Transcript
MR. JAMES M. LINDSAY: In today's briefing we want to concentrate on how we got to a point that seemed unimaginable two weeks ago. Two weeks ago we were all focused on how the war plan was going badly. There was a lot of criticism of the Administration planning for the war, talk about perhaps falling into a quagmire. Yesterday we saw U.S. troops go into Baghdad, the tearing down of the statue of Mr. Hussein in central Baghdad. To explore how we got to this point and what are the consequences of winning the Iraq war we have my colleague Ken Pollack, Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies program here at Brookings and Research Director for the Saban Center on the Middle East. We will be joined shortly by my colleague Michael O'Hanlon, Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies program. I believe Mike is unfortunately stuck somewhere in traffic between Capitol Hill and here.
We are also fortunate to have some people from outside Brookings join us. We have to my immediate right James Dobbins, a career Foreign Service officer and currently the Director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at RAND. But much more important, he was the U.S. Special Envoy to Somalia, Haiti, Kosovo, and Afghanistan. Jim is a man -- and Bosnia. I always seem to forget one. Basically, if we wanted to go out and fix something, Jim was the man we sent. We're very fortunate to have him here today.
We are also joined by Shlomo Yanai who is a Major General Retired from the Israeli Defense Forces. He is here in residence at the Saban Center, and he among other things in the Israeli military dealt with issues of strategic planning and we're going to draw on his expertise about looking forward as to the consequences of the war in Iraq.
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