Leon Panetta

Well, you know, no one really knows what the ultimate result of that would be.

I mean, I happen to believe that we probably should have maintained a presence there because, frankly, we didn't know whether the Iraqi security force and the intelligence forces would, in fact, continue to move in the right direction to help protect their country.

And I think it would have been better to have been there and to put some pressure on them.

No?

Or they wouldn't give them... Prime Minister Maliki said, we need a SOFR agreement, which is a status of forces agreement to protect our troops.

And Maliki continued to resist it, said, you know, yeah, we should have you do this, but, you know, I'm not sure about the SOFR agreement.

I'm going to have to send it to the parliament.

And it was obvious that he continued to oppose it.

At the same time, you know, I think probably we could have...

With the leverage we had on him with military assistance, we probably could have pushed him a little more in the direction of providing that kind of relief.

He was playing the Shia game, which is basically, you know, I'm going to confront the Sunnis.

I would rather do it without the United States present.

I think what we, you know, what brought us there, and, you know, there are obviously a lot of questions about whether we should have gone into Iraq, whether we should have gone into Afghanistan.

Once we were there, the issue became, can we accomplish a mission of giving this country the ability to govern and secure themselves?

That became the mission.

And so, you know, we work with their security forces.

We work with their intelligence forces.

We establish some of the structures of government to give them a chance to operate.

But you're right.

I mean, these are tribal societies.