 So, I was the Middle East Bureau Chief for the New York Times from 1991 until 1995. I had covered the First Gulf War, had gone into quay with First Battalion, First Marines, and then stayed on after the war in the region, which meant that I covered the aftermath of the First Gulf War, including the work by the UN inspection teams as they found, monitored, and ultimately destroyed the chemical weapons stockpiles which Saddam Hussein had gathered and intended to use in the First Gulf War. I went into Kuwait with the Marine Corps and we found out subsequently that in the first trenches they were all reservists and the idea out of Baghdad was that they were going to drop chemical shells, artillery shells with chemical gas on their own positions because they knew where they were as soon as there was contact. But there was no radio communication, so when we overran those trenches, Baghdad didn't know we were there and those shells fortunately for all of us were not dropped. So that whole period, several years after the war, I monitored as a reporter the destruction of these stockpiles, which were quite successful and thorough, as well as the imposition of the sanctions. Now, I didn't support the sanctions against medical supplies which resulted in one million Iraqi dead children and this kind of stuff, nor a cleanse bombing in the south of Iraq. But the military sanctions degraded Iraqi military to such an extent that he couldn't get spare parts for his tanks. The regime was crumbling and so at the inception of George W. Bush's call to invade Iraq, I, who had been on the ground in Iraq, understood that Iraq was not a threat to us and not even a threat to its neighbors. Saddam Hussein had retreated into one of his many palaces. He was actually writing bizarre romance novels. His two heirs apparent, his sons, one of whom was very badly crippled in an assassination attempt. The whole regime was crumbling. The all of the arguments used to invade Iraq were utterly absurd and untrue and it was extremely difficult for those of us who had experience in the Middle East, especially those of us who were intimately familiar with the Iraqi situation to have a voice. The hysteria after 9-11 was such that those of us who spoke rationally and I would include all the Arabists, including the Arabists in the State Department, the CIA, all of us understood, but we were drowned out and not only that, we were ruthlessly attacked. I was booed off of commencement stage, my own employer, the New York Times issued me a formal written reprimand telling me to stop speaking out against the Iraq War for all of the disasters that has now become. So there was an inability on the part of a fear-induced propagandized public to hear and then even establishment organs worked overtime to try and silence those of us who spoke about the reality on the ground because we have to, I think, finally concede that the whole, all of the arguments used to invade Iraq were non-reality based. The argument, for instance, that Iraqis would greet us as liberators and the insurgency started almost immediately, of course, that the democracy would be implanted in Baghdad and spread outwards across the Middle East, that the oil revenues would pay for reconstruction. All of this could only be propagated by people like Rumsfeld, Pearl, these neocons who live in their own parallel universe, not by anybody, no matter what their political opinion, who actually had worked within the Middle East and within Iraq. So the war has been, I think, arguably the greatest strategic blunder in American history. It has destroyed Iraq as a unified country and it's never coming back. It has created failed states, both within Iraq, within Syria, within Libya and along with, of course, the horrific human suffering, the human cost of the war. And I would finally say that once you open that Pandora's box of war 15 years, once we go back to Afghanistan, kind of endless war, is that you no longer control those forces, they control you. So we, all of the original goals that we went into Iraq purportedly to defend have been upended. Iraq is now a Shia country allied with Iran. We are, in essence, working as Hezbollah fighters who are on the State Department terrorism list fight with Assad in Syria. We are acting as Assad. We wanted to overthrow Assad. We're acting as his Air Force. We're acting as Hezbollah's Air Force. We're acting in concert within the region, both within Afghanistan and Iraq because of Iran's long hostility with the Taliban. We're acting as a de facto ally of Iran. We have armed by funneling arms and weapons, especially along with our allies, the Qataris and the Saudis into Saudi Arabia. We have created these monsters called ISIS. As we just, if you go back to Afghanistan, created al-Qaeda. So all of these measures to speak and form and reshape a society through force have completely backfired, as they always do. And in fact, we, of course, have given rise to elements that speak the language we taught them, which is the language of violence. And that's how you get the terrorist attacks in France, the terrorist attacks in Belgium and eventually, although, of course, the number of passport holders within ISIS from the United States is within the hundreds. It's much smaller, so they're easier to monitor, which is why we've been able to prevent so far a major attack. But it's coming. It's coming. I mean, the inability to properly analyze what we've done and to confront the lies that were disseminated, not only by the power elites, but by the press, lies which large segments of the American population still ingest, makes it impossible to respond in a rational manner to what's happening in the Middle East, the heavy censorship of the violence, of the industrial violence that we visit through militarized drones, airstrikes, missile attacks, not to mention, you know, heavy artillery and tanks and everything else, has rendered us incapable of grasping why groups like ISIS or people in the Middle East respond the way they do. For instance, when they capture, capture the Jordanian Air Force pilot, they put them in a cage and they burned them alive, which, of course, is horrible and cruel and barbaric. And yet, day after day in cities like Rocco, we are incinerating through one thousand pound iron fragmentation bombs, entire families. What they did was a cruder version of what we do. Morally, it was no different. And until we grasp that reality, until we get past the jingoism, I mean, I don't have a TV, but I'll see it at the gym. And there was a report yesterday that these are just infomercials for the U.S. military. They were actually doing one on the spy plane, the U-2. I mean, it looked like a Pentagon. It looks like something you see at halftime at a football game. And that's not journalism. That's jingoistic advertising, which is so much of the corporate media has essentially surrendered to in the name of ratings and access. And I think that it is vitally important as we go forward to understand what we've done, understand who we are, take responsibility and have the moral fortitude to look closely at ourselves and ask questions about ourselves that the wider society isn't asking. If we don't do that, we're doomed. If we don't stand up and ask those difficult questions, then ultimately we are trapped within this kind of death spiral of violence because more violence is only going to create more chaos. And all you have to do is look at a map of the Middle East to see that that is what's happening. Somalia, Libya, Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria. And if we don't begin to recover a linguistic, a cultural and a religious literacy, if we don't begin to accept the consequences of our own actions, then this will, you know, this kind of endless war will not only spread in terms of the anarchic and and terroristic violence, and I would include the state, our own state terror, not only will it spread, but ultimately it's going to come back to affect even the domestic life of the United States itself.