SPECIAL PRESENTATION “ASSESSING U.S. POLICY IN IRAQ AND THE MIDDLE EAST” WELCOME BY: MELODY BARNES, EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT FOR POLICY, CENTER FOR AMERICAN PROGRESS INCLUDING FEATURED REMARKS BY: CONGRESSWOMAN ELLEN TAUSCHER (D-CA) AND LUNCHEON KEYNOTE ADDRESS: CONGRESSMAN LEE HAMILTON (D-IN) 8:30 AM – 1:30 PM MONDAY, MARCH 19 TH , 2007 TRANSCRIPT PROVIDED BY DC TRANSCRIPTION & MEDIA REPURPOSING PANEL I: EXAMINING IRAQ'S IMPACT ON THE MIDDLE EAST AND REGIONAL DIPLOMACY MODERATOR: BRIAN KATULIS, SENIOR FELLOW, CENTER FOR AMERICAN PROGRESS SPEAKERS: JON ALTERMAN, DIRECTOR AND SENIOR FELLOW, MIDDLE EAST PROGRAM, CENTER FOR STRATEGIC AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES MARA RUDMAN, SENIOR FELLOW, CENTER FOR AMERICAN PROGRESS JUDITH YAPHE, DISTINGUISHED RESEARCH FELLOW, INSTITUTE FOR NATIONAL STRATEGIC STUDIES, NATIONAL DEFENSE UNIVERSITY PANEL II: U.S. MILITARY STRATEGY MODERATOR: PETER RUNDLET, VICE PRESIDENT AND MANAGING DIRECTOR FOR NATIONAL SECURITY, CENTER FOR AMERICAN PROGRESS SPEAKERS: KEN ADELMAN, FORMER U.S. AMBASSADOR TO THE UNITED NATIONS GENERAL JOHN M. KEANE, UNITED STATES ARMY, RETIRED, AND SENIOR MANAGING DIRECTOR AND CO- FOUNDER OF KEANE ADVISORS, LLC LAWRENCE KORB, SENIOR FELLOW, CENTER FOR AMERICAN PROGRESS, AND SENIOR ADVISER, CENTER FOR DEFENSE INFORMATION (Partial transcript follows.) MR. JOHN PODESTA: Congressman Hamilton is here and we’ll get started in just one minute, so if you please stay in your seats. Again, I want to thank this morning’s panelists and I want to thank Congresswoman Tauscher. We really appreciate her ideas and leadership in trying to change the current course of policy in Iraq. It’s now my great pleasure to introduce our luncheon keynote speaker, the Honorable Lee H. Hamilton. Congressman Hamilton is a preeminent voice on national security and defense issues and we’re honored to have him back here at CAP. I should note at the beginning that about half of our national security team was trained under – (laughs) – Congressman, Chairman, Vice Chairman Hamilton’s leadership and you trained them well, Mr. Hamilton. Congressman Hamilton served for 34 years as the United States congressman from Indiana. During his tenure, he served as the chairman and ranking member of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, now the Committee on International Relations, and chaired the Subcommittee on Europe and the Middle East from the early 1970s until 1993. Mr. Hamilton also served as the chairman of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Select Committee to Investigate Covert Arms Transactions with Iran, the so-called Iran-Contra Committee. Mr. Hamilton remains an active voice on matters of international relations and U.S. foreign policy. He served as a commissioner on the influential United States Commission on National Security in the 21 st Century, better knows as the Hart-Rudman Commission. He was also co-chair with Former Senator Howard Baker of the first Baker-Hamilton Commission which investigated security issues at Los Alamos. In December of 2002 he was appointed vice chair of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, better known as the 9/11 Commission. He is currently a board member of the 9/11 Public Discourse Project – the legacy organization of the 9/11 Commission – and he’s currently a member of the president’s Homeland Security Advisory Council. On March 15 th of last year, just a year ago – almost a year ago yesterday, I guess – a couple of days ago, Congress announced the formation of the Iraq Study Group organized by the United States Institute for Peace. Mr. Hamilton was named co-chair along with former Secretary of State James Baker of the Iraq Study Group. I think we thought when he retired that he was going to be in residence at the Smithsonian tower and have to take it a little easy, but I think every time our country has called, he has answered that call. Lee Hamilton is a national treasure. His distinguished service in government has been honored by numerous awards for his public service and promotion of human rights. I want to get you up here, so I’m not going to through them all, but his accomplishments are many and I want to get him up here so that he can make his opening remarks and then he’s agreed to take questions from the audience. Thank you. (Applause.) REP. LEE HAMILTON (D-IN) [Former Congressman]: Well, good afternoon to all of you. John, thank you very much for that gracious introduction. I’ve been looking over the schedule you’ve had here this morning and I’m not sure that I’m going to be able to add that much to it because you’ve had a very talented group of people already speak to you. Let me begin, then, right away with a few observations about Iraq. I suppose all of us would agree that there are no really satisfactory answers in Iraq and anything that is proposed, you can find plenty of things wrong with it. Four years after this war began, it is obvious to all of us that where we go from here is an exceedingly difficult task and indeed may be virtually impossible to fix it. The question in Iraq that has always been kind of uppermost in my mind has been whether the means that we employ can achieve the ends that we proclaim. If the consequences of failure are as dire as has been stated over and over and over again – the president’s word is “incalculable” – then the gap between the stakes and the effort is striking. The resources, the commitment, the competence that we have brought to match the urgency of averting incalculable catastrophe really do not match at all. I think that victory in Iraq will not come in any normal sense of the word. I do not think that Iraq will become a model of constitutional democracy. It is likely to remain violent and even chaotic for a number of years. But we do not want to see a partitioned state. We do not want to see an al Qaeda with a sanctuary. We do not want to see a country that is in thrall to Iran. We do not want Iraq to be hostile to our interests. So what we should strive for, it seems to me, is a stable region and a stable Iraq, and our overriding goal must be to find a responsible way to extricate American forces from Iraq, doing the best we can to contain the suffering of the people and emerge with the best achievable results for the protection of American interests in the region. Now, we’ve got a lot of resources that we’re putting into Iraq. With the right policies, the right implementation, and maybe a little luck, we can come out of this with some stability. On the Iraq Study Group, we tried very hard to find the right balance – the balance among American interests, among political realities in both Iraq and Washington, and a right balance with our ideals and, of course, our power. You cannot help but be struck by the uncertainties that dominate in this Iraq equation. One, obviously makes everybody very uneasy and that is the performance of the Maliki government or principally whether it can achieve national reconciliation. Secondly, the uncertainty of the performance of our own government whose record in Iraq has been marked by several years of astounding incompetency, and another uncertainty – our ability to build a political center supported in the region by so-called moderate Arab nations. We never anticipated in the Study Group that things would get better immediately if our recommendations were implemented or for that matter anybody else’s. We did think that what we said offered the best course of action to meet achievable goals in the United States. I’ll not go into our recommendations because I’m assuming all have all read very carefully that report, which is right up there for a couple of weeks with Harry Potter on the bestseller list. Now, the president has acknowledged the first chapter of the report. If the Study Group made any contribution, it was, I guess, in our assessment of the situation. If you look, for example, at the White House statements prior to the report, they were just unrelentingly optimistic. After the report, their tone changed dramatically and they basically agreed that the situation was dire and getting worse. So we had the surge of the 21,000 or maybe almost 30,000 troops to stabilize Baghdad. The president is pressuring the Malaki government to meet the benchmarks – I’ll have more to say about that in a moment – and he is balancing a more confrontational stance with Iran and Syria with a beginning, at least, of engagement. I think that the surge as a military approach needs a good bit of elaboration. What we really need in this area is not just a surge of the military, but you need a surge of the diplomacy and a surge of the economic reconstruction and a surge of the political efforts at national reconciliation. And what has been lacking and I think is still lacking is an integrated approach to dealing with the problems. In order to succeed in Iraq, you’re going to have to do a lot of things very well and do them very quickly. And there is a real question, frankly, on my mind whether the two principal governments involved can achieve that kind of effort. One of the things that has not been generally noted, I think, in the press is the whole question of sequencing. On the Iraq Study Group we took the view that you cannot separate the security and the political progress.