way. and i think, you know, one of the things we're looking at in the broader context that i think

this can be a piece of is getting people excited about diplomacy. i've joked with the secretary that the state should have a hollywood liaison, that all of my nieces and nephews know exactly -- or think they know exactly what a soldier and a spy is. they do not know what a diplomat is. now there have been some tv shows in the last year and some other things that have started to play that out. but i think you know, we want to look at case studies not just to learn from them, but we also want to celebrate. it's been the most enjoyable part of my job has been to go around and see amazing work that nobody ever hears about that our folks are doing every day in countries to try to build peace, try to pull people out of poverty. so, you know, for me i think this is part of getting better. we have to get better. we have to get honest when things aren't working. but we also want to tell a story about the fact that -- to the american people that one of the things they support is this kind of effort. with that, i'll hand it to you with our thanks for the report. >> yes. >> just very quickly, i couldn't

agree more. and peacemaking and conflict resolution is tough work. i mean, people wouldn't have gone to war if there weren't some very difficult issues at stake. while i think the use of special envoys or seniors of the department is empowered, it takes a lot of people to get this done. that's why using the full instruments of the department, if an envoy doesn't do that, it's a mistake. but beyond that, it's about multilateral institutions and other allies, absolutely critical, and you have to be engaged and engaged. and sometimes it takes a very long time. i couldn't agree more that this is an area that the u.s. can invest war in and i think will serve us very well in the future. >> i'd make about six points.

the first is don't take the job if you don't know the issues. second is know the local players. you have to reach out to them. in sarajevo, that meant not only the politicians, in fact, it meant politicians not very much, but to know the grand mufti, to know the cardinal, to know the head of the jewish community. these were the people who were really making policy in cultural terms, and cultural terms are key. third, and this has been said in one way or another, know the dynamics in washington. if you haven't got that game down, it's not going to work. know the interests of other players. i mentioned the europeans, the organization of the islamic conference, nato, all of these elements have to be factored into the mix if you're going to do your job. know the limits of the possible.

the early stages in bosnia not much was possible except preventing starvation and preventing any more mass executions. and finally, take the long view. ask yourself how would i like this place to look in ten years and how can we get there? when i was in the army, we had a sergeant who said if you don't know where you're going you're never going to get there. it's also true spr special envoys. >> thank you all very much. thanks to usip and have a wonderful holiday. >> thank you.

president obama holds his year-end news conference this afternoon starting at 1:30 eastern before he leaves for his christmas vacation in hawaii. you can see the president live on our companion network c-span, again, starting at 1:30 eastern, with your phone calls and your comments via social media. an then at 8:00 tonight also on c-span, interviews with two committee chairs who are retiring from congress beginning with dave camp, then buck mckeon who can chairs the armed services committee. here are a few moments of conversation with congressman camp. >> i knew i wanted to get on the ways and means committee and