 Hello, and welcome to the Crisis in Iraq program here at New America. My name is Fuzz Hogan, managing editor here at New America. I have not been to Iraq, but I have spent enough time at CNN to have served there during both Iraq wars, from the safety of New German Atlanta. I also, for a time, in the early 2000s, oversaw the investigation in Al Qaeda for CNN. I'm familiar from the days when Zarkawi was the connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq. We have the best panel of experts we think are available on this topic, very important challenge confronting the White House, although the president's made his big decision, but there's still clearly more to talk about and more to think about and more to sort of worry about. So we have this great panel, and we are ready to have that conversation. Just one note, this is being live streamed, so please when we get the Q&A, which we will get to, wait for the microphone, very nice person on the microphone, and we'll call on you, and please wait for a second for that microphone to get in your hands. We will start with some opening statements. I'll ask a few questions, and then come to the audience. We're on social media, at NatSecNAF, N-A-T-S-E-C-N-A-F, Twitter, the hashtag is crisis in Iraq. So to our panelists, turn your phone off. Yeah, please turn your phone, it's just done. Thanks. While Nadia is walking, I'll introduce Doug Olavant, a senior national security fellow here at New America. We're very proud, by the way, all the folks in the panel are fellows here at New America. Retired Army officer, last assignment in government was as director for Iraq at the National Security Council during both the Bush and Obama administrations. Recently spent one year in Afghanistan as senior counter insurgency advisor to the commander, regional command east. Now, the senior vice president at Mantid International, LLC, global strategic consulting firm with offices here, Beirut, and Baghdad. Nadia Owaitath is a non-residential fellow here in New America, interests in the challenges to political Islam within Islam itself. Holds a defil and oriental studies with a focus on contemporary Arab Islamic thought, Islamic thought from the University of Oxford. Prior to that, she worked as a research associate at RAND, led several research projects, including an analysis of Arab cultural material promoting critical thinking and obstacles to dissemination. She was just giving us a pretty cool window in to be bag daddy, wiki bag daddy weeks. That was pretty cool. Right now, we're conducting research on internet trends among Arab youth and browsing websites and forums that enjoy a large online following. Chris Fussell, making his first public event after serving in government, is also a senior fellow with this national security program here in New America. Spent 15 years as an officer in the Navy SEAL teams, recently transitioned in the private sector, now a partner at the McChrystal group. During his active duty career, he deployed multiple times to Iraq, Afghanistan, and other nations in the Central Afghan region. From 2007 to 2008, served as an aid to camp to General McChrystal, who was then commanding general of the Joint Special Operations Command. So like I said, I'll give each of them 10 minutes to sort of give us what they think we should be thinking or what the President should be thinking or any policymaker should be thinking as they approach this crisis. I will start with Doug. Thanks very much, Fus. What a difference a month makes. I was at an event on Iraq just a month ago on government formation at another think tank that will let me be nameless. And we couldn't get a quorum, so we had to bring in interns to fill the room. So it's nice to see that Iraq is once again topical. Just a quick disclaimer. As Fus said, in addition to being a national security fellow here, I am a managing partner at The United States Command to the International. We have offices in Baghdad. My partners were in Baghdad and Karbala this week. So I do have financial interest in the region. I think right now in Iraq, we're faced with two crises, and they are distinct but overlapping. We first have a crisis with ISIS or ISIL or DASH, whichever term you prefer. These are all interchangeable for the same organization. This is a unique evolution and phenomenon in global jihadism. The old, it grows out of the old al-Qaeda in Iraq, which was also called the Islamic State in Iraq. But when Chris and I fought against it in 2006, 2007, the Islamic State in Iraq was kind of a joke. It was the political wing of AQI. It didn't control any territory. Certainly what little pockets it had were not contiguous. If you found these fighters of al-Qaeda in Iraq and got them in a firefight, they would die. They were great terrorists. They were great bomb makers. They were great kidnappers. They were lousy lying infantry, and you could kill them, and they would die. The organization that grew out of al-Qaeda in Iraq, moved to Syria, became the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria under a new leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and has been truly transformed by the fighting in Syria. Not only in the quality of its people, as I like to say kind of flippantly, they've been fighting against Hezbollah now in Syria for two years. If you fight Hezbollah for two years, you either die, or you get really, really well educated. They've gotten very well educated. They are much better fighters and are now considered the equivalent of the Iraqi special forces, which is the best-trained unit that we left in Iraq. They're a serious fighting force, and as we've seen over the last week, they can fight as an army. But more importantly, they hold territory. The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria is no longer just a name. It's a thing. It is a de facto, if unrecognized nation state on the ground. It has borders, fuzzy borders, but it has borders. It has political control. It runs courts. It polices. It provides somewhat limited services, most certainly has an army. It has a flag. It's a political entity. So I would say with ISIS, we are no longer faced with a safe haven in a weak state, like we saw in Afghanistan. We instead now have a weak state that is a safe haven. This is something different and new. So as I say, even if tomorrow Iraq turned into Switzerland with all its issues went away and it had a first tier army that could totally and utterly push ISIL out of Iraq, and there was no ideological appeal for ISIS inside Iraq at all, it would still be an issue. In Syria, it has made clear its desire to push into Jordan and Lebanon and Israel. The S in ISIS stands for Greater Syria or the Sham, of which all three of those states are apart. So totally independent of Iraq, ISIS or ISIL is a problem that we need to deal with. Well, then we come to Iraq. Iraq has utterly dysfunctional politics, as we've now seen over the last week. This makes them particularly vulnerable to ISIS. ISIL, as again, we saw through their rather incredible movement through Mosul and pushing down south in the last week. It is easy to blame Prime Minister Maliki for the political dysfunction, and certainly he is a part of it. But I think there is plenty of blame to go around. All parties in Iraq have contributed to the dysfunctional politics. As I've said a couple times in print, if Nuri al-Maliki is no Nelson Mandela, this is in some part because there is no equivalent of a declerk on the Sunni side to come to him and settle the differences that still remain for the old regime. There's no leader on the Sunni side who is willing to come and say, yes, we're a minority. Yes, we were somewhat complicit in the crimes of the old regime. Yes, our group is never going to rule again. We have to decisively reject the Bath Party, Islamic extremism, and violence, and figure out how to live as Iraqi citizens while explicitly demanding our rights as a minority group of Iraqi citizens inside Iraq. That leader is not there. Nor, to be honest, have the Kurds been totally helpful in this. They have their own agenda. There are certainly personal grievances between Prime Minister Barzani of the Kurdish regional government and Prime Minister Maliki that do not help the personal conflict between these two leaders has exacerbated the institutional tensions that are below them. But the bottom line is there's a very difficult politics in Iraq. There's an incredibly high degree of difficulty. The issues that separate the three groups inside Iraq, which is not to say that there are fuzzy borders between these groups, and there are lots of differences between these groups. And just to say, Shia Sunni and Kurd is to smooth over a whole host of differences. As the current ambassador to Iraq likes to say, he's a Shia Kurd who's a member of the ruling Dawey party. What does that make him? So there are blurry boundaries. But we can still, in the main, talk about the three groups. The politics between them are totally dysfunctional, and it's not clear how that gets fixed. So what does this mean for US policy? Again, we have two problems we're facing. Again, as I said, elsewhere publicly, I think while there is lots of blame be given to the administration for their neglect of Iraq over the last six years, since this crisis came about, I think it's been handled actually pretty well. The President's speech yesterday was very, very prudent, I thought. In essence, he didn't make a decision, which is exactly the right choice. Don't make a decision until you have to. The President came out and said, I'm going to send some advisors into the country, essentially to give us better situational awareness. They're only going to go down to brigade headquarters, so they will not be at any significant risk. Brigade headquarters set in office is not unlike the one that we're sitting in here. They're not going to be out forward in the field where they're in danger of being shot or captured. But they're still close enough to the action that they're talking on the radio to the guy who's out front seeing it. So they're only one person removed from having a real field for what's going on in the battlefield. That'll give us a much better situational awareness. In the meantime, the President has increased the airborne intelligence and surveillance that we're putting over the battlefield. I suspect that's everything from drones to spy planes to changing some satellite orbits to get better situational awareness. Let us know exactly what's going on so that when and if the President decides that this first problem set, which is ISIS needs to be dealt with, he has both better situational awareness and the resources at hand to deal with it. I think that's very, very prudent. Then we're going to have to deal with the politics. In a perfect world, we could deal with the politics first and then worry about the military solution. Unfortunately, temporarily, they're going to be presented to us in the opposite way. The fight between the Iraqi government and ISIS around Baghdad looks like it's going to happen somewhere in the next one to 10 days. Iraqi politics moves very, very slowly. This crisis happened in Iraq in the middle of government formation after that election. And I suspect that's no accident. And government formation in Iraq, if it were to move at light speed, would take 45 to 60 days. 60 to 120 days is probably a more realistic window. So even there was no way to resolve Iraq's political crisis in the near term. It's going to unfold through the government formation process, through the elected parliamentary members that were recently elected in what are universally regarded as free and fair elections in Iraq. That's how that will be broken out. It remains unclear if Nuriel Maliki will remain a prime minister or not. As the president said, that's for the Iraqis to decide. He does have a privileged place, not only as the incumbent, but as the leader of the party that did extremely well in the last elections. So we will see how that unfolds, but that process is up to them. So again, I think the president has done more or less the right thing, putting us in a position to deal with the immediate crisis, the fight against ISIS just north of Baghdad, while making it very, very clear that the political is the key fight. It needs to happen, but that's going to unfold on a slower timeline. Again, probably at least 60 days before we see a new government. And that would be a very rapid government formation given the constitutional provisions of the Iraqi Constitution. I think I'll stop there. Thanks, Doug. So we can zoom in or zoom out. And I'm going to zoom in first to the battle, Chris. I was hoping to cheer the room up a little bit, but Doug's brought us all down. That's OK. No, I think Doug lays out a great case. I'd like to say the clear solution to all that is send in 200 special operators, and they'll seize the day and take care of everything. But I think that's clearly unrealistic. I will just offer some quick thoughts about the role and function of these forces we're sending in, where they cannot help the situation, and then perhaps what we can expect to see from them once they're on the ground, and some of the risks associated with that. I would first offer just taking it up a level. I feel there's an old saying in the military, fight from where you are, which is to say, if you get inserted on the wrong side of the mountain and immediately start getting shot at, it doesn't help to have a soldier run up to you and say, boy, we should be on the other side of the mountain. It's pretty obvious at that point. So this is one of those situations where we're on the side of the mountain. So we have to have deliberate conversations, I believe, from where we are, not looking back in this town, especially likes to look back rather than forward. So I think all productive conversations need to start from today. The more macro point that if I was one of those folks getting sent in, I would want to answer the question around the intent, the broader why of what we expect to get out of sending folks in. I agree with Doug that there is obviously a driver to do something at this point. I think it's important to the region. It's important to our position in the world. And obviously our history inside of Iraq. But do something is not a great mission statement. And to go forward with that on a piece of paper opens up a difficult can of worms potentially. And then you will create meaning once you're in the environment and sort of reverse engineer your purpose for being there, which is I always consider a dangerous approach. And one I believe hopefully learned from in the past. So that would be my desire if I was one of those folks looking to going forward was would be the first to answer that question. And we're getting closer. We know we don't want to see it devolve into civil war, but I'd argue we're pretty much there at this point. So I think there's some more detailed questions we need to answer before we look at a potential ramp up, which brings me into the discussion around the troops we're sending forward. So in these small pockets, as Doug said, these are relatively safe positions. You're gonna work inside of headquarters around the country, develop a better sense of what's going on the ground and be able to share that information with decision makers back here and any coalition partners that we're talking with. We've actually gotten quite good at that. We do it in several areas around the world regularly. But it runs the risk of misinterpreting what those troops will be able to accomplish out of the gates and will be potentially create additive pressure. Well, now that we have troops in there, why aren't we seeing certain types of momentum? So when it comes to momentum, what can we expect from small forces that we send in? The most important, obviously, is the intelligence gathering. We can circle back to that a bit later. The other big one that's out there being discussed right now is how do these troops involve themselves in forward air support, whether we put fixed wing manned aircraft overhead to support the Iraqi army, or we pull in a more aggressive drone campaign for unmanned vehicles. Both of those are radically different approaches. And there are constraints to what a force can actually do when they are sitting in the battalion headquarters level with those assets. We run the risk of misunderstanding what it means to actually call in fixed wing aircraft, frankly, that's a conversation between a person on the ground and a person in a cockpit. And there's not a magic button that we can hit to say, well, now we have four deployed operators sitting in battalion headquarters. We can now effectively use fixed wing aircraft. Especially given where the targets are situating themselves, right? That's right. And when it's a, there's also a buzz around ISIS presenting itself as a very conventional force, which is true, which is exactly what I would be doing if I was one of their advisors right now, because it's the easiest way to move troops and take territory very quickly and present as big of a presence to the population as you possibly can, which would be my goal right now if I were them. However, the instant you start aggressively going after that posture, it will change and they will integrate quickly into the population, which we've seen before and it can be done very quickly. So they don't have a long time to fight in that conventional manner. So that can bleed itself into the option of putting forces actually onto the ground, forward with Iraqi army. And we have to be very intentional about if that's a line we intend to cross at some point. Right now, the rhetoric is we will not. Sorry, dumb question. Has it ever happened that an Iraqi person on the ground has given intel we've used from the air? That's a complicated question. Yeah, cool. It's a very integrated sort of process, but then the drone war, the predator possibilities, of course, from an intelligence gathering perspective, you're gonna want as many as those assets in theaters you can if your job is to report back what's going on the ground. Just the imagery of what they can see as we've all seen ourselves can be very productive and you will have folks in an advisory position where they can quickly translate and interpret for the Iraqi army and central government folks that they're working with. If we go into a targeting sort of scenario, those are much different assets. You're looking at very pinpoint targeting, which, again, in different scenarios plays itself out differently. I think we run the risk of, as we've done many times in dealing with al-Qaeda or similar groups, we are a nice structured system. So we tend to look for the strongman inside of this group. In this case, it's Baghdadi, which obviously is a significant leader inside the organization with a great amount of respect and history inside the organization knows us well, having, we had him in detention for several years. But it's important to remember that the day after Zarkhari was removed from the battlefield, nothing changed. It's a loosely connected network and the longer Baghdadi has the chance to build ISIS into the same thing that AQI once was, the less impactful removing one or two key leaders is. The real degradation of AQI, which was a combination of a series of different organizations working together, was when the targeting was focused on the mid-level leadership and removing that swath from the battlefield, much more so than you'll never run out of aggressive young fighters. If you try to just remove senior leadership, it tends to just splinter the network. And so to focus on a mid-band level of leadership, you need forces on the ground that are operating at a very high tempo. So we need to be cautious in how much we think or allow our thinking to go along. The great man theory, remove a few people inside ISIS and it'll settle itself. And then the final thing I'd offer on these is all these bleed into sort of circling back to my first point. I would assume we can see a more aggressive posture around growth in troops, growth in posture and what we're willing to do on the ground there, which will be the natural sort of conversation that flows from- Growth of U.S. troops. Growth of U.S. troops potentially, right? Having folks on the ground, but being able to have a limited effect as the problem continues to increase, you may see a discussion around, well, if we had this one more authority what is the flowchart fork in terms of what would lead to that and what wouldn't lead to that? I think it'll be a political discussion. We're sending seasoned military advisors in that know how to read the situations they've been in there before. A lot of them will be probably unpacking their bags in the same place they lived a few years ago. So they'll offer best advice on how we can affect the situation. And I'll say, last time I needed these guys, why need these guys again? Yeah, and that's why I think it's all important to return back to the initial why statement because with a lack of a clear strategic intent, they'll offer best opinion on what they're seeing on the ground, which I clearly know where I would take that direction, was if we want to stave off the growth of ISIS, here's, I need more of this and more authorities. I added a question to my list at the end is what does victory look like? We'll get to that after we hear from Nadia. So I'm going to start with the big picture and then zoom into ISIS and their social media and their reaction to that social media. So first, to put this in perspective, you're talking about a region that has actually never until the Arab Spring seen a peaceful rotation of power. Usually how it happens is a sect, a family takes over by force and stays until somebody's stronger comes and replaces them. And there's no sharing power. Whoever is in power dictates. So Iran, for example, was Sunni until a monarch came and decided the whole population should be Shia to counter the Ottomans. So this is a region that really needs to learn what it means to share power, to be citizens of a nation. At the national level. At the national level, absolutely. So, and we think about it, the very concept of a nation state is new in Europe. It wasn't until the second, the first half of the 20th century that Europe really became comfortable writing constitutions and becoming nation states and geography of Europe looked very different only a hundred years ago. So the best service the U.S. could have done when they invaded Iraq was actually as much if not more than training the Iraqi army is to train the Iraqis on civic engagements and how to share power, how to be, what it means to have real citizenship and equality, which is really alien to much of the Arab world. In my own household, there's no way my brother can accept we're equal. So the very concept of egalitarianism, citizenship, we're all equal in front of the state, that's something that needs to be taught and this is where the U.S. can really make a huge contribution. And if you look right now also on the ground, you have a region that is 80% under 40 and 70% under 30, mostly unmarried. These young people want change, they want modernity, which is why the Arab Spring was peaceful, was inclusive, was egalitarian and the demands of the revolutions were Madaniya, civilian, which is as really as close as you can come in our culture to saying we don't want religion to be part of the state. It's legal, it's civic society. So if you take this into consideration and you zoom into Iraq, you have a government that is very much part of the problem. You cannot, Iraqi, the Maliki's government has managed to do the impossible. It has managed not only to alienate the Sunni population, it has managed to have a Zarqawi-like figure, Baghdadi, a Saddam-like figure, a former Bahtist general, a Duri, Sufis, all aligned against Al-Qaeda's, and this is why this territory grab was successful because this is how strongly all these groups that are sworn enemies feel against Maliki and his policies and his government. So I feel like if the US wanted truly to have a solution, I would think the first thing is Maliki has to resign a new prime minister to show good faith to all these different groups that are Iraqi that have been disenfranchised since Maliki came into power and new leader to show faith that there's truly a will to cooperate, a will to come to an agreement and to share power peacefully. So looking at ISIS, you know there has been, I wanna start by debunking a myth that Al-Qaeda actually disavowed ISIS because they were too violent for Al-Qaeda. I mean, killing is killing. Al-Qaeda had no problem killing thousands of civilians unarmed, in a plane, so that's silly. It wasn't that at all actually and we know that because not only because it makes no sense at all but because also the alliance that Al-Qaeda, that ISIS has is so fragile in fact because you have people with such different backgrounds, again, Bathis, Sufis, hardcore militants aligning together just to, because of their grievances against Maliki's policies. But if Maliki's, they are not natural allies by any stretch of the imagination. So if you take this alliance already, there's somebody from within leaking all their secrets. It's called Wiki Baghdadi, we don't know who he is but he's been really instrumental in divulging a lot of names, a lot of details. For example, he divulged how it came about that ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra, which is the Al-Qaeda affiliated group, became enemies. So Baghdadi, apparently somebody with a huge ego wanted Jabhat al-Nusra to not only pledge allegiance but to dissolve themselves, hand over their weapons and or else be killed. Of course they said, whoa, actually no, we have a lot of popularity, we don't wanna dissolve ourselves. So then he formed units to actually assassinate all of Al-Qaeda. So this is how much there is zero tolerance for dissent from within that organization. Now when your alliance is made of such contradictory backgrounds, you don't have loyalty. Loyalty is built through short time and short experiences. So this loyalty does not exist so it's very easy to get to dissent from within such an alliance. And I went to address also the social media like, oh they're using social media, oh my God. The thing is, Islamists in general, militant, peaceful, political Islam, they have actually been on top of media. In fact, the Arab internet a few years ago when I was doing research on counterterrorism, you couldn't find a liberal website. It was 100% practically Wahhabi, Islamist, milit, that's the only content you have. But the new development, the exciting new development that is totally under the radar is that liberal content is competing with such content. Oh, and it is winning big time. So if you look, for example, at this 80% how they use the internet, what is the most popular, the most watched, 10 YouTube channels? It's all, all 10 of them, equivalent of John Stuart's of the Arab world. All of them in Jordan, in Saudi, in Egypt. And so what's popular among the youth is somebody who makes fun of the authority, political, religious, social. This is the 80% that we should not forget. This is our future ally. This is when in order to prevent this from happening 10 or five or even two years from happening, this is the audience that you need to be dealing with, the 80% that wants exactly what America has. So if you look at the top 10 Facebook pages or even 150, you'd be shocked. You know, it's National Geographic Abu Dhabi is among the top five. Number one is educate yourself. Number two is a Facebook that follows Hollywood movies and stars and so it's important to keep that in mind. And finally, because again, there's no loyalty in such an alliance that is formed so rapidly. They are actually dependent on social media to attract recruits because their violence is not making them popular in the airboat. You can scare somebody to death. That's not actually very hard to do. But to get their loyalty and allegiance and wanting them to work with you, that's a whole different story. So because they're depending on social media, the people they attract are simply blood thirsty individuals who are, they find it attractive that you kill elderly people or teenagers. I watched an hour video of ISIS. The whole video is just killing unarmed people. Everybody in the video who was killed, this is not heroism. That is horrific. So whoever is thinking, whoa, I wanna join them. That's whether it's somebody in Europe or America or I mean, that's somebody who gets just as equally turned on by Hollywood violence. So, but the wider context of the Arab world, it was actually Al-Qaeda, their brutality caused the Sahwa Councils first and it will cause, I mean, it continues to cause, it caused a whole wave of theologians for Al-Qaeda to recant. And it's inevitable that very propaganda they used to supposedly attract more recruits will cause them to have another wave of repulsion and that much stronger feelings that this is something we need to tackle as a culture, as a religion. Et cetera. Thank you very much. I'll get to all these questions in just a moment. I've got a few there that A, come up with headlines and B, come up with what you guys said. Starting with Doug, the topic on many analyst minds is Iran. And if you start with the now, like what Iran's role is as far as you understand it now and the ideal, right? What it should be and say, what it ought to be in 2030. What is it now? What is the best way to manage it to the ideal? Well, that's a huge topic I really don't have time to deal with, where should Iran be in 30 years? Briefly, where should it be in 30 years? Iran is an incredibly dynamic, old-respected culture. It's the relationship to Iraq. And the rest of Iraq. Well, Iraq and Iran are gonna share a border in perpetuity. So they have to learn to get along with each other and there's influence that goes over both sides of the border. In the immediate term, we're in a very interesting place where our interests in Iraq are not significantly different than Iran's. Iran wants Iraq to stay together. The last thing Iran needs is an unstable border right now. It's very vested in stability. It's very interested in perpetuating a Shia-dominated government. And given that our interest is in perpetuating democracy and the Shia are 60%, there's at least loose overlap between our goals with respect to the government. So it'll be very interesting to watch how, obviously how that unfolds in the coming weeks. We are in an interesting place where it is not inconceivable that we'll have US aircraft providing de facto air support to IRGC units fighting against ISIS or ISIL in the coming weeks. That is not something that any of us would have suspected five or six years ago. That's the place where we are. This does go to show that our policy is largely dysfunctional in the whole region. ISIS is fighting in two countries, in Syria and in Iraq. Iran is fighting them in both of those countries, in Syria and Iraq. In Iraq, as I said, it looks like we're about to enter a de facto alliance with Iran against ISIS. While in Syria, we are arming the people who are fighting against the Iranians, and it's very muddled and confused. I'm gonna get to how to define victory, but to that point, what does the day after look like when we're sitting across it? We've been working with Iran for all this time, and then we achieve the victory wherever that is, like what's the next day look like with us in Iran? If I knew that, I'd be Secretary of State. No idea. Anything on that before I go to the next? You know, the geopolitics of the region is such an important point, because you have Saudi and Iran competing for power and backing their guys with weapons, with training. Again, if I may reference the wiki Baghdadi, there's a lot of reference to the hundreds of thousands allocated by Saudi officer to the media campaign of ISIS, and I mean, there's, and I'm sure on the Iranian side as well, so you have two powers that both wanting to enforce their power on the ground by their agents. However, I mean, the wise thing is to actually, just for them both to realize that none of them will win. It's not the old historic times, it is they have to learn to share power over Syria and over Iraq because the Sunnis are going nowhere and the Shiites are going nowhere, and we have to share the region peacefully. Raise the point, or any journalist out there, the story we're looking for is the propaganda chair of ISIS, who is that character and where they live and how are they pulling this off? Just offer one sort of broad thought on Iran, is from the day we entered the region across the border, started the war, however you want to look at it, they've, we have to understand their position. They've played to their own interest very effectively for a decade now, which is the same thing who would all do. So we have to accept that they have a keen perspective that has to be respected, whether you agree with it or not, that's been, we've seen it play out for years now. Possibly a segue, possibly not to my next question to you, Chris, is if our folks are just showing back up and trying to get their intel up and we have this challenge of getting to the end of this, who does have good intel now? Where are, where are we going to, if Doug has said that the calendars are ability to get there and doesn't match up with the need to act quickly, what are we going to do in the next few weeks? Yeah, just speaking broadly about intelligence, because it's a, let's round with a big buzzword, there's no golden binder anywhere in Iraq that has the intelligence. Intelligence is a collection of, think about it in your own personal life. It's understanding, it's understanding the individuals of groups, of communities, of how they interact with one another. You can't just follow someone for a day and understand them, you can't know their address and understand how they interact with their community. So that the levels at which you develop understanding, the deeper it is and the truer it is to the situation then on the military side, you use that understanding to gauge your actions and you can, in the best case scenario, you can pinpoint very effective actions and predict second and third order effects that will result from those. But that's a level of depth and understanding that takes in many cases years to develop. We do it through having forces on the ground that can get out and interact with the population. We do it with obviously intelligence services and assets, as Doug referenced earlier. We do it through host nation partnerships. So, fortunately, unfortunately, however you wanna look at it, the reality is we have a very much more current understanding of who the key players are inside the government and the understanding of how things tend to evolve inside of Iraq from our currency there. So we're not starting from ground zero as we were a few years ago. But that said, from where we are now, our best asset is going to be putting folks in there that can interact with really host nation leadership that we have to reform bonds with and trust and try to get their sense of what's going on inside the population. But you're gonna have a constraint on what our individuals can actually find out themselves because there's gonna be boundaries on where they can go inside the country as there should be. So the other thing you'd layer in is national assets that you can use to cross-reference understanding that you're getting from your partners and arguably develop a new sense of intelligence about what the organization is doing. But it's gonna be difficult and to develop a real true understanding of how the ISIS network is organized and how it's functioning and in a limited amount of time will be hard. And specifically target identification. I mean, that's a real challenge, right? As we talked about during when helping come in. Yeah, at a tactical level to develop a true understanding if you're talking about airstrikes. Again, as I said in my comments, it's difficult. You have to decide which types you want to do and to what effect. You're not going to solve this problem through a series of airstrikes. And as soon as you do that, the situation's gonna morph on the ground around that and adapt very quickly. So it's gonna be two or three chess moves trying to fight a remote war if that's what we want to go to. But I wouldn't name it. I think the third order effects of it are much worse than what you're gonna get out of it. Can I say something about the intelligence? You know, actually, they really provide their own, they provide us with intelligence in the sense that when you have an organization that is so authoritarian where any dissent is met by cutting your head immediately and there's a lot of revelation that this happened and oops, sorry, the wrong guy, no problem. You instill fear and then the only way you can criticize is actually through leaks. So while Baghdadi is a wiki, Baghdadi is the most famous, without even looking, I spotted a few others who are critiquing the various jihadi movements because there's no space where they can say, you know, sir, actually, well, we should not do this. Maybe, so because there's, again, there has not been space to create loyalty really. So they just go online because they think, oh, this is the only way I can really express how this is dangerous for the group and you have so many of them leaking their own secrets. So I'm gonna, let me just very quickly, I totally agree with Chris on the difficulty of fighting the network and the necessity of intelligence. I think we're at an interesting phase though where ISIL is presenting a non-network target. You know, if they are hiding in the shadows, again, and remaining kidnappers and saboteurs and terrorists, you know, Chris knows more about that than I ever will how difficult that is to untangle and find. We're now in a situation though where they're presenting us convoys with machine guns in the back and black flags flying. You know, you don't need the type of detailed intelligence that Chris is, you know, I don't need to know, you know, how he relates to this guy to bomb that truck. That's extraneous information. So we are in an interesting situation. Now, if we have success with that campaign, then they will almost certainly go back to the networked organization at which point it'll forgive them a very different problem again. Not a refer to this, and this is Peter's question. He's written about this a lot. It's imagined they, for whatever reason they have time, ISIS does, or ISIL, however you want to call them, to run a part of the country. They can they rule? This has been sort of over and over again, these types of groups. When they achieve whatever victory they achieve, they sooner or later screw it up. They can't, as Peter said, they can't help themselves but manage the territory badly. Do we all think that's likely to happen if they ever get enough time to? Absolutely. I think they can terrorize, but they cannot rule. And the reason why they even have an alliance in the first place with the tribes, with the Bathis, with the Sufis, is the grievances that have not been met through a legitimate government. So if we were to help the Iraqi people by instilling a government that is not secretarian, a more Nelson Mandela-like government, that is 90% of the solution, in my opinion. We have no sense that they've learned these lessons from Mali and Afghanistan. The analogy, they're the frog in the scorpion. The scorpion is always gonna bite the frog in the middle of the river, even though he drowns himself. It would be tactically so much smarter for ISIS to show its kinder, gentler side in the way it rules. It's ideologically incapable of that. That's their entire raison d'etre. If they didn't do that, they would not have what legitimacy they have as a Islamist group setting up the caliphate. What's the point of wanting to set up the caliphate if when you set it up, it's not very caliphate-like? I also think we're hearing reassuring noises, at least from Nadia, that this has been the old saw, the regional conflagration, the world's scariest flowchart. This begets another fight in the everybody-in-the-pool scenario that everyone from the region jumps in or this explodes out. I remember Macedonia was the first time I started hearing that talk in the mid-90s that Greece was gonna jump in and next thing you know, they got a whole World War III. That sounds like that's not gonna happen here because it's contained for various sets of reasons. Is that valid or should we worry that this will spill out of where it's now? I'm very concerned about it continuing to morph. I'm very concerned about Jordan. I'm very concerned about Iraqi Kurdistan. I think those are the next two logical places for ISIS to attempt to flow. It'll be very, but it'll all depend on how the next couple of weeks play out and are they able to hold this terrain? So we've got a lot of situations still to happen, but for this to continue, even if they're pushed back slightly in Iraq, I would not want to be around Kirkuk and to me Jordan, given all it's, it's not like it had a lot of stability to spare at the start and now all the Syrian refugees who are there are making that a very, it's a tinder box, I think, waiting for something. I do think it has a huge potential for exacerbation. So for example, one of the points of contingence between al-Qaeda and ISIS is that ISIS ordered supposedly a suicide attack in Turkey and Jobhat Nasser said, well, Turkey is not an important target now and they're Muslims anyway, and they're helping the Syrians. The Syrians would not accept an attack on Turkey and this is one reason why Baghdadi wanted to assassinate all the leadership and members who do not comply among Jobhat Nasser, which is affiliated with al-Qaeda. So it has a huge potential for spelling over other countries and there's already, I mean, like Doug said, there's so many issues, the refugees that can really, really exacerbate the problem. I would just offer it, I think, it's hard to make a judgment about the violence spilling out, that's very unpredictable in my opinion, but I think we're certainly looking at the, I think to Nadi's earlier point, the very severe degradation of the world's first effort to sort of implant the nation state structure in that part of the world and this is flawed going back decades and now it's really bubbling up as a result of the events of the last decade as to the feralties inside of it. So I think that trend will continue and it's very dangerous. Gristang, with you, how do we partner, this is Peter's question as well, how do we partner within and build effective armies? Is there a lesson from, is this, are we getting better at that? Yeah, I mean, that's the question. Have we done it? Can it be done? It's still, it's an open-ended question and it's a big policy decision on how you're gonna disperse your forces around the world. We've seen it done arguably successfully in maybe places like Yemen, but a lot of the program's going on in Africa now, but there's a very integrated relationship with the United States in places like that. So when they're left alone, this is our most recent and powerful example of what may or may not unfold. I think the lesson from at least what's happened to date in Iraq is less around the capability of the military that didn't turn and walk away because they didn't have the firepower of the forces or the training and it was much more of a social divide. When you're, if you're a soldier stuck in a completely alienated part of the country who has every reason to be unhappy with the way they're being governed and you see the berms literally just being torn down and what is your drive to stay and fight for that part of the country that obviously has a justified social reason to be very discontent with the central leadership. So again, to Nadia's overall point about social structures, armies are an extension of that whether interior, exterior, whatever you're trying to accomplish with them. If the imbalance inside is completely off kilter, then trying to bandate it with a highly trained army eventually will not play out. And I think also that the police have an important role to play at the local level. And if there is no, again, no civic engagement, no education for citizenship, for transparency, no building of institutions, this cannot happen with an army. It's not an army, it's not a forest thing. Forest, whether by Maliki or by ISIS, is not gonna achieve long lasting stability or prosperity for Iraq. Great, one last targeted question and then a big question. The oil field, Bajid, is that, what is the status now as far as you understand it and can they actually do anything with it? I mean, what would they be able to, what advantage would they get other than a propaganda win? Facts are in short supply, as to exactly what's going on in Bajid. So we've heard everything from the government totally has control, to the insurgents totally have control and everything in between. So I think it's safest to say it's being contested and who actually controls it is not clear right now. The effect of it, that the Bajid refinery has nothing zero to do with Iraq's oil exports. The Bajid is all about Iraq's internal economy. That's where the oil is taken and refined. It provides the gasoline, the heating oil, the LPG that people use for cooking. It's all about the internal economy and largely for north of Baghdad, for the areas that are currently being contested. So perversely, if this goes out of function, all this is going to do is cause more suffering for the people that are in the areas that are suffering most. Goes their ability to leave. Right, this will not affect the Kurds in northeast who have a really great thing going. This will not affect the largely Shia population from Baghdad on South who also have a really good thing going. This will affect the range of ambar through Mosul through Saladin where all this is happening. So two last questions. What does victory look like, each of you? My opinion victory is the elimination of sectarianism and establishing a nation state in Iraq based on egalitarianism, sharing power and civic engagement with the government with no voting, no appointment of a president, vice president or I mean imagine in the U.S. if African-Americans can only vote for African-Americans and Irish-Americans can only vote for somebody who's an Irish-American. I mean it would not really lead to a democracy. So why do we think in Iraq or anywhere in the world this could be a working model? It has to be I'm a citizen, you're a citizen, we're equal in the law, whatever you want to believe is your business. So the best thing we could do victory is to be able to really share our experience with the Iraqi people. Yeah, it's a broad question so our broad answer would be social stability which I think supports at this point. We can engage for another 10 years militarily but until those underpinnings are in place it's gonna just continue. I'm gonna make Doug think of a shorter timeframe. What does victory look like in this potential conflict? What's the most we can hope for in terms of what happens to ISIS after the? Victory would look like ISIS being driven back to being the type of network that Chris was talking about for them to have to go back into the shadows and resume just their terrorist campaign. That, you know, pushing them out of that is a much, much longer term project. On the political side, it looks like all these leaders realizing that Iraq is about to go over the abyss and having that decisively change the way that they look at the problem set. But that will require reaching out by the majority. It will require an acceptance of minority status by the minority. It's gonna require, there are long ways apart and they're each gonna have to take steps towards each other while it's not gonna work. The last question, in a very crowded oval office there's a room full of advisors trying to get a word and edge with the president. He looks at you, you've got about 90 seconds to make your case. What are you telling him to do? I would say, if I was advising Baghdadi today, I would do everything I could to draw us into non-thoughtful airstrikes because that's gonna help my recruiting, it's gonna help my narrative about the far enemy returning to the region. And it's going to help, I probably built closer bonds with the population which ultimately is the core of the conflict like this. I think the first step would be to get on board another leader replacing Maliki who is more inclusive, who is more willing to share power and that would be a huge big step that something is really changing. As long as the face of the problem is leading, the very person who caused all these problems is in power, there's no way you can, it will take longer to break these alliances. Realize there are no good options. If you bomb, the Sunnis are gonna say at 2nd Fallujah all over again. If you don't bomb, the Shia are gonna say it's just like 1991 where you sat back and let us be slaughtered. There's gonna be no good narrative that's going to come of this and you have to accept that. Again, the military aims can help with the ISIL problem. They cannot help with the political problem at all and that's what needs to be focused. Focused US attention, maybe a special representative for Iraq and Syria. This is becoming to some extent one problem set. It would help to have someone to manage. I think we've got an interagency. We have one group of interagency people looking at Iraq and another looking at Syria and the crosstalk between them is fairly minimal I think, so trying to bridge that at the government level would be helpful, but patience. As a people, as Americans, we are impatient. This is not gonna get solved tomorrow, it's not gonna get solved next week and again, I think there's zero chance we're gonna see a change in government within 60 days at the soonest and that's if they really, really wanted to change, so patience. Great. I'm on it first then, next one. I wait for the microphone. We're just gonna come all the way from the back of the room I think. I'm on it. Hi, my name is Mohamed Najem from Social Media Exchange Beirut. I'm also a junk fellowship in New America Foundation. There was no mention today for internet which has been blocked since June 13 on and off and from June 15 it was officially blocked in five provinces and social media websites were totally blocked. People are using different kind of VPNs, ISIS, other kind of terrorists are accessing still the internet. The only people who are really affected are the netizens of Iraq and the government is doing this illegally. Is there any advice for giving it to them? Is there anything to push more framework of openness more? I think from the government's perspective, of course, is that this is the means that ISIS is using to communicate and it's blocking it, whether that is a good idea or a bad idea, that's their logic. I don't see that changing anytime soon. Would you have advised it? I'm sorry? Would you have advised that? No. Yeah. I'm sorry, back to Emily one more time. Hi there, my name is Tyler Thompson with United for Free Syria. I'm just wondering how beneficial is it to Maliki, the Iranian government and Assad in Syria that the face of the Sunni uprising in Iraq is ISIS at this point? I mean, it's not by design. Sorry, may I? Okay, no, yeah, yeah. And it's not by, I mean, this was not, if I get it right, you're saying that this is serving Maliki that the Sunni face is now ISIS. But if you are an Iraqi citizen caught between being killed by your own army or having somebody say to you, oh, we're gonna protect you. It's so, facts on the ground are dictating this and causing this. So it's Maliki's, if Maliki wants to spin it, it doesn't matter, just like, you know when Mubarak tied to the internet, when Mubarak to cover up his failed policies, wanted to cut the internet, it doesn't work. This has been in the works for years. So you can spell it or you want, you can try to, but at the end, propaganda can only work if it's really followed by actual decisions on the ground and actual policies. It's, let me, very quickly, it's not helpful at all. As you know, Assad has been saying since day one that he's fighting against terrorism. On day one, when he said that, that was not true. Today when he says that it's only a half lie. So this is certainly helping him. In Iraq, there's been now a conflation of ISIS and Sunni grievances. And I don't think this is at all helpful for the long-term problem. All of ISIS is Sunni, but by no means are all Sunni Isis. But that is the face that we're getting. And I think there are some people who are trying to make, well, this is a mass Sunni uprising. Well, there are a couple groups, and it's broader than we would like, and it's not just ISIS. But I don't think, the vast majority of Iraqi Sunnis want to live peaceful lives and raise children and tend their gardens. This is, I don't think this is a mass uprising, but I mean, it's bigger than ISIS, but the fact that ISIS is the face of it is not helpful at all. Thank you. Sameer Sumida, the former ambassador of Iraq to the United States. Thank you for the presentation, but I just wanted to inject a little bit of nuance into this sort of binary representation of a very complex problem. I know you looked at it from so many different angles. Iraq faces two, a fork in the road, basically. And this is very relevant to American policy towards Iraq. Either it disintegrates and breaks up into three components, at least, or it comes back together and forms, again, a national state. And the critical factor that will determine which way this is going to go is whether the next government that's formed is going to be an attempt to include everyone and make them feel part of the country. I'm sorry, but I disagree that it is only ISIS that has suddenly swept through the country and controlled all this territory. I know, I have relatives there. They live there on the ground and I get telephone calls every day or internet when they could use it and now they've stopped internet, telling me that people are fed up to the teeth and anybody, anybody, ISIS, and they are saying that they will turn on ISIS when the time is right. They are talking about it already. So it is a bigger political problem. It is a conflict. Now, the way to go, I didn't hear any emphasis on the issue of sectarianism. Nadia highlighted aspects of that and that's the most important. If we say, okay, the Shi'ar majority, so they are going to rule anyway. Iran wants them to rule, so we have to go along with Iran, bomb the hell out of ISIS and anybody who opposes that and therefore we restore order. That's not restoring order. That's buying more trouble. The long term, the only way is to walk away from the agenda of sectarianism. Which Iran, by the way, is promoting because it's only devised to have influence in Iraq. It's major device to have influence in Iraq is through sectarianism. The less sectarian the country is, the less influence ISIS has and the less influence Iran has. I'd like you to comment on this specific thing, the specific point of sectarianism and the influence on American policy or the choices presented to American policy about which way to try and get the thing on the ground to move away from sectarianism or just back so-called elected government. Thank you. Nadia, you can talk about Iran. Great comment. Thank you for this contribution. It's so true. That's what in Iraq needs a non-secretarian leader and I wanna say how many Republican or Democratic states have somebody a mayor or who's from the opposite party. So it's not by default that if let the fittest run in Iraq, not whoever is Sunni or Sia, let the people choose because I dare say that the people themselves are not a secretarian. They want a national Iraq. It did exist. A national Iraq did exist. And actually a lot of people don't know that 48 out of the 50 who were on the cards that the US distributed were actually Sia. So there's a lot of inner marriages in Iraq and until the 2003 invasion, a lot of my friends didn't even know which of their parents are Sia or Sunni. So I think this is such an important point and it needs to be number one step to solving the solution is to have a leader who is non-secretarian. Sectarianism in Iraq is the problem. It comes from both sides. It's not simply the Iranians who are encouraging sectarianism. The Gulf states also have an interest in encouraging sectarianism. The Sunni citizens are clearly in the mass fed up with the current government. The significant part of the Sia citizens of Iraq have come to the conclusion that any time the Sunni citizens don't get their way, they're going to return to the bath party and or Islamism and send car bombs into East Baghdad. The entire situation is that there's a lack of trust on both sides and there's deep sectarianism on both sides and that's the problem. We have admittedly abuses by the central government in terms of mass roundups of Sunni citizens. On the other hand, the language that was used at the protest camps to describe Sia Iraqis was deeply racist. There's no other word for it, the equivalent of deeply racist terms. That has to be ratcheted down on both sides and as I keep saying, it's both sides have to take steps towards the center to move away from this else we are going to divide. And very quickly a word on division. I mean, any rational analysis is that Iraq needs to stay together. The, even the Kurds who may perhaps in their hearts want to secede, a independent Iraqi Kurdistan is landlocked. It becomes instantly a Turkish client state. If the Turks tell them that Kurdish oil is only worth $10 a barrel, they're gonna have no alternative to that because that's gonna be their sole means of export. So that is not a situation, they cannot speak as equals to Ankara, just or be. The Sunni areas are utterly impoverished. There's no significant resources in those areas. They would also be landlocked. It would be Jordan without a seaport or Somalia without a coast. A truly tragic situation. And by the way, the Kurds just moved into half their land, by the way. So that'll need to be settled out. And the Shia South would become what it's now, I think, largely falsely accused of being. I don't think Iraq is currently an Iranian client state where it reduced to just the southern provinces. There's no way it would be able to deal with Tehran as an equal and it would become an Iranian client state. So a division Iraq I think is tragic for all three major group. Thanks. Great, thanks, right there. Well, I would be first, a bit of history. If you look at Arab and Islamic history since the Prophet died, you always had people who believed in absurdities like Al-Qaeda, like ISIS. And those people who believed in absurdities commit atrocities. Now, from my perspective, the Iraqi people will not tolerate people of that elk. Now, ISIS has a big challenge. How will they pay the salaries of their people in Mosul, in Fallujah? You know, people eventually want to make a living. People want to send their kids to school. But groups like this are nourished when you have vacuums, when you have repression, when you have no inclusion. And therefore, if we want to have Iraq as a strong unified country, because I believe the Iraqis, all the Iraqis, are nationalists, they want a united Iraq, they want a strong Iraq, there has to be a political process. And maybe we should send Mr. Brahimi back to restart the reconciliation. Not just their tragically terrible management style, but also they have enough, they're spread pretty thin. And they really leave people behind and to actually manage anything in the world of the country. I mean, what is their post, what is their post-victory? I think it's very unclear what they have left behind. Who's managing these cities, how spread thin are they? Again, as I keep saying, facts are in really short supply as to what's going on in the North, which is why we need to figure out more very quickly. But we know they have a lot of money. They robbed one bank and got 400 million. That's just from one robbery. They have been collecting money from citizens. They have been, so they have plenty of cash from their agents. There's talk on the Baghdadi League, so reliable Saudi source. So that's the least of their problems, but they do have other challenges. I think Zarqawi faced the same issue, same population and same inability to really offer a better alternative. And his answer to that was, he certainly didn't think he was gonna be president of Iraq at any point. He knew his days were limited. He created enough violence and chaos inside of that situation to spur something that grew out of control. And so part of this has to consider is that the approach that's trying to take right now? That's a race against stability and chaos. Yeah, that's the question is chaos, I think of the revolutionary leaders throughout the time that always had something they wanted, Castro wanted Cuba, right? I mean, not to equate those two folks, but I don't get the sense that he has a, he's even articulated a goal, has he? A caliphate. A caliphate. Yes. Okay, yeah, that's true. Yeah, yeah. I think all these parts of Al-Qaeda indirectly promotes them. They love this attention. What you guys are talking about, when you look at the US media, like this is an ISIS show. And as the ambassador said, it's not truly an ISIS show. And there are tribes who are dissatisfied. There are nationalists who are dissatisfied. So, you know, it's a field day for them. I agree. It wasn't an Al-Qaeda show either, I completely agree. We lost the media spin on that one. There was a grouping of many disparate folks and opinions, everyone in the country, even at the peak of the war. Al-Qaeda globally is not a unified thing, but we put labels on it to try and understand it somewhat. And I think we're not giving enough credit to the important point of sectarianism and the importance of alliances, the importance of building different kinds of policies. That should be really the star and that should be the focus. Who can accomplish this? Who can unite the Iraqi people? We need to give just as much media coverage and thought to that idea. Sorry, moved back on the first row. Sorry, go ahead, the glasses, yeah. Hi there, my name's Aaron Gurley. I used to, I worked previously in the national security team for Center for American Progress. Now in New York I'm just an interested individual on the topic. My question is, what, could you speak a little more specifically about what the de facto relationship is between the US and Iran now? And is there a larger role for Turkey in all of this that has been discussed so far? Turkey? Well, I can jump in. Okay. I think Turkey can play a positive role. Clearly they are viewed as a possible leader. They were doing a lot of things before the Syrian revolution. How the US is gonna use its leverage with Turkey? It's quite unclear. I'm not aware that President Obama reached out or but the Iranian US alliance, it could not be at worst timing to be honest because it can easily be viewed as Sunni versus Shia and the US is shifting back to Shia enforcing the very secretarian virus that is killing Iraq. So I think it would be a blunder for us to want Iran to solve the Iraqi problem. I'm gonna go all the way back to that guy with the world's largest baffle. Thank you for your time, Rahim Rashidi from Kurdistan TV. My question is for Parnell. For sure, do you think is Iraq divided between Kurds, Shia, and Sunni? And what is Maliki's responsibility for this situation in Iraq? Thank you. Who is that to? The panel. Anyone here? Maliki's role in? Maliki bears the most responsibility because he's the prime minister but as I keep saying, I think all political lead, all the major political figures have been unhelpful. The one example I like to give is I think we had a moment last spring where we saw Maliki and Mootlock together bring forward a major debathification bill that would have made, I think major progress and would have been seen as a major reaching out to the Sunni community. The Shia parties to Maliki's right objected to that policy on policy grounds. They just had no interest in ending debathification and the other Sunni figures to Mootlock's right, so to speak, didn't want Mootlock and Maliki to get a political win and therefore that policy did not go forward. That would have ended debathification, put a grandfather clause on debathification, taken the bottom two, one or two levels, I forget which, off the debath list and even given pensions to the Saddam Fidyean. I think there's would have been a major confidence building measure for Iraq's Sunni citizens. Because of political wrangling that looks very familiar to those of us who watch Capitol Hill here, they just couldn't get this through. So all political figures in Iraq bear some responsibility for where we're at. Maliki most of all, because he's the prime minister, he's in the hot seat, the buck stops with him so to speak, but everyone as I keep saying needs to take steps back, move to the center and try to get us somewhere or we can work through this. I do think we run the risk of dangerously oversimplifying it by laying all blame on one individual. It's incredibly complex situation. So to Doug's point, it needs to look at a much broader scope as a restructure. And I think gathering from this, there's a natural division and it's a long-range goal to manage expectations within your own community about what victory looks like for them. But also this is one individual who is really major. I mean Mandela was one, so don't underestimate the power of one. He could have played that role. So I don't know, I think he really bears a lot of responsibility for what's happening. Tara. Hi, Tara Mallor with the New America Foundation Security Program and also with the Aspen Institute. I'm gonna steal Fuzz's formulation and if you were in the Oval Office with the president and he asked you, what are the biggest game changers even if they're low probability for a worst case scenario unraveling or a best case scenario unraveling, what do you think they are? And secondly, it seems like everything we've been discussing today, well I agree with a lot of what you said. It's so reminiscent of everything, I mean I worked on a rock 10 years ago and it's the same options, the same problems, the same discussions and the definition of insanity is talking about the same thing expecting a different result. And I was wondering, are there any out of the box? And I'm not saying I have a perfect answer either. Are there any out of the box ideas that have been floated around or that you've heard that might be something different rather than sort of reformulations of things that we were doing or saying or recommending 10 years ago? I'd offer it, it is eerily reminiscent obviously. I think a best case scenario is that, to earlier points, we see what happened in the first decade happen much faster where the citizenry immediately gets the buyer's remorse that I'm sure is out there and stands up and really engages against this problem themselves as I'm confident they will do it at a certain point. The question is, at what level do we engage to drive that? And I'm referring specifically to the awakening in that whole process that took place but took several years to get there. I think it's important to have in mind that Iraqis do not want ISIS to be their ruler. So the first thing, if there's one thing we could do is to actually rally around a different leader who can bring the country together. Game changer's done, out of the box. I'm gonna jump in with her. I think very approachable between the United States and Iran can be helpful. Now, obviously then the relationship with the Gulf States is gonna have to be very, very carefully managed. But I think bringing the United States reaching out to both sides, not being seen as being an ally of only the Sunni states in the region could significantly help move us to a, it's like we're not gonna move past it. Take baby steps towards a post-sectarian region. Yeah, right there. My name is Anthony. I'm with the NCUSAR, a National Council on US Arab Relations. My question is like, you talk basically about the airstrikes option and also reform the government. How about the containment? Like you work with basically Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries to contain this problem just like in Western Iraq so it doesn't spread out to like other parts of the region. I think it's important to think like that in parallel, but I think strictly containing the issue would leave a host of issues on the ground that we have some accountability to obviously given our own history and I think an obligation to engage against. I think we just have to be very thoughtful and deliberate on how we go about that. And also these countries have their own interests and they're not going to put them second of the US's interest. So if you take for example Saudi, most of the oil fields are in the shia segment of the country and if they give equal rights to shia or allow for shia empowerment, they may want to have their own independence also along with all the oil wealth. So they have their own interest and their interest dictates their actions. So we have to keep that in mind as we try to convince them to do what's in our interest. I think it's difficult to contain a problem that's so transnational. We know that in ISIS, while the bulk of ISIS is composed of Syrians and Iraqis, there are, we know there are, there are Chechens, there are Bosnians, there are Tunisians, there are Saudis. It's a, and for that matter, there are a lot of Europeans and even dozens or scores of Americans. So this is a larger transnational problem. It's kind of pulling all the jihadis into one place, which I think is perversely stabilizing for some people right now until they go home. So it's, I don't think this is a problem that lends itself to containment. I'm certainly open to thinking about the problem in different ways. I'm not convinced that's going to get us too much purchase. The camera. Yeah, and the guy standing next to the camera. Sorry. Hi, Mr. Bill, Mr. Rao. Does this work? Yep. Former assistant IG with a special IG for Iraq, former senior advisor in the AFPAC office of the Pentagon and a former senior advisor to governments in both Kabul and Baghdad. I have one observation and one question. First of all, I think, and this is in line somewhat with the young lady over here who spoke a moment ago, it's important to have a sense of history, particularly the last 10 or 12 years of this complex situation to make sure we don't make the same mistakes of which there were many and to understand our responsibilities as well as our national interests in the region. My question is, where is the sense of urgency? We've talked a lot about the long-term problems and the complexities. It's my understanding, this is based just on press reports, that ISIS has captured territory within 70 or 80 miles of Baghdad, captured massive amounts of arms and ammunition and maybe some heavy weapons thanks to the collapse of the Iraqi security forces. They seized almost $500 million from the Mosul branch of the central bank of Iraq. That funds a lot of activity for a long time, as well as social services. And it's my understanding, they are setting up social services, courts, intelligence services throughout the areas that they control. Where's the sense of urgency? This seems to me an impending disaster. Thanks. I don't think we have a sense of urgency and that's why I think the president has made exactly the right decision in letting the situation develop and gather more information. If ISIL were continuing to progress south towards Baghdad at the same speed they moved from Mosul to Crete, well, then we'd be in an entirely different situation. But it does not appear that Baghdad is in any imminent danger of falling. The heavy weapons that were captured, they're not gonna be able to use. If they have a tank, they'll shoot the rounds that are in it and then it'll break down and that won't impact. Now, the trucks that they've captured, the small arms that they've captured, that's real. They got a lot of money, but as our guests here in the front row pointed out, they also inherited a whole bunch of people. And if you're just having to pay your own salaries, half a billion dollars lasts a long time. If you have to finance the entire city of Mosul, I'm not sure that gets you through the next three weeks. So I don't think we need a sense of urgency. If Baghdad were about to fall, then yeah, we'd have a sense of urgency. Baghdad's not about to fall. We can take some time to let the situation develop. I disagree strongly. I don't think, even though ISIS only has 10 or 11,000 hardcore fighters, those numbers seem to be growing. Again, these are by press reports, by the hundreds if not thousands. The danger is not that they'll take Baghdad, even in the sense, the limited sense, that we took Baghdad in 2003 with about 10,000 troops in the city. The problem is that they'll create constant instability and we'll end up with Swiss cheese sovereignty. They won't be able to control and rule the country. They won't govern from Baghdad with a central government and an efficient administration. They'll just create a mess, a worse mess. So I think it's entirely inappropriate to say that we have time and there's no sense of urgency. Let me, I totally agree with everything you said, but that horse is out of the barn. This territory is held. If we go take it back, that would be, if the Iraqi government goes and takes it back, that's going to be ugly. So given the situation that we have right now, I think it's very prudent to take it very slowly and let this situation develop. I mean, they're not moving any further. They're not, you know, the Baiji refinery accepted, which is kind of an island in the middle of all the, one little island of government control, such as it is, again, facts are scarce, in the middle of all this territory that they've held, that aside, the lines seem pretty stable at the moment. I disagree strongly. I actually, I think there should be a huge sense of urgency because if you look at the narrative of all terrorist organizations, this is a victory for them. They should not be allowed to have. The narrative needs to say, think of a new recruits, think of young people who may want to join. Yeah, you held onto arms and then you were squashed and this is victory. So there needs to be an addressing of this problem ASAP. I think it is very urgent and every piece of land they own is a potential land to train, to even foreign fighters, to, so it's really, it needs to be tackled as a global problem, not an Iraq problem. I want Chris Goldin to have a question. I think you, look, I think we've learned some hard lessons about taking urgent action going back a decade. And that was it Prince Turkey Faisal said, I hope you're as deliberate in your way to throw off my rack as you were undelivered as your entry. And I think there's a key lesson there. And if we're, you know, I completely agree with the idea and the dangers there, but urgently do what? I think we urgently need to build coalitions, think about the end state we want to create and then take appropriate actions. I can urgently deploy thousands of forces. The question is what does that get us in the near term? Yeah, I guess the question is, is it the same as Zarkali? What's different? Can we learn lessons? Is the lessons from the Zarkali moment patient? It's certainly different. It's certainly different than Zarkali, but it's not different than it was 90 days ago. I mean, we have a difference of degree. The Islamic State and Iraq and Syria is bigger than it was 45 days ago, but it's not any different in kind. You know, the, yeah, now there are now safe havens in Mosul. There have been safe havens in Fallujah and Al-Rakha for a year now. It's bigger. It's on our screen now, but in terms of the danger that it presents to the West and the terms of the danger to the narrative, in terms of attracting the hottest recruits from around the world. It hasn't become instantly an exit threat. It's no different than it was 45 days ago. Yeah, up here. We have time for this and then one more question. How long with Phoenix Television? I, we, you talked about, you know, the political and social issues in Iraq and long-term solutions, but in the meantime, the U.S. is sending up to 300 troops to Iraq. So in the foreseeable future, in the next few weeks, how effectively do you think they can advise or they can help the Iraq force to, I don't know what to achieve, to push the ISIS back to the North or what they achieve, but how effective that the U.S. can help the Iraq force to stabilize the current situation? I think military aid by the U.S. cannot be effective unless it is simultaneously carried out with a political solution, unless two of them are at the same time replacing Maliki, getting a more progressive, more inclusive leader alongside training. There needs, they have to be happening simultaneously or else it's not gonna be effective, in my opinion. I would offer that same idea, but slightly off. I think the biggest risk is you can, these are good troops, they'll be able to show momentum depending on what assets are given and what sort of relationships they'll be able to create with the army. The risk is those wins allow the second more important narrative to fall to the wayside. And so both of them need equal attention in not only in closed door, but in the public sphere is if we're going to go in and create momentum, it needs to be in support of this sort of longer term stability. I think what we're seeing right now is a classic, what's called in the counterinsurgency world, a weak win, where you basically put your boot on their neck for many years and as soon as you move the boot, give it a year, two years, however many long it takes to reorganize and some sort of movement will re-engage. We'll let the big hand win the back. You win by being taller. Thomas Risberg from the Conversion Center for Policy Resolution. My question is, you said there's no non-sectarian leader that you can see. What about Ayat Alawi? And is he playing any role? Does he have credibility in the country? And then to the extent that there's a choice between democracy and sectarianism, do we have to start at least being open to the possibility of having a secular strongman? And that's what it needs. We never said there is no such a thing. We said we need to bring such a person. But we didn't say he doesn't exist. Of course he does. Iraq is actually one of the most secular countries in the Arab world. So compared to many other countries, they have much deeper roots in secularism. So that's, I know he must exist this later. Or she? Do you have any names? I don't. We have one sitting up in the front row, right? Yeah. On that note, thanks to Peter Bergen who sends his regards, and thanks to Bailey Cahall and a great team for doing this now. Thanks.