to our guest. for all the hold work the organization -- that only for joining us but for all the hard work your organization has done. thank you. [applause] the real reason you came is for the free food and beverages. >> it's ok. it is a good reason. >> syria's foreign ministry is speaking out against a recent decision by turkey to allow foreign fighters to launch operations against isis from turkish territory. reuters reports the syrian foreign ministry called the approach a flagrant violation of moveharter and warned the was a danger to peace and security in the region. turkey has recently been trying to stop advances by isis in a

kurdish town allowed the syrian-turkish border. u.s. warplanes struck isis targets in that region overnight in attempts to hold the insurgents. and other middle east policy issues or part of a recent discussion hosted by the washington institute that included a look at policies over the last 30 years. this is a little over one hour. -- m patrick claw sen clausen. i'm the director here. i would like to welcome you to this event, the sam lewis symposium. as my friend said at the start of the symposium. we will have two panels.

one of which is looking backward and one of which is looking forward. as we said a moving target the art and science of middle east policy planning. and couldn't be a better moment for discussion that issue as we hear from important sources like the president of the united states, the difficulties of formulating a strategy for the middle east and to discuss those issues we've assembled, i think a stellar panel of the first speaker. you've got their bios in their little brochure. and i'm sure you know them anyway. but paul wolfowitz and the former deputy of defense and he was also the director of the state department in the early 1990's. we have jessica mathews. she's a foreman director of the

council on foreign relations office. and she was the deputy under secretary of state for global affairs and also the director of the office of global issues on the national security council staff. and finally commenting on their two remarks is going to be my colleague david moss who is the distinguished fellow here at the washington institute. he has served for more than 25 years in high level of government with white house and in the regan, bush, obama administration. with that, let me ask paul to egin with a few remarks. >> i want you to now that i wouldn't be foolish enough to talk about the middle east if

it wasn't out of enormous respect for sam and really wishing we had some of this wisdom for us now. he was a great man and did great work. excuse me. i was ahead of the policy staff from 1981 to 1982. during that time as dennis knows it seemed as though 80 to 90% of our time was spent on middle east issues. i had a fantastic time. i had dennis, frank foriama and don forte who became deputy much ty advise who died too soon. i did my own pivot to southeast ashafment it was like moving from darkness into light, like moving from a par of the world where all people can create problems to a part of the world for the last 20 years they began to simply solve them. nd it was so refreshing.

so i can understand very well the administrations reason to pivot. but i think by can see no matter how much we try to see the middle east, the middle east will not leave us unfortunately. and we have a role until that part of the world that no other country can play in a role that i think is critical for american security and critical for energy security of the entire world no matter how much oil the united states produces, but one of those countrys that critically dependent on the middle east. a wonderful man named sam lewis whom i got to know during that time. sam was always the voice of calm and balance in an area where so many of the year issues were loaded with tension. tension is kind of an understatement. it got kind of vicious at times. and not just in the middle east but back in washington as well.

but sam was always wise, always open to discussion and able which wasn't always that easy in a foreign service establishment which was fair to say not very friendly to israel to be able to express views that explained what the israeli outlook was. she was always the ambassador to israel. he never made that mistake of becoming that ambassador to israel which i hope i didn't do when i was in indonesia. it's an occupational hazard as an ambassador. .nd sam never succumbed to it i believe that at that time we ve in one of his hardest times but in 1982 as israel was be sieging beirut and george

schultz was negotiating to get beirut he out of asked others to help develop a peace proposal that could be launched at the time that p.l.o. left beirut which is remarkable of what policy doing.g -- should be as soon as the crisis was over, everyone would be be sieging us. and he wanted to have his own. so the next eight weeks or so were spent in a very vigorous internal debate with sam intervening by cable from time to time to develop -- this is incident.an resurrecting the alumn plan. you're dating yourself if you

do. it seemed like applauseable idea at the time. and but it became a difficult job for sam because in this case he was outraged that we hadn't consulted with him before telling anyone else on the principle that if we did consult with him before everyone else would no before they were supposed to. am took it well and handled it brilliantly. i'm going to first talk about challenges and policy planning which are considerable. it's a great position in theory. .ou have enormous flexibility i've already mentioned denise and frank and steve, and charles and a number of really outstanding people. in theory you have the license to weigh in on the most important issues facing the department. but that's part of the problem.

anywhere that you way in is someone else's turf. you never welcome bureaucracy if people think they welcome intruders to their turf. all of this hit me hard when schultz asked me to do a memo forum on how to restore the policy plan to the position of mitsva.e under paul so i reread that history which this particular question chi hadn't thought before. one of the first things that struck me the hard zest to realize that george canon had quit in frustration. the same kind of frustration that we were feeling through much of the hague years -- sorry hague year and a half. it felt like years [laughter] when in fact, we did seriously a graph of the number noted cables, you know the most

restricted cables in the department. it started out at a very high number and start declining and then it shot back up briefly again. what canon says in his book regional s that the bureau would never welcome anything coming from the outside. if they come from the secretary of state they feel an obligation to respond. but if you don't have the ability to debate clearly so that he ask the question, the reaction will be this came from a bunch of amateurs dreamily long range thinkers and has no application to our present situation. the other thing i still remember from that bit of historical research was describing being invited to the white house to meet with truman who told me the single biggest secret in washington probably in d world. the fact that the united states

had developed a hydrogen bomb. he said i need to develop a strategy for me for how we build a policy of this. and he said i went back to the state department and met with the policy planning staff, the policy planning staff, not the director of policy planning, the entire staff which i think at the time were only seven people. but the idea that the secretary of state would bring a group of seven people in its confidence a that way was a -- i took lesson from that when i was in the pentagon when we were looking at the prospect of liberating kuwait and the military plan at the time was what prince cocroft thought it was going to go right up the middle. it was going to go up the kuwaiti border which was the most formidable plan that they had.

it's possible to go around kuwait and come around from the western side. it's a good idea. let's try to develop it. because but you have to swear in blood that you won't talk to anyone outside of our policy unit because as soon as the joint staff learns that a bunch of civilians came up with this idea they will -- all over it. we took the idea to cheney who liked it. and energized the joint staff. i felt enormous satisfaction a couple of years later when i happen to be sitting next to tom kelly, a remarkable general who had been in charge of planning ifer that period. and he said without realizing that i -- our planning staff had anything to do it. he said cheney had these crazy eas and we had to be putting salt on his tail but it produced a much better result in the end. also looking back on it and i

guess it's a sort of example in this case of not going to bureaucracy but to the secretary of state maybe so accidentally. be i recall when regan was -- came into office. there was enormous dislike for the bureau of human rights which had been created under jimmy carter and ran those four years by fat darian who was unfairly blamed by many people in our administration to help destabilize friendly governments which one was iran who as bad as he was what came after him made him look like a golden agent away. so there was no eagerness to have that office and hague nominated one of the first assistant secretarys that i know of to be turned down by the senate. i won't name him. it's unkind. but you can go look it up. and as soon as that nomination

was rejected hague decided, ok. his is a good opportunity to abolish the office of human rights. this is a crazy idea if we're going to have any kind of support for the helsinki process, any kind of opposition of the soviet union on political grounds. we can't abandon the support for democracy. he said there's a better way to do it than going around and harassing individual governments and that is to work on systemic change. so we produced a memo. and gave it to the deputy secretary judge clark, a very inegg mat k man. never said much. but he took it. he must have taken it to his best friend the president of the united states. came back a couple of weeks later saying we want to keep the bureau. help me with some people who can run it. i think it was a good

institution that was important to save. when george marshall became secretary of state, he both created the policy planning staff as a way to produce planning. and he did something that tends to neutral lies the policy planning staff which forgive me for saying this. it's the state secretary. they see it as their job to protect the secretary for uncoordinated recommendations hence the idea of private advice to the secretary becomes almost impossible. and they also see it as their job to restrict sensitive documents and the difficulty of getting access to all this information when you're in that job. as we enter into what i think has to be called a three-sided world or i guess there's an issue whether the war applies, with the assad regime a war that may last for a long time,

think policy planning needs two critical things. they need the best intelligence possible although even our best intelligence seems be fairly limited. but you have to be access to the very best stuff and they need access to our friends and partners in the region as reflected in diplomatic conversations. if i had one statement to make as opposed to speck policies i would say the secretary of state should form a very high level very, very qualified policy advisory group. maybe it should be advised. but it has to be small like tchison's was. you're able to talk to him without anything going outside to the press or anything going outside to the bureaucracy. i think that's a critical need

that point because i think anyone would have to admit that we really aren't all clear where we're going. i think we need a paradigm shift in the middle east. we need to try to figure out who our friends are. do we really have friends? can we find genuine moderates in the middle east? are we limited to the dictum that some people think might apply to us although i think it's shocking to do that, that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. if they want to do that they should remember the qualifier that the great middle east historian albert harani applied to that dictum, policy in the middle east comes down to the enemies of my enemies. he said it a little more colorfully. but you have to remember is the current australian ambassador said when he was a rhodes scholar. what you have to remember, mr. beasley is that the principle enemy at 9:00 is never the same

as the principle enemy at 9:00 in the evening to which he replied how can you do politics like that? which he replied exactly, mr. beasley, exactly. have to do our best to a better handle on. in the battle days of the sothe union in the cold war we could distinguish at least but semantically between communism and democratic socialism, not all socialists were bad. not all muslims were bad but if the extremists i think can properly characterize as islamists which to me means someone who believes that islam should be imposed to others but not justice lamb but their version including on other

muslims but unfortunately i'm not sure that works. i got lectured once that i was being anti-muslim because i talked about the threat from islamist ideology. it's a threat in a country with the largest muslim country where i was privileged to be ambassador and that's indonesia. their simple institutions there were very, very basic. you find one with a three-story dormitory if a fancy gymnasium. ideology.ing mohave for many years we followed a policy of the lesser evil. at seemed to bebreed rrorists that seemed to be creatures of policy. and it fell into the wrong

hands. i think it was -- it was obviously premature to prefer to the arab spring as a brand-new season. but i think it's also premature to refer to an arab winter. i think we can't afford -- there's an upheaval in the arab world and we need to find ways to influence i. what that demonstrated is the willingness of arabs to be free from tyrants but that's not the same as being ready to embrace the responsibilities of democracy. i think we lost an opportunity in libra. there have been two elections both which returned pro-western and moderate parties with a resounding defeats with the islamists but those are the people that had the guns, guns that came from qatar and principally from qatar and the persian gulf in other ways. and it's now the law of the gun

and not the law of the ballot. i think perhaps libya would still be salvage able -- certainly would have been salvageable if more would have been done in the beginning to help create effective security forces. tunisia i think is the most hopeful of all those arab spring countries. it's reflected some sensible reaction from the electorate and deserves as much support as we could give. and the europeans should step up to the plate on this issue. but syria will take many years recover. the real mistake we walked to into syria was not the mistake that was so feared that we would somehow repeat the bad experience of iraq. instead we repeated the bad experience of bosnia where for three years we allowed the

bloodshed while the weaker side lacked for weapons and the end result was 200,000 people dead. it is partitions in all that name. i will leave it to my wiser panelist to see if there's a quicker way to pick up on this. if you're looking for allies in the middle east and certainly israel is the only reliable ally in certain critical ways but it's also critically important because of our closeness to israel we end up >> i don't think everything p israel does -- is their way to get to better understanding and more restraint. i would just offer this one example that came during the gulf war when i remember if we were thinking ahead to the

possibility of war, it was attacked israel were by iraq, israel would respond militarily. there was no way you could prevent that. the fact that israel was attacked pretty much continuously for 54 days and did not respond. and the reason it didn't respond is because we convinced them we would do everything necessary to take care of israel's security. and even at moment when's it seemed as though maybe we weren't doing quite as much as we should have that bargain held. 've never forgotten being with -- shamir said you're treating us like a disease. you're asking us to give up our right of sd? need to d out, no, you

understand first of all we don't send our -- we're not treating israel like an outcast. if you want to know why mubearic said what he said about israel is because we asked him to do so. you should the rest of that sentence where he said i don't think there will be much left to retaliate against after the americans are finished. thank you very much. [applause] >> just before i begin i would like to say that sam lewis was , of a man of deep wisdom overfloge common sense and of very good humor. i think that is a rare

combination and one to be admired, and if we can immolate. and so i don't really feel deserving to be here but i feel privileged to be. our assignment was to think about planning in the context or the middle east in the contest of policy planning which to me means what are the big questions? what are the ones that underlie day-to-day policymaking? let me offer a few thoughts. i should add that before i begin that listening to paul talk about the difficulties and the downside of working in policy planning, i remember a time when i was forn between accepting an offer to take that job and what was my current job. paul is one of the people that i asked advice of, and i don't remember any of the negative

stuff. [laughter] so the first question would be for me would be how engaged is the american public prepared to be now in the middle east? the common wisdom is that war worry -- weariness. but i've looked hard at the polls and i don't see any evident that that's actually what this country is suffering from. i think what we're suffering from is weariness of interventions that don't succeed. and that's a very different thing. and i think what you've seen this summer after the beheadings and this massive shift in public opinion so quickly is some evidence for the view on -- i'm suggesting that there is a llingness to stay engaged if

there is clarity -- convincing clarity about what it is we're setting off to do. remember that afghanistan is not only our longest war, but we have spent in real dollars more money in afghanistan than we spent on the marshall plan. and americans may not know that figure, but they have a feeling for how much we spent and how much there is to show for it on the ground. so my sense is the willingness to be engaged is there if our president and the secretary of state can capture it. a second question or a need is that i think we're very short now on strategic patience in the middle east. and paul referred to this, but i put a lot of the blame in this

case on the word arab spring, on the phrase arab spring. phrases as we saw with the pivot can do enormous damage to policy. in china it's amazing to me how a word that had so little content can have so much outcome on the ground. but arab spring did leave people with a sense that things were going to change for the better fast, and in a linear kind of fashion. and undoing that is going to that some of doing director of policy planning needs to think hard about. third, we are going to need -- i think we badly need more diplomatic energy and i think probably most people here have found and i discovered to my surprise that we have more

people in military vans than we do career diplomats. that's been a trend now in both republican and democratic administrations for at least three decades, and it's something we have to work to unwind. that said, i think our -- how we behave abroad, what we do -- what we attempt to do has everything to do with how we think of ourselves at home. and when we can make positive change at home we're more inclined to think we can do so abroad and vice versa. it has been a very long time since we had very much to celebrate in terms of how constructive we can be on our only domestic policies. obviously no director of policy planning, month secretary of state can undo that, but i think

-- in office making policy right now would be very much on my mind, how far we can stretch ourselves given our record at ome. we need a better listening ear worldwide. in particular, we need it in the middle east. we have far too few people whose expertise is the arab, israeli conflict as opposed to the arab whose and we need people principles pal expertise is that. there's an awful lot of history happening and is going to happen in the coming years, a lot of difficult history that we need to be better prepared than we are now in my view to deal with.

and finally the president has shown in the last few weeks with the right threat it is possible to build quite fast an extraordinarily ad hoc coalition, and we've seen before. it's also true that ad hoc coalitions are your third choice in international coordination, cooperation. your first place is institution. one of the disappointing features of the last 15 years has been the steady decline of what we hoped for from the u.n. in the 1990's. and your second choice is established partnership. so your third choice is ad hoc coalition. and ad hoc coalitions now are pretty much the best we can do outside of the u.s., israeli

relationship. of the time. ious about me just say a word that relationship. i do think we need to get a more realistic relationship with israel. e've gotten unable politically to distinguish u.s. interests from israeli interests and to prioritize u.s. interests. and i think too often for too long our policy has protected israel from the consequences of its own choices and that's a formula that doesn't have a happy ending in my view. let me say a word about syria which i think is the biggest immediate challenge for this

region. the achilles heel of the president's new policy is obvious, and that's the lack of boots on the ground in syria. we can see three sources of boots on the ground in iraq, iraqi army, the kurds, the peshmerga and the sunni tribes. serious set see a of boots on the ground in syria. the syrian opposition that we're talking about training, the time scale is, according to the pentagon, a year and a half, three to five months to that, a year to train. so what happens in the interim? i think that there is a piece of good poe ten -- a piece of good news if we can discard the guiding assumptions that have directed our policy for the last three years, which is that we

need an outline of the political settlement before we can take steps to cease-fire and agreement. ' extraordinarily accomplishments in the last several months has shifted it ty so differently that is m possible to imagine two separate parallel cease-fires by the assad regime and by the moderate opposition, both of which are stretched badly and bleeding badly and both of which would enormously profit from such a truce, vis-a-vis each other so they can focus on a common threat. what makes me think this is onseefable is that the same change in priorities now holds rue for saudi arabia and iran.

they fear each other and distrust each other but recognize they now face a common threat that they would like to deal with before it gets to their borders. so i think that there is an as a last comment i will say this. the other thange that would be -- isuch on my mind where our relationship with iran. if we lose the opportunity with this deal, we lose so much more than that, and i think a deal is there. a deal is in the room. it may not be on capitol hill. may not be in tehran, but

it's in the room to do a good deal, an acceptable deal. -- if we can get it indiscernible] >> thank you. i think paul and jessica's comments were interesting and created a kind of broad kn september yule framework -- conceptual framework. i think jessica raised some provocative thoughts at the end and maybe we'll get into some of that. i want to do it a little bit differently just because i want to do it in a way that would reflect, if sam were here, what would be the questions that sam

would ask. and i feel like i can do that in part because i used to spend a lot of time with sam and sam used to ask a lot of hard questions. typically when i was our negotiator and i would see him, he wouldn't have to offer his judgments because he would ask the kind of questions that would make me question my own assumptions. of all the people i worked with over the years, i don't know that i ever dealt with anybody who are more consistently would ask us to question our own assumptions. and i suspect at a time like we're in right now in the middle east, i can't think of a better time to be questioning our own assumptions. there are a lot of assumptions about this region that have taken on a life of their own and if there were ever a point in which they seemed to be in doubt, this is it. so if sam were here the first thing he would say as a policy planning person, he would say, look, be sure that the decisions

you're going to make in the coming days will be decisions that will move you where you wanting to over time. don't make the decision that seems comfortable because this is the easiest path or the path of least resistance because maybe six months from now or a year from thousand you're going to regret the fact that you did that. that's the emphasis with policy planning, how to be sure your -- if we decisions take a step back and i want to do it sort of -- i'll do it on two things. we didn't talk about the arab israeli issue actually for good reasons because the reason today rieflecting, i think, a reality is challenging what has been assumption that is one that was

embedded in the national security establishment for a long time. it's true, i finished a draft of a new book on the u.s. and israel. and every administration from truman to obama had a stit constituency that had an assumption guided about the middle east which is if you solve the israeli issue you'd region. by the way, if you solve it today, it wouldn't stop one barrel bomb from being dropped in syria. it wouldn't have -- soist wouldn't change its approach. you can go through country by country. i rack's problems today and so forth. so it's important to realize that. but that can't be an argument for not dealing with the issue. and by the way, if you looked at the video, sam's preoccupation

with this issue was driven by how we defined american interests, how we defined the region, but also how we defined israel's interest. and so i do want to deal with that issue at the end because we haven't really dealt with it. but let me sort of deal with two broad sort of questions, in effect, and i won't belabor it too long because we'll have some time for questions. in the first case, how do we look at the region? i think sam would say what do we learn by looking at the landscape of the region right now? he would probably sayers dennis, did you pay attention to what went on in gaza? you know, i notice that there were demonstrations against europe but i didn't see demonstrations in the middle east. what does that tell us about the landscape right now? and i would say, well, it tells us that the gulf states and egypt and probably morocco and

algeria view the muslim brotherhood as their first threat. now that doesn't immediate that the saudis don't view iran as a threat, because they do. and in effect what it says is used u have -- and paul this term -- he said it wasn't shoe isthmus was the right term. you have a spectrum. they are defined as extremists. there are those who don't much respect the idea of civil authority. they don't really respect the idea of individual states. in effect in ieve the very concept of pluralism because they reject the very ida of tolerance. they don't accept anybody else's

interpretation of islam. and that might be an interesting sarting point for us to think about how we decide who we want to be working with. the problem is -- and same sam would be the first to come back and say this -- that's an interesting way of thinking about the region. it's probably conceptually a very important place to start from. but if we approach it that way, we're still going to be faced with dilemmas because if you save those who aren't the extremists, we're still going to have those countries or leaderships who might respect individual states who are athor tearian in character and they challenge our values. so how are you going to reconcile on the fact we have those and then we have those who may be with us right now but still challenge our values? how are you could going to

reconcile that? and i would say that's a tough one. i don't have an easy answer for that. but i guess if we hope for pluralism over time, we first have to deal with those who will never accept it under any circumstances. we first have to establish that security and order are a baseline because there's no pluralism without it. and that might mean that, yes, i would work with the egyptians and others who i think at this point may challenge us on some of our values but at least i may be lining up with us in terms of who threaten the basic principle of pluralism over time. i don't think i -- i know we can't surrender our voice. i know we have to be honest with them. and sam, he was the embodiment as an ambassador who would lay out what was important to us even as he was working with those who were our friends. and so i think one of the

challenges may be how on the one hand to establish as a clear priority that we're going to deal with order and security first. and that's in effect what the president is doing right now. even while we recognize that we will have partners in this coalition who we have differences with, but it's a kind of first thing's first approach, and that's going to be the basis in which we'll approach things. i think on the issue of syria which, jessica, i think you put your finger on. it is true today you can see the strategy in iraq. by the way, it's kind of consistent with what i just outlined. in syria it becomes much more complicated because, yeah, you have to deal with isis because their the first thing's first. e idea that we can in anyway

-- in any way pard partner with -- he's gone beyond anything acceptable. the question is can you follow the path jessica was raising? is the fatigue and the threat from isis, is it enough to create some kind of convergence there? the short answer is i don't know the answer. i'm a big believer -- this goes back to the point sam used to rain, if there's one thing that guided him more than anything else is don't fall in love with your own idas, and if you think you're right that's fine. but why don't you test your ideas. why what do you lose by testing your own ideas? i would be quite open to testing certain things, but i also know if it looks like we shouldn't assume necessarily that having

the sunnis with us is a given if it looks like we're draug too close to the iranians which has clearly been a sensitivity for the obama administration, if we want sunni tribes by the way not just in iraq but in syria, because, yes, you have a syrian opposition that is completely fractured, but it's still largely based on sunni tribes to the extent to which they're going to be part of this, they also have to be integrated into this. if they are prepared to accept some kind of cease-fire that would be one thing. at this point i know one thing about assad. assad seems to be using our going after isis as an opportunity to go after the syrian opposition that is not isis. he continues to did that. throughout this conflict he has been much more willing to drop barrel bombs on those who are not isis than those who are.

he was willing to buy oil from those who were isis. so while we think about this idea, i think we have to do it very clearly. that's again the point. you know, whatever your idea is, be clear about it but also have a hedge built in. you better have a hedge and think about the consequences of it if it's going to move us in the wrong direction as opposed to the right. that gets back to the idea of policy planning. if you make a decision, don't just think about the order of consequence, the second order of consequence and the third order of consequence, think about where it's going to leave you over time. the say something about sraeli, palestinian issue. and i could actually envision sam saying this very clearly.

when you look at your options, don't create two polar on sits. don't -- polar op sits. don't put your self in the position where you're going to solve the problem or you're going to do nothing. if you can't solve the problem you're going to be left doing nothing. one thing we've seen is that you have vacuums and the vacuums get filled. and we know who fills the vacuums. they're all the worst forces. the choice we have cannot be that if we can't solve the whole conflict right now, well, there's nothing to be done, we're going to wash our hands of it. because the one thing we know that will produce is a much worse situation which later on if we try to do sbhg it, the challenge to us, the test to us, the problem for us will be worse. in some ways i would say that's what happened in syria. we applied that principle of

we're not going to put boots on the ground so there isn't much to be done and we've seen what happened. well, i would say in dip -- diplomacy when you do nothing, the vacuum gets filled. so where are we today? well, i would say that it would be really desighable to be able to resolve the conflict. i say the prospect of solving the conflict rite now to be pretty close to nil. i don't see -- i with say even before what happened in gaza i was actually in the region the end of june and i was struck very much by two different realities. you can be between jerusalem and ramallah, you're talking about less than 10 miles and it might have been -- might as well have been from here to the moon, at least psychologically. i was there right after the cud knapping of the three israeli

teenagers which turned out to be the murder of the three israeli teenagers. i was there before the murder of the palestinian teenager but what i saw in israel was a cundy that was under a sense of national -- national trauma because of the kidnappings. and what i saw in ram alla were they fingers being held up to celebrate the idea of the kidnapping. it was profound -- from the time hen i was our negotiating -- negotiator it was never close -- the gap between the two sides is as wide as i've seen it. where it'sall a time been like this. the one hand if you look at his approach towards hamas these

days seems to reflect, shall we say a very high degree of except six. he's not -- skept six. he's not israeli has the same view but the idea that the israelis at this point are prepared to take a big leap given what they see around them, the idea at this point that he's in a position where he can make what amounts to fundamental concessions, given what i think the mood of palestinians is and how he sees it, i think it just doesn't pass the test of being realistic. and if there's one thing that guided sam, it was don't tell me about what you'd like to do. tell me what you can do. i mean if you listen to that video, he focused very clearly on the ida -- idea you don't give up. that gets back to the notion of if you can't solve the whole thing, you don't give up and

wash your hands of. so the question now becomes what can you do? i would focus very heavily on at i have for a long time is coordinated unilateralism. focus on those things that could actually begin to make a difference practically, meaningful. yes, on the israeli side i would like to see them make their policy consistent with the two-state approach. if you say you build in two states, don't build in what you think is the palestinian threat. it jury cuts your credibility. not to mention the fact it does a great deal to foster the lenlity massey of israel internationally. and if you're serious about two states, then what about opening area c, which is 60% of the west bank and if it were opened up for eckcommomic -- economic active it could have a democrat

atic effect. if you go back to the poll that was taken, throughout the whole middle east between 18 and 24 year olds wrrks it shows -- it -- it took 18 to 20 year olds from north africa and the gulf and the one thing they were all focused on was not the idea of political transformation, which is where they were a couple years ago. this poll has been done over the last several years. they were focused on having a job. what was their economic future? the country they most wanted to live in anywhere in the world -- ctually the imritz emirates because they saw an economic future there. you can have an effect among the 18 to 24 year olds if they thought it was going to be an economic future.

there's not going to be an economic future if you don't ease some restrictions. i could sit here and say it's in your strategic to do this. but the israeli psychology will be if you give something for nothing, all it does is foster givedea that you confantly and you've -- constantly give and you'll never get. the role for the united states is let's see what you can broker between the two. if you can get the israelis on these two kind of steps, then what could you get the palestinians to do because these would be things that would be measurable. today if you look at the polling , he's standing -- his standing with palestinians isn't so great. he need to deliver something. going to the u.n. is symbolically good and practically nonproductive. ,hen he went to the u.n. before

he was celebrated when he returned and a week later people said, ok, what changed? so the point is do something where people will see that there's a change and i don't just mean economically but a change that begins to signal something will get significantly better in the future. that's the kind of approach that sam would emphasize because he would say don't do something that makes you feel good for a day. do something that puts you on a path that gives you a chance to change things over time. it's not only good policy planning, it's good voice. when i sit and i ask myself questions about how we should be proceeding, i ask must self what questions would sam be asking? [applause] >> now is our chance to ask questions and i get to go first. first, this weekend president obama said that the united states had underestimated the

strength of isil and underestimated the weaknesses of the iraqee army and that's how -- iraqi army and that's how he got to this current quandary. talk to me about how to do you sniff out what strategic surprises might be on the horizon. jessica matthews mentioned that an iran deal might not happen. how do you do planning for plan b without making it look like you've already given up on plan a? how do you make it look like you're thinking about the possibilities if your plan a doesn't work out without at the same time undermining the plan a? it's not obvious this administration has got a planning -- it's not obvious

during all those months that secretary kerry was putting the effort into the israeli, palestinian talks that he had a plan for what to do if that didn't work out. so how realistic is it to think you can do some policy planning about plan b? >> all three of you. >> just very quickly on the iran deal. he don't think that's so obscure or so difficult. i think everything will depend if it does fail on how it fails and why it fails. i don't believe we'll go back to the status quo. i believe there will be some kind of a muddling through framework, and that's something that that's possible to be thinking about and working on right now, and i would guess it is being thought on and thought about and worked on.

i think plan b is the sort of thing you need need to work on with some degree of privacy and confidentiality, which is maybe he's hoping for peace in the middle east in washington but it's a reason to have that kind of private channel to people who .re working on planning i'm sorry your first question was? >> strategic surprise. >> it seems to me this should not have been such a surprise. there was so much evidence that extremists were growing in strength among the syrian opposition. maybe sometimes you need to read products that are not just from the intelligence community. but i don't think that really should have been such a surprise. and the weakness of the iraqi

army was something had been jumping up and down now with their hair on fire for a couple of years because practically every colonel who served with pa tray yuss has been watching the firing of capable generals because they were the wrong confessional persuasion. i thought it was a strikeing when the president said the united states underestimated, i'm in the sure who did, but maybe the white house did. i think this is something we could have seen coming. that doesn't entirely answer your question how do you prepare for surprise. having plan b -- it goes to one of the questions usually if you bring up the idea of a surprise, people say that's not likely to happen.

of course, that's how we got surprised in suez in 1973 and that's how we got surprised in pearl harbor. surprises are almost historically something that didn't seem plausible for some reason. i think what dennis described, what are you assuming when you say the egyptians couldn't hope to cross the canal or what are you assuming when you're assuming the japanese couldn't attack the u.s. fleet? what are those sum sthun shuns and how reliable are they? sometimes i mean i think there were some very deep secrets in japanese military planning we plobble probably could not have penetrated, but we should have been thinking given we were putting the pressure on japan at that point, and i don't think we did. >> i think it picks up where i would answer, one of the things

you have to do is be asking yourself where did thing -- where could things go wrong and if they go wrong, what do they look like? when i was head of policy planning with baker, i had the advantage of also being part of a very closely knit group with him where he would ask, among sit down and go over where the opportunities we haven't talked about and where are the dangers that no one is talking about and thinking about. that doesn't prevent you from being surprised because the administration was surprised when saddam hussein went into iraq. one of the reasons for that is because the top -- they were concerned he concerned with german yune fiction and and nato . even if you sort of try to

constitutionalize the issue, you have to ensure it gets to the heart of what you're raising, those who are raising these questions have a pipeline into the leadership. so the leadership if it's consumed because there's an use -- there's a limit on the bandwith. somehow there has to be access for those who are asking hard questions. they can't be discounted. i recall after 1973 one of the lessons the israelis learned is they need to create the equivalent what we call a red team. the problem is when you create that kind of group, the minute they walk in with something, everyone discity and countys -- december counts them. no one can ever guarantee against surprises but i think the more you try to anticipate where could things go wrong so that you are positioned for that and also, by the way, where

could thing goes right? because the benefit of doing things where you actually produce, the payoff is really disproportionate. agree with jessica said -- on the issue of iran, i find it hard to believe that the administration isn't thinking about the all tern tiffs in no small part because the administration has been quite pessimistic in public about the prospect of a deal. that was not the case on the israeli palestinians talks where i think secretary kerry actually was hopeful and there were certain points where he had a reason to be hopeful. so where you're pessimist eck, presumably you are already thinking about what are the choices if this doesn't work out. i do think some kind of muddling approach is likely. i also think the iranians may have a default strategy. i don't buy those who say if

there's no deal the iranians will go all out. i think the iranians will say we're going to continue with some of the transparency, we are it -- o show you how >> let's turn to the audience. your question, please. let's start over here. >> hi. thanks for the panel. dan with cbs. i'm wondering the independence of state department policy planning because it's not a university symposium and it's not a think tank. do you work for the current administration? can you really -- if you're doing that job think outside the box things the president ouldn't even want to hear? >> the answer is yes and no.

the answer is yes, you can. a lot depends upon relationships. that thelationship secretary of state has with the theident, if those around secretary of state have been given a kind of charter, it goes on the national security staff have been given a charter, you can come in there and raise ideas. i say no, because if you do that too many times, dogs of you being able to pursue the things you most want to pursue goes down precipitously. are not is, you excluded from doing that. fair, i have been a political appointee for four presidents and had access to three of them. i would say of the three that i worked for, there was never a kind of prohibition on raising

new ids. in fact, i found frequently a readiness and openness to that. you overdo it, and you may not find the openness on a continuing basis. >> i remember something acheson says in the memoirs. it says if you want to have new ideas perceived by the president am a you need to understand how he thinks an spate of language that speaks to him. the expertshim what know, you have to trust us, the state department will become irrelevant as it has frequent times. >> the only thing i would add is we all three have talked about the importance of being able to re-examine core functions. i just want to underline how incredibly hard that is to do. whether you were in the government or outside. definition,

psychologically really hard to re-examine them. it often tends to be the steps that give you insight. it is just rare. >> keep it short. >> fair enough. i did my hear your friends of course. many,wis did say too including myself, on several locations, one should start by questioning one's assumptions. the united states has not embarked on a war on the islamic state. the islamic states and me are enemy are the shiite. so the united states is now for the third time in a row the

cloying its forces, summoning allies to fight an enemy. we did that and iraq with saddam. circumstancesth and now we're doing it for the third time. de there were is relentless. when these fighters entered yemen, the first thing they did they came out saying we have to become anti-american. that was their statement. >> the question that are becoming soon. >> are we questioning their assumptions or going right ahead with the notion. what i heard on the panel is, let's go right ahead and make the deal with iran. let us not question the assumption. let's of course try to enforce boots on the ground to fight against isis, which happens to be the enemy of around --

iran and to do so with allies such as turkey. 37 other thousand schools there. the question is, are we questioning the assumption? i think not. i think we ought to. theunited states -- american public has seen us intervene in the middle east again and again with very scant information, less information that i gather when choosing a hotel. >> as usual, provocative. more as ak of it comment and a question. the question is, who is we you don't i think some of us up here are prepared to question assumptions.

tom my point i was trying take a different view of the landscape of the reason -- region and shape policies in light of that. one i was trying to suggest was landscape.-shiite quite the contrary. that you look at it from who are the radical us or extremists be is? who are on both sides and build the policies toward competing with them. you should be trying to youngthen those who help reestablish order without losing sight of the fact that you have to recognize there is a tension between interest and values. if you do not have some security to start with, you will not be able to promote them fairly later on. much agree with that. i think we should not the lining up against any again shiite.

i think we too often referred to that. i have never forgotten secretary baker and his first visit to the middle east. when he met with the foreign minister and ambassador to of a secondnd kind foreign minister, the two of them spent the entire meeting saying the worst thing you could do is to leave saddam hussein in power. you should support the shiite. we are not afraid of them. -- andid they did not they fought loyally for a bloody war. unfortunately when the chance came for the saudi's to support a new iraq and -- what they did was to impose sunni domination. inevitable in saudi arabia, but i would not give

them the influence and bike that that would count the the influence in baghdad. they basically walked away from iraq at the time when they could have done some good there. that is an example of working across the divide with people who share our interest, if not our values. >> one last question. >> thank you for a really interesting discussion. to probe more on the divide you perceive over ironic popular. iran politics. we have seen high-level meetings now.

we have a team in place that has had reconciliation in the past. is it possible to have a nuclear deal and the islamic state? it, would say i would test and that was my point. i know with the instincts are, out we need to know has something changed in terms of how they look at things? a they have, you are in different place. if they have not, you will have to figure out how they manage that. add one thought to that. i do not think a nuclear deal makes them our friends or their friends at all. what it certainly does do is it legitimacy to the government, which, as you know, is in a very dicey position

right now. ability to interact with the saudi's will be greater if they can deliver a deal and substantially less if they cannot. >> with that, i am afraid we are running out of time. secretary burns schedule is quite tight. ask you toou, can i grab a drink and a box lunch and get back to your seat and we will start promptly. [applause] >> on monday, we will hear more about foreign policy in the elsewhere from bobby jindal of louisiana. he will speak on the issue of the american enterprise institute in washington. that is live monday at 11:00 eastern on c-span. that same