Robert Pape

When we started out in 2004 and we had these more heavy-handed tactics, we were actually producing more terrorists than we were killing.

And back then in 2003 and 2004, that was the big issue I was engaged with, which is I want to kill terrorists.

I absolutely wanted to kill terrorists.

It's not that I want to let them off the hook.

I want to know how do I kill the current generation of terrorists without producing a second generation

That's even bigger.

And even Don Rumsfeld finally started to say, we're producing more terrorists than we're killing.

That's why we changed strategy, not just tactics, but we literally changed our approach and we ended up

defeating AQI, and we did this through a political strategy by empowering the Anbar Awakening, who were this 100,000 set of Sunni tribes that were numbering 100,000.

And we took a big risk here to get rid of AQI.

What did we do?

We gave them money.

We gave the Sunni tribes money, not AQI.

But when we gave the Sunni tribes money, this was a big risk because maybe they would turn their guns on us.

And I knew this up close and personal because in February 2007, even though I was a critic of the war here and I was saying we're doing so much wrong, I was invited to go to the 3rd Infantry Division in February 2007, speak to all 150 of their officers two weeks before they deployed to Baghdad.

Two weeks before they deployed.

Wow.

It was a two-hour briefing.

And they wanted to know, no kidding, how could they calm this thing down?

No politics were in the room there.