 Let me tell you right up front, I cannot come to this country without a sense of gratitude. I had the occasion to fight alongside your lads on more than one occasion. I would just tell you that when Sergeant Andy Russell of the Special Air Service Regiment was killed in action in February of 2002, that was your first of your troops lost. That was under the area I commanded. I would tell you that the Special Air Service Regiment took liberal poetic license with whether or not I commanded them in proper Australian independent ways and it was a wonderful relationship between us. But to lose him that early to a country as small as yours, the military as small as yours and the many since then, I also come here to pay my respects and I don't forget the debt that I owe you. I don't forget the debt my country owes you and we'll never forget those irredeemable debts. I thought what I would do here tonight because having served alongside people that served in the finest tradition from Braco-Marant to Gallipoli from North Africa to Long Tan and Vietnam, I wanted to just put in context the world situation as it is right now. That's what I was asked to talk about. And I would just tell you that 9-11 reminds us we all make our plans, especially you young students, and then along comes life, okay? Who would have thought that the ANZS treaty signed in 1951 when we were worried that somehow Australia could be vulnerable to an attack when we signed that treaty? The idea was the Americans would come to the aid of Australia if trouble loomed. Who would have believed some maniacs attacking the United States on 9-11 would invoke that treaty for the first time and you were coming to the aid of the United States that had been attacked? And I'm keenly aware that you lost 11 of your innocent citizens that day, but I would also tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that it says something that without any hesitation you sent your lads in and the first nation to join us after that initial thrust 350 nautical miles from the North Arabian Sea into Afghanistan. The first one to join us were Task Force 64, the Australian SAS. And there was no surprise when that happened, but as we look now toward the future, what does an incident like that do and what happens in terms of the relationship U.S. and Australia? Here I come from the Pacific Coast. I grew up there in the United States. We consider ourselves a Pacific nation, as do you. You are also fronting on the Indian Ocean and the Indo-Pacific areas of increasing importance to us, so what does that pretend for the future? I thought the way for me to address this was to go kind of deductively and start just by a quick glance at the world map and then drill right down to the area that I first sailed into, the Middle East in 1979, as an infantry company commander on board U.S. Navy ships. The reason I want to look at that broader picture first is to put what is happening to your country and mine into a framework within which perhaps we can look at what's in the news each day and get a little bit of a sense of what does that mean as far as to the young people are growing up today and the kind of world we're going to turn over to them. Let me start with Russia and what's happened down in this area here with Crimea. The Chinese guy put it very well to me. He said that Ukraine lost Crimea, Russia lost Ukraine as a trading partner, something they needed badly, NATO and the United States lost Russia as a diplomatic and somewhat of a partner, there was some budding partnership going on there in the 90s into the 2000s. But the Chinese guy who said this said and the world lost stability. Now why would he say that? Why was that so important to him? First you have Putin who's trying to destroy the state system and is near abroad and he is doing it by saying I want a veto authority over the economic and diplomatic and security interests of the countries along real close to Russia. He does not want them to have sovereignty over their own future. And so you look at that and you wonder where is he going to stop? Does NATO have the gumption? Does NATO have the commitment to actually throw an obstacle in his path and stabilize this situation? And there's a lot of question in that, I was just up in Europe in June, there's a lot of question about it. So let's jump out to this area here in the South China Sea. Now up here the Russians have used their military to do what they're to destabilize these areas and create what they want. Down here, however you identify the motive, the Chinese have shredded trust between various nations that thought you could settle things by talking about it, by going to international mediation, that sort of thing. And they've done it by building these islands up down here. And the bottom line is I don't think they use their military the same way. It's a much more complex and much more subtle problem. With Russia I believe it is a strategic problem. I think with China it is a cultural problem. They are using their authority again to gain veto authority as the big nation over the nearby states, you know where they are, it's Vietnam, it's Malaysia, it's Philippines, this whole region in Europe, they want veto authority over their security interests, their diplomatic interests and their economic interests. It looks like a classical Chinese tribute state model that you see there. It is not a bellicose send the army off and start wars or do little green men like we see Putin doing up in the Crimea, Donut's Basin area. And then you come back over here so you have two attacks on the state system, the Westphalian state system that says you don't do that sort of thing. You allow nations their own sovereignty. And here you have Iran which is constantly fomenting using non-state actors, what we call some kind of partners, some kind of surrogates, Lebanese Hezbollah. And they do not own Lebanon but nothing happened in Lebanon, the Lebanese Hezbollah, the Iranian militia doesn't permit. In other words, they are trumping the state system inside Lebanon. And they are doing the same thing as we know down here, they've tried to do it down here in Yemen, they've been thrown back there. They've tried to destabilize Bahrain and Kusam Soleimani, the head of the Quds force has said Jordan is next. I mean he's been very honest about it right up front, what they're going to do. At the same time, and here's where I want to get more specific for our discussion here tonight, you have ISIS over here that is also destroying the state system. They're literally bulldozing the boundaries between two states and they're saying that no longer does the state exist, it's now a caliphate. And so what you find is a common thread is the attack on the state system in these locations. And with ISIS, it's enough of a change, what's happened is enough of a change over the last six months. I thought I'd talk about that for a bit, then I want to talk about Iran after the JCPOA, the Joint Comprehensive Agreement that was just signed, just signed. And see if we can somehow look at this in a way where the Middle East becomes more understandable in terms of where it's going and what that pretends for Australia. First of all, I would tell you, Lynn, Joan, that the center of gravity of terrorism in the Middle East has shifted. And specifically, right on NATO's doorstep now, right on Turkey's doorstep is this churnable type of fact of constant spewing out of more terrorists right there in the geopolitical heart of the Middle East. And there is no indication right now at all that this movement is getting weaker. In fact, I'd tell you, if I was here six months ago, I would have been even less concerned than I am today with it. They are stronger today for all the having lost a few miles and this sort of thing. They are stronger today than they were six months ago or a year ago. They are the richest terrorist group in history by far. There's none that even comes close to it. And they are holding terrain the size of Great Britain. And al-Qaeda never achieved this level of sustainability. They portray themselves as the Sunnis last line of defense. And you say, well, what's that got to do with me? I'll show you what it's got to do with you as we go further forward. Because in fact, they're such masters of the social media that they are attracting recruits from the West in a way al-Qaeda never did. And they do not vet them very much. Basically, send me anyone who wants to die. We'll turn them into martyrs and send them on in. We have young men and women coming out of the Western democracies. And we are talking about thousands of them. And my next stop, Russ, is I'm heading from here into the Middle East. And the leaders there are scared to death of what this is going to return to their countries when these folks come home from the wars and what that's going to do to them. The al-Qaeda also never thought there'd be a caliphate in their time. So now you've got a caliphate out here. It's taking down the state system, which is wobbly all the time due to this, the problem of the social contract between the governed and the people doing the governing. And the end result is you have this disarray that is heightened right now in a way that no one is significantly impacting. One thing, a point I made to some folks a little while ago was that it's going to take time and boots on the ground to defeat ISIS. But if we don't get boots on the ground, and I'd love it to be Arab boots, I have no interest in going in for another war out in the Middle East. But if it's not Arab boots, it's got to be somebody's because ISIS could win. And yes, I said ISIS could win. You can't just sit here and say, they're on the wrong side of history. So they're going to go away. Any of you students here who study history know that history is written by both good people and bad people. So it's going to be critical they suffer some kind of military setback so that we interrupt their recruiting and we interrupt their finance. And because right now, if this continues, they are not going to sit there and say, we don't really mean what we've been saying about going after other nations around the periphery. Right now, they're focused where they are right there in Syria and Iraq. But in fact, they are going to inspire copycat groups and your police, your secret services like ours and all around the world are already seeing some of the problems that come from these copycat kind of responses. And part of it is it's not that they're that great. It's the very half-hearted and strategy-free approach we're taking to try and throw them off their stride. Many of the people in the West say we no longer have the gumption, the political will, the unity. And part of the reason we don't is we don't have a persuasive strategy that allows you to know what it is we're trying to do out here. And I think as you look at this, the defined goal by our president in the United States is to degrade and destroy ISIS. We have not committed the means to do it. So that means you've said you want to do this. We put this against it. And that's called bad strategy. That's a strategic mismatch. There's nothing all that magic about this. So if you look at the dilemma that right now faces Turkey, you get a sense of just how complex this is, ladies and gentlemen, because right now Turkey wants Assad gone. They've been willing to turn and look the other way about letting some terrorists get down there. Some of these terrorists have now turned around and attacked Turkey. They're in a very, very difficult situation. And as a result, you look at it right now where the country, the big cities in Western Iraq have fallen. And what you see is a caliphate that is starting to gain sustainability. And I think when you look at the, I go on their website, I like doing that, I like reading what people write about themselves, they talk about their distance provinces. Very interesting. Sinai, Libya, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Indonesia, interesting distant province of ISIS. And you see why when I come here and I look at where you're at on this map, why I would be very concerned about it. And I think right now what we have to look at is what nations would be with us if we decided to go after them. There are nations, for example, President Al-Sisi in Egypt has come out and at Al-Azhar University on the 1st of January, he read the riot act to the clerics there of the Sunni religion. He said, you are getting the entire world afraid of us. They're starting to hate us. It's not a problem with our religion. It's you clerics and what you're saying every Friday at these mosques and these sermons. And we need a revolution in rhetoric right here, or you're going to turn the whole world after the Muslim religion. So there's a man that we could actually ally with, and I'll give you another example, United Arab Emirates. The country Simon and Mark, old friends here who are on the SENTCOM staff, we called little Sparta. The reason we call them that is every time we got into a jam, United Arab Emirates was with us. For example, when the French and British had to pull their troops out of the 50 Nation Coalition in Afghanistan, the largest wartime coalition in modern world history, the United Arab Emirates called and said, we know you're going to have to turn to the Americans and request more troops to backfill them. I said, yes, I will. And they said, well, we're going to send in six more fighter aircraft and other special forces company, so you don't have to take the Americans, don't have to carry the whole load on that. Now, when you think that right here in Afghanistan, in Australia, in Afghanistan, you were the second largest troop contributor in terms of what really mattered, to put it bluntly, sending troops not just that could hang out at airports, but actually make a difference. You were the largest non-NATO contributor out there. We can't keep turning to nations like yours and say we need you to do more or couldn't keep turning to the Americans. So here's United Arab Emirates saying they would be there. The King and Jordan, who always speaks for moderate Islam, the King and Jordan, when he heard the British were pulling out, he reassured me that you will still see a Jordanian soldier in Afghanistan until the last American soldier comes home. So there are countries out there that are quite willing to sign up and do the heavy lifting along with us. But we're going to have a very difficult time doing that if we don't have a coherent strategy or if we exempt ourselves and reassure the enemy in advance that we will not send our ground troops against them. Even if we weren't going to send them into Iraq again, there is no reason to tell the enemy in advance that we're not going to. Why reassure them? Just leave the uncertainty there. And besides which, it could very well be that the next president, now confronting the situation that is deteriorating, will have to go back in. So I bring these nations up to you because what we don't want to do is keep thinking that we've got to do it all ourselves. We've got to look at how do we create new allies and then we bring in nations that may not be perfect, but we don't need perfection. The last time I checked, America hasn't reached perfection yet and it's governing at home either. So I don't think we should expect perfection from all other nations in the world before we're willing to work with them. I'd also tell you that if history teaches us one thing about allies, it's that nations with allies, with good allies, defeat those without. So we're going to have to remember that it's not good enough for US military officers to be willing to listen to other nations' officers. They must be willing to be persuaded and understand that all the good ideas come from the nation with the most aircraft carriers. This is critical because America has got such overwhelming military might right now, other nations could come in and feel like they're just, they have to be junior partners. I'll be very specific here. I think that Australia's moral and ethical voice needs to be heard backed up by your military. And if we Americans have disappointed you at all in the last dozen years, you'll still have to go a long ways to find a nation more willing to admit its mistakes, correct its actions, and listen more to a trusted ally like Australia. So I think that right now, what we've got to do is ensure that we have a good strategy. I think we've got to get our Congress off its bottom and start acting like a Congress and making decisions about declarations of using military force or not. It's up to them, but I think this is an enemy worth fighting. And we have to recognize that in the post Snowden era after the secrets were revealed by a person who betrayed us, we're simply going to have to learn how to deal with this enemy who is much more aware now of how we were able to find out what they were doing. They, an awful lot of good information got out there and we're just going to have to deal with this and the younger officers coming up today will face a much more difficult time than I did. And let me put it very clearly to you, I was never surprised once as the commander of US central command by what the enemy did operationally or strategically. Not a single time in three years. There's not many generals in history that can say that in no small part that was due to an intelligence constellation of countries that shared information and they were always surprised on the tactical level, you know, tactical ambushes that sort of thing. But that's going to be harder for the young officers you have coming of age in your forces today than when I was in the job that I had when I was wearing a uniform. Now, let me switch for a bit because I want to get to question and answers real soon but first I said I'd go through this Iran comprehensive agreement because it's really changed a lot of things in the region and I'll tell you why it's changed with our allies out there. There are five threats from Iran. One of them was a latent nuclear threat and that's what we addressed in the joint comprehensive agreement. But in addressing that, we allowed the adversary in this case to get relief from sanctions in four other areas, ballistic missiles, terrorism, cyber and maritime, counter maritime efforts to interrupt the lines of communication in the Gulf. So what we did was for the nations that are closest to Iran, we basically said we're going to relieve you of sanctions for all of these things and you've got to live with it and we are going to get the advantage that they won't go nuclear soon, we think. That was very unsettling. It was very unsettling for Arab allies. It was very unsettling for Turkey in some areas. It was unsettling for the Israelis and you don't find many issues where you find all of those people in the same position looking at this where arms agreements are generally to increase stability. You have noticed somewhere they called our Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of Reassurance was sent in to tell them we will sell you more arms now to the Arab countries in Israel. That's a pretty clear indication that it's not necessarily a more stable environment when the Americans sign it and say we'll sell you more guns as a result to deal with what's going to come out of this. So you have to look at this ladies and gentlemen and recognize it is not, for all of its title, comprehensive. Now I would tell you I've read it twice and it's clearly written with the idea that Iran is going to cheat. I went back and looked at the agreement the Clinton administration made with North Korea. It's four pages long. There is not a single verification issue in the four pages. Then you read the one on Iran. I think it's 156 or something pages long. For you young folks, make sure you read this stuff. Don't take what other people tell you about it. Just pick it up and read it. It's not that intimidating because a lot of the pages lists of people that are being relieved of sanctions. Not that big a deal. But bottom line is when you read it, it looks like everything's about, we know you're going to cheat and here's how we're going to catch you. So I think where we're at right now is we are going to have to recognize that Iran got out from underneath a pretty onerous set of economic sanctions. And for all the US Congress talking about whether or not they'll support it or not, if the Americans walk away from this, they'll walk away alone. That's the bottom line. There is no walking away from it. Under our system of government, the president can sign up for something like this. Wise or unwise, whatever, it's going to happen. So what we need to do, I think ladies and gentlemen, is have basically two lines of effort. One is on the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy folks who are going to monitor them, we've got to make certain that from France and Japan, from Australia and Canada, from all the countries that have nuclear physicists and all that the IAEA is fully staffed and all of us keep our spies watching very closely to make certain that it is verifiable that they are in fact not going for a nuclear weapon. It can work. It's going to be difficult because they have used denial and deceit many times over many years to deny that this program was going on. It was not a nuclear program. It was a nuclear weapons program. We have no doubt about that. On the other hand, we're going to have to address those four other elements. In other words, if they have ballistic missiles, we're going to have to help the GCC and the GCC of these countries right in this area here. Saudi Arabia's first Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Oman. This is it right here. Plus we're going to have to somehow incorporate Israel, Egypt and Jordan into an integrated air and missile defense because if they start launching ballistic missiles, there's going to be a lot of innocent people die out there. This will be worse than any bombing campaign you've seen. The second thing is we're going to have to have a cyber monitoring center. Their cyber folks are like children juggling with light bulbs full of nitroglycerin. One of these times they're going to drop one of these and they're going to turn out the lights in Paris or they're going to turn off the London Stock Exchange or something and political leaders will be forced to act. They have done some really crazy things and right now we think they've been under restrictions because they didn't want the agreement to go off track so that in Tehran they kept them under control. There's another element and that is the maritime element and I think we need to increase using the US Fifth Fleet and build up a stronger coalition allied fleet out there to make certain that if they do try to interdict the lines of communication that the world depends on that we're ready to help. And this is not where the Americans need the oil. As you know, we are very quickly becoming energy independent right now, but the world economy, there are nations from the Pacific, China, India, there are Europe, they need that oil and we've got to keep those lines of communication open. And the last one is we've got to have a counter-terrorism campaign. These are people who without a nuclear weapon went and murdered Israeli tourists in Bulgaria a few years ago. They went down to Mexico, they enlisted a drug cartel and they had a plan to kill the Saudi Arabian ambassador two miles from the White House and watch in DC with a truck bomb. And they're gonna do it on a Saturday night and for any of you who've been in Georgetown that's where the restaurant was, you can imagine the carnage that would have been there. Absent one fundamental mistake, they would have pulled it off. They made one fundamental mistake and that tripped them up. I've seen the intelligence, this was not a rogue intelligence officer who decided to go do something funny. This was approved at the highest levels, they were gonna murder an ambassador and to those of us in the military we look at ambassadors as men and women of peace. They're almost sacred, you don't touch an ambassador. And they were going to murder that ambassador in downtown Washington DC. It gives you an idea that you're dealing with a country here that's not really a country, they're really a revolutionary cause and they are subject to doing some really crazy things. So we're going to have to have some way of stabilizing and moderating their misbehavior or something very bad is going to go on. I think that you can make it work, this agreement work. I don't think our negotiators could have done any better. I think after the Americans blinked when Assad used chemical weapons in Syria and we did not do anything about it, they decided the Americans no longer had the stomach for another fight. And so at that point, I think we were in a position where our negotiators basically got about as good a deal as they could have come up with in this case. And there are ways for the militaries to buy peace or to hold the peace or stabilize for a short time. I'll give you one quick example that I want to get to time for Q and A here. As flying back, you remember about three, four years ago you heard all the how the Iranians kept talking in Tehran at their parliament, the Supreme Leader, that they were going to mine that little spot right there, the Straits of Hormuz, right here off the tip of Oman. And I was flying back one night and I was sitting there thinking about it. And I thought what I'd do is we'd run an international anti-mine exercise, not an anti-Iran exercise. So I called my fleet commander, fifth US Navy fleet, and I said, I want you to do this. I want you to pull together all the, as many nations as you can. And I was pretty sure we'd get what I called the usual suspects. We'll get UK, we'll get France, we'll get Bahrain, we'll get United Arab Emirates, Australia. We'll get the ones who know that we can actually put together a mine clearing exercise and make it look good and all. But I said, but make sure it doesn't turn into an anti-Iran exercise. And everybody hates mines. I learned to hate minefields on the ground at age 21 and I've never liked them at all since, to tell you the truth. So I think this will work. So we went out there and the first year we did it, we got 29 nations. We got Canada, and we got all the huge ones, but we got Canada and Estonia, Singapore, we got Japan, we got Djibouti. We had every continent except Antarctica, and I was looking for a penguin to represent Antarctica. They used another diver, you know? And they came out, they either were in the excise, had ships there, you had some of your sailors there, and the next year we had 35 nations come. And the reason I give you this example, ladies and gentlemen, is because in many cases, the inconclusive nature of some of the fighting over these last 12 years, you can start wondering what are we really doing here? Does this use of the military make sense? Well, the bottom line was they stopped, how many times have you heard them talking about mine in the waters last year or two? Zero. They realized that any coalition against them had two parts, a political and a military. Usually we lead with the political and the military goes in and buttresses them from behind. In this case, we led with the military to show we could clear those minds again very quickly, and by having all these nations show up, that was sending a message to Tehran that they're bombastic, we're gonna mine the waters, actually was creating an international coalition against them. They quieted down. Why was I so worried about it? Because about a year and a half before some British sailors and Marines up in the Northern Gulf had been grabbed by a Republican guard force. These guys were in little boats and the Republican guard got them and they were arrested and taken up to, they got cut off where they could return to their ship and taken to Tehran. It was embarrassing for the United Kingdom and Iran was flexing their muscles and it turned out, we're pretty sure that the guy who did it, the captain of the ship that sent the people over to grab the British Navy and British Marines, he never got orders to do it. He did it on his own. In other words, he just thought, well, I know what they want in Tehran. I'm just gonna run off and do this and I had visions of some nutcase out there dropping mines in the water and sinking a super tanker with all the environmental damage, loss of life and all. And so I wanted to do something to tone down the rhetoric up there in Tehran so we didn't have this acting, wars are often started by miscalculation, not calculation. So that's why we did it. And I bring this up because there can come awareness in all of us when you have inconclusive wars. You don't see anything good coming out of them and you start saying, we can't use the military instrument. What we have to do is use the military instrument wisely within a strategic framework, not with ignorance of history and culture and that sort of thing. So let me stop there because this is the new situation we deal with. Iran right now is going to start becoming more part of the body politic. It's coming out of isolation. They would like to be both North Korea and South Korea. They'd like to be North Korea in the sense that no Western influence invades their country. They'd like to be South Korea where their international market is bringing them all the trade that keeps the mullahs in power there. They can't be both. And so there's going to be problems inside Iran as those young people who may not be overly happy with the restrictions on freedom are going to have to deal with mullahs who are not happy with giving up their control over them. At the same time, you've got ISIS and you've got Lebanese, Hezbollah, two different groups, two completely different. One is coming out of the Sunni tradition, one out of the Shia. And you have to remember that back in 1983, the Shia side declared war on the West, okay? 1983, they blew up the French paratroopers barrack, the American embassy, they had other embassies, they blew up the Marine barrack in Beirut that we brought in to protect the folks down in the refugee camps. It was about 10 years later when the Sunni side, what you know as al-Qaeda and ISIS, declared war on the West. And I would just tell you that all of this is coming in to a new kind of relationship with each other and we're going to have to accept the complexity of it and deal with it, not say it's too complex, I'm just gonna go bury my head in the sand whereas one officer put it to me here since I've arrived in Australia, we're just gonna cut the Middle East off the map and say, I don't wanna look at it right now. Coming home from World War II, the greatest generation, coming back to Australia and England and America said you cannot turn your back on the world, you cannot do it. And out of that came the United Nations, the Marshall Plan where we actually helped enemies to recover out of it comes Bretton Woods and all these kind of things that we put together. And if we are going to live up to our responsibility, people of my color hair, to young people, so we give them a decent world, we can't ignore history and say, we're just gonna turn our back on the world. 60, 70 million dead in top one generation, you can't go to isolationism, you've gotta work together in this world. We're going to have to work together to address these issues. And I hope strongly that Australia's voice is heard loud and clear in all these issues. Let me stop there because I'd like to get to the Q and A and see what's on your mind and let's have at it here. And if you don't wanna talk about anything I talked about, something else in your mind, I'm more than willing to address it. So who wants to ask the first question? Yeah. You've got too many videos helping out, too many questions actually. That's the first question right here in front of you, Andrew. That's obviously both of you, Andrew. Ha ha ha. Okay, and I'll probably talk loudly anyway. General Mattis, look, you said there's an effective strategy in Iraq and Syria, and I'd agree with that. What's your idea of what would be an effective strategy and why do you think that strategy would work? Yeah. What would be an effective strategy? First of all, I was a general once upon a time but it was long, long ago on a land far, far away. So I've rejoined the human race. My name's Jim when I come to Australia. What an effective strategy would look like, again, go to the two parts. First, the political part. And I think that we should see a political agreement among every nation that's willing to fight these people. We find common cause with them, and that means at times we may very well have people that we are not always that fond of. They may not be people that buy into everything we think. They don't have to be. They have to be people that are willing to fight this enemy. So first of all, you get the political house in order and you help all of them put together the strategy. I think the first thing the strategy has to do is deal them a significant military blow. So they lose the sense of inevitability or invincibility. And at that point you get every banking system in the world, every country, to go after their finances and you make very clear that any attempt to support this group through recruiting, joining up with them, sending them money is going to earn you a time in jail. You don't get to have a moral buy, an ethical buy after you've sent money to someone who does what these people do. While we're sitting here tonight, ladies and gentlemen, girls as young as eight are being sold into sexual slavery. And this is going on every single night at between 750 and 3000 every single night this is going on and they're trading after people get tired of who they have there. This is something that's got to be stopped. And so we've got to get some kind of I would call it a coherent military financial strategy that can pin them to the wall. I think that the military side of it should not be an attrition fight where we send in truth for a long period. We go in just long enough with America and Australia and whoever's willing to sign up to bring a sense of confidence to the Arab forces that are there. We make certain that all the forces are overall under the command of an Arab, a capable Arab leader. And when you go in you fight a battle of annihilation against the group that you can surround not a battle of attrition that goes on a long time. Then you pull our troops out and you bring them back and forth as they're needed in order to bring kind of incite the bravery of the other forces there. And if they choose to really dig in, it's our forces that can best move against them right now. I think too what you have to do is go after their message. And that's the harder part but when you have President El Sisi willing to put his life on the line and that's what he did when he makes a speech like that at Al-Azhar University, the oldest university in Arab lands. When you have someone like Prince Mohammed bin Nayef in Riyadh, who's willing to go after Al-Qaeda the way he is or the United Arab Emirates that's willing to put their army down into Yemen in order to stop what was probably pretty much Iranian supported effort to take over the country there. Then you have countries that can do this with us and I'd start with the political. Make certain that you go after the financial that's got to stop as you've got, we got to quit allowing them to get the money they're getting right now and then deal them a good military setback. Same time, we're gonna have to have Arabs who can turn this message around. Sunni Arabs who can turn the message around that they're selling. Does that answer your question? Good stuff. That's good enough. Good afternoon, sir. Sorry, I'll sit loud. I just had a question with regards to ISIS. You were talking about the fact that they're openly accepting pretty much anyone who will sign up to their cause. But could this over-willingness to accept wannabe terrorists improve Western intelligence agencies capabilities because there's essentially a big gap that can be exploited? In what sense, how would you exploit it? You have a great opportunity to be able to send in double agents and infiltration and that kind of stuff. Yeah, you want to sign up? No, that's okay. It's a very good point. It is a tough thing to do because you'll lose some of the people we send in. I think that what you need is a firm commitment on a political level to do whatever is necessary. Our countries breed some young fellows that would be willing to do it. We've had them take very difficult tasks before. But right now, we have an uncertain trumpet call. We say degrade and destroy them, meanwhile, but we're not going to send our ground troops and we're not going to put our forward air controllers on the front lines and we're not, we're not, we're not, we're not. Right now, you've got to get the political piece right and we are going to have to have political leaders who can actually explain not just what we stand for as the Western democracies, but what we absolutely will not tolerate. And then you go in with total, you can run a limited war, but you limit the war by limit the political end state. You don't limit the military means. You go in with decisive military means to end the war as quickly as possible. Every war is going to be a tragedy. The longer it goes on, the more innocent people die. So you've got to go in with everything you need, and that would be certainly part of it, but you're going to have a hard time getting the leaders of the secret services to send people in to do this when you have such a tentative approach to addressing this problem. It's got to be a lot more forthright than what we've done so far. Yeah, but the short answer is yes, we just have to make certain we're all in. Yeah. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. My name is Adam Gastrono, and I've deafened everyone in the room. I'm with the Center for Moral, Social, and Political Theory, which is actually in the Philosophy Department, don't throw things. And I've got two questions. One of them has to do with David Cuckullen's analysis of ISIS that came out in a recent quarterly review, where he said one of the mistakes that we're making in dealing with ISIS is regarding them is simply a terrorist organization. And I was wondering what your thoughts were on that. And also a bit more to the point of my area of expertise. You mentioned Australia's moral and ethical stance, and I was wondering if you would be willing to comment a little more on what you see that as being and how that compares with the stance currently held by the United States military. Okay, yeah, good question. On David Cuckullen's article, I agree with how he describes them. They're a political organization, they're a religious organization, they've used terrorism, they've got an insurgency going, they're holding ground, they've got some state-like aspects to them. They're the richest, as I said, the richest terrorist organization in history. So when you put this together, this is like Lebanese Hezbollah and Al Qaeda on steroids. If you know, Lebanese Hezbollah runs a state within a state, a terrorist organization, they attack a state next door, Israel, they actually are supplied by Tehran. So you've got that aspect of what's going on with ISIS, but you've also got Al Qaeda, which is just a pure terrorist organization, attacks, you see their attacks everywhere. They're all over the place. And so yeah, I think he's right. It's much more than a terrorist organization, and that means you have to adapt your response to address each aspect of what is going on. And that's one of the reason I mentioned about going after them diplomatically and economically as well. Normal, just the average terrorist group, you can go after them with just police and military and do pretty good damage to them. This group's gonna take a lot more coherent and broader effort because of what David writes about there. On Australia's moral and ethical example, now I was listening this afternoon as I was getting changed to come over here about, and I listened to your Prime Minister talk and the opposition talk that Australia helps people when they're in the situation the Syrian refugees are in. And you can see people in that very contentious parliament you run, you can see people on both sides agreeing on it. Now, you've got to understand that the Americans for whatever reason have right now lost much of the affection of the world in terms of strategic, morally guided strategic activity. I believe we can learn from our mistakes. I believe that we will come back, but at the same time, Australia has shown a level of loyalty to the United States, not just when we were in the right, but perhaps when we were not in the right that allows you a degree of suasion with us, but also you are not included in some of the decisions that are looked upon now as faulty in both moral and strategic terms. So unhindered by that baggage and knowing the role you've played in Oceania, for example, close in where if any nation gets in trouble, they know they'll see whether it be your constables in charge of the Solomon Islands thing until you get it settled down again or someone gets hit by a typhoon. You have a degree of moral and ethical reputation that I think could help ensure that in the future more sustainable decisions are made, including by the Americans, because they're sitting in this room or officers who represented Australia's best interests and better angels inside my headquarters, I guarantee you. And they are grim, they know what their job is, they can do it, but at the same time, there's a way to maintain your moral balance when you're dealing with violence. And just to show you that even inside US military there's a special role for this nation. A couple of us were laughing outside in the corridor beforehand and Australian two-star Army General was the Assistant Operations Officer of US Central Command, the command that has got a quarter million US and allied troops in it. He had on one occasion, because my operation officer is up in Washington, DC, trying to explain our strategy one more time or get from them some idea of it. So when we had to move the US aircraft carriers, it was up to my operations officer to do it. The Australian officer got people on the phone and the fleet commander was off doing a visit right then with the head of state. So the deputy fleet commander was a two-star Royal Navy officer from Great Britain, deputy commander US fifth fleet. The officer we were trying to support right then was a Canadian Brigadier who was my personal representative in Jordan and the refugee situation was, this was when that was worsening. So we had to move the carrier up in case Assad thought he might wander down into Jordan and slap Jordan around for protecting these refugees. The Jordanians were doing a wonderful job protecting these poor people. So here I have an Australian Major General tell a Royal Navy officer to move the US carriers to support a Canadian Brigadier. I bring this up, ladies and gentlemen, because there is a very short list of officers that the US will put our troops under the command of. And I'm standing in one of those countries, very few countries right now to include one of your generals telling my aircraft carriers where to go. By the way, his last word, he meant it tongue in cheek but General Boomer Smith said, the next time I call a conference from US Central Command, I'd better hear yanked voices on the other end of this slide. So he kind of chewing them out and here they were all doing this. But it says something about the kind of, they bring an ethical dimension in and it inserts straight inside the command and that is healthy for us because not all the good ideas come from the country at the most aircraft carrier. That give you an idea of what I'm looking for. Sure, you're welcome. My name's Bruce Payne. I'm a retired civil servant. You talk quite a lot about politics, military, finance and you've only just touched a little on the economics. What I'm wondering about is your views on how big a motivator for all of the different participants in that area is the oil question, you know, both supply and demand. Yeah, you mean with the price of oil going down so much, can they sustain their nation? Is that part of it or you mean about how we actually fund the operations? More general than either of them. How big a motivator is oil for people who've got, you know, called them foreign troops but also how big a, you mentioned financing for ISIS. You know, they have a big revenue source. So imagine there was no oil in that area would people be as interested? Oh, I think oil has had a significant impact. I first sailed into those waters sir in 1979 and a couple of things happened. The mass, the grand mosque has taken over. The Soviets move into Afghanistan. The Iranian revolution, of course, is gaining full traction. And to your point, the oil prices start climbing big and there is no more governor on the oil money coming in and it's funding all sorts of people. The Assad family is putting more money into some of their, the Wahhabs, the mosque effort, the international effort they have going on. A lot of nations are seeing tons of money go off and just get diverted into basically terrorism. That's when you see it really starting to pick up. I think oil plays a significant role but there's a saying in golf you play the ball where it lies. The oil's there. The world's economy needs it. The only part of the world's economy right now that probably doesn't need it is North America. And the bottom line is you can't leave China the second largest economy to go downhill without thinking it's gonna affect everyone else and the same thing for India, the same thing for Europe. I mean, they need the oil. So I think the oil is a key factor. I will tell you this, every morning I woke up I knew I would not be given. I could not say, well, that's difficult. I wasn't able to keep the Straits of Hormuz open. The oil had to flow and I knew that I was expected to keep it open no matter what. And so it was a driving, just a driving imperative every day. That's why I went to that international anti-mine exercise. Anything to try to keep the peace or what passes for peace in that region one more year, one more month, one more week or even one more day. So the diplomats have worked their magic. But I think oil has been, a matter of fact, I've heard a leader of one of the country out there called the Curse of Oil which really is the answer to your question. It's made it very difficult for those countries even if it's been also the source of enormous wealth. So I'd like to ask you a question, a history question really where the dust has settled and it concerns the United States government and Vietnam War and also the American military. I noticed that your own secretary of defense a man called McNamara before his death he went to the University of Hanoi and among other things, he said, we didn't know anything about you. I'm convinced that our war against you was wrong. The Commander-in-Chief of Australian Armed Forces in Vietnam told me to my face that the Vietnam War was wrong, wrong, wrong. And the man who subsequently became Chief of the General Staff in this country also went to Vietnam and he also denounced it in articles under a nondiplume. What did you achieve in Vietnam? You killed two million Vietnamese but what did you achieve for ordinary Vietnamese and what did you achieve for ordinary Americans? I know that Ray Theon and Lockheed Martin and Boeing they did very well out of the suffering but what benefits accrued to the people of Vietnam and to the people of America for your war against that country? I know what you've got to say. Pardon? Let's hear what you've got to say. Oh sure, happy to say. And I appreciate it. I've come down to Australia to hear people and what they think, not dance around it. I believe that in the Cold War period there were decisions, yeah. Try telling the Vietnamese that. Well, I mean, let me put it this way. There were decisions made about where to try to hold the line. You saw the French make the decision against the Viet Minh. I think that with the Americans the idea was that we had to hold the line against a monolithic communist threat. It was not a monolithic communist threat. We know that in hindsight but history is unregenerate. You cannot change what happened. So you look back and you try to understand what did people think at that time without the benefit of hindsight? I believe that what happens there, years later I was in Malaysia and I was talking, I went to dinner with a gentleman and he said, you know, he said, for all the wrong reasons you bought us time. I said, what are you talking about? And he said, well, he said, we had all the colonial problems that any nation coming out from underneath colonialism had. And he said, had you not, had they not drawn all of the communist help in to help fight you in Vietnam? He said, they could very well have put Malaysia and Indonesia into a position where the internal contradictions of colonialism. Well, I mean, if you want to hear fine, I mean, it's up to you, sir. I mean, this is what I was told by a Malaysian, not an American, okay? He said, you bought time and you didn't even know what you were doing. And so I would say that from our perspective, we probably would look back on it and say it was a mistake, a tragic mistake. Okay. Next question, please. Yeah. Sir, when you were speaking about Iran earlier, you mentioned that there have been a number of emissions from the negotiations and that therefore there were a number of outstanding risks that needed to be mitigated. My question though is, there obviously is a rationale behind the agreement with Iran. In your words, what is the strategic rationale behind this agreement and is there a good side from it? Because at this stage, all we've heard are the negatives about that agreement. Well, I think it's hard to be real positive about the agreement when the Supreme Leader come down and says you're gonna continue with terrorism, nothing's gonna change in Yemen, in Bahrain, in Jordan, Soleimani come down and says they're gonna keep doing things. But I think the reason I believe that the agreement has got to be carried through with and we need to implement it as best we can is that there is not an international will to deal with this in a military way. And another war in the Middle East would be a catastrophe. I'll just tell you right up front, it would unleash even worse than we've already seen unleashed there. So what you do is you look at the rationale being you limit the potential for the Iranians to get a nuclear weapon. And when you think of some of them saying they wanna wipe Israel off the map or something like that, you and I grew up at a time when the nuclear capable nations of Russia, China, France, Britain, the United States, we all knew the other guy didn't wanna use it. We did not believe the Russians wanted to go to nuclear war. We came off of close at times, but there was a sense we didn't want to. The new nuclear regime that could arise, especially if Iran got one, appears to be one that wants to wipe someone off the map. And so this is worth it I think to try to prevent that. But now we're going to have to address the other threats or the nations that are closest are going to feel very vulnerable. And for good reason is you watch what's happened in Yemen or what Lebanese Hezbollah has done right now. The only reason Assad is still in power is because the Iranians are giving him full support after Russia's regrettable veto in the UN. So as you put all these conflicting, I would almost call them, rivers coming together with different threats, the one we have to avoid is the nuclear in the hands of a country that is acting like a revolutionary cause unconcerned with their own people. And that's why I think you've got the rationale for it is you've got to try to make this work, if that makes sense. It's just to prevent a nuclear detonation. And I think there's a lot more potential for that than anyone wants to really take a chance on. And this is the best chance I think we have. Thanks, General Matias. I just wanted to ask a question with regards to the lack of political will around confronting ISIS decisively from the West. If we continue to let this wound fester, what do you foresee happening to the Middle East and the West? What do I think happened if what? Sorry, if we don't act decisively with regards to the Islamic State, what do you foresee happening in the Middle East? As you said, if ISIS wins, what happens? You know, I believe right now we're past a point of no return that it's going to keep getting worse for a while. And the impact on the innocent people out there has been about as severe as it could be. I will tell you that I've seen refugees in Africa, I've seen them in Bosnia, I've seen them in Southeast Asia, pulled them out of the water there. I have never seen refugees as traumatized as I've seen coming out of Syria. And I think it's going to get worse and the political will issue will not be addressed until the current American administration is replaced by a Republican or Democrat administration that comes in with a fresh approach, one that is much more embracing of allies and much more committed to actually taking action. And that does not mean it has to be military action. I would say that America's got to engage more with the world and intervene militarily less right now. But if you align enough nations together, then should we have to take military action, then it's got a, I would say an international way to address it and not just an American way. And I think that would be one of the ways you avoid ending up worsening the situation, frankly. Did that answer your question? Not really? Okay. Tom Worthington from the Research School of Computer Science. Normally I'd ask about cyber warfare, but you've already addressed that. So what about the pivot to Asia in all of this? Is there, where do we balance the military force and also the political intellectual power is addressed? Is there a danger of spending too much in the Middle East and then not worrying about the part of the world closer to where we are? Yeah, you know, at this point, the degree of strategic atrophy in Washington's got to be addressed. I thought it was very unfortunate to talk about a pivot to Asia. And you hit it right, there's two parts of this. There's the attention basically and then there's the military role. And in Washington DC, apparently we're not aware that half the U.S. Navy was in the Pacific already. They forgot about that. And a quarter of the U.S. Army, two thirds of the Marine Corps and a significant part of our Air Force. Furthermore, many Pacific nations had officers like on my staff, they're even when they weren't committed to Pacific operations, Australia's voice or Japan's voice was loud and clear in Tampa and Washington DC because their people are there. They're actually inside the top secret meetings. And so I think that it was unfortunate it scared the Dickens out of Europe. I'll tell you that. And it also caused a lot of concern in the Middle East and it encouraged our adversaries to try and take advantage of weaker countries. I think that what we've got to do is we've got to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. And it's not that difficult if you'll listen to others and if you're willing to allow them to take the lead on issues. I have no problem allowing others to take the lead. I mean, why shouldn't Brazil take the lead on maritime search and rescue in the somewhere between South America and Africa and Portugal does it up out of the Azores? I mean, there's ways where the America don't have to keep feeling like they've got to do it all. And yet that statement gave a kind of an impression to me that we thought it was all about us and where we're going to apply ourselves. I just thought it was very unfortunate. It was not strategic statement. And I think we've pretty much recovered from that. But at the same time, we're going to have to go by with and through allies. We don't have enough money or enough ships to do it all ourselves in the Baltic and in the Pacific and in the Mediterranean everywhere else. It's got to be all of us working together. Hi, my name is Mohanad. I'm from Syria. I just want to know what's your vision on the future of Syria? Everyone is talking about Syria as just only ISIS versus Assad. There are tens of factions functioning over there. The Syrian refugees are not fleeing only from ISIS. They're fleeing from the war that's going on. That's not between two sides. There are tens of sides, like Damascus last week, where it was rocketed by 98 rockets one day and by Free Syria Army or Nusrah Front. So there are hundreds of people being killed every day by unknown people. So they call them Nusrah Front or Jashid Tawheed or Jashid Islam or Fatah. So they have tens of names. And Syrian people are being killed by those people. And all the international community are talking about only ISIS or Assad. So how do you see the future of Syria? What do you see Assad in it or not? It's not only ISIS. So how do you see the future of Syria? Yeah, it's a complex region. And I don't have time in a few minutes to go into all the things that I agree with you about. I mean, had the Lebanese Hezbollah not come in and perhaps had the Western nations supported the moderates early on before they got ground to nothing between Nusrah and ISIS and the Assad forces and all, then maybe we would have had more options. But now I'm afraid we've missed the opportunity to arm moderates and assist them. I think it's going to get worse. Right now, there's talk about whether or not Russia is talking about moving in military people to support Assad. This sort of thing, you could just see it go on until it just exhausts everyone. And it's just spewing out terrorists. It's drawing in terrorists. It's causing refugees to go into all the surrounding countries. I think it's going to get worse before it gets better. And I don't know, other than helping the refugees, I just don't see an international effort right now that can stop the killing and come to some kind of a ceasefire long enough to try to put this back together. In UK right now, they're trying to put together a plan. I know some folks are working on a plan to use Gulf monarchy monies to go back in with kind of a Marshall plan effort. But that's still born until we can stop the violence. And I don't think as long as others can get in there and you can exhaust everyone enough income, these reinforcements, and they just add more killing to the equation. I think right now, it has terrible forecasts is the way I look at it. I think it's bad and getting worse. I wish I could give you a better forecast right now, but I can't. Thank you. Please, gentlemen, let us hear your presentation. My name is Craig Butale. My question goes to, I guess, some of the picture that you painted about the complexity of a strategic environment and being that even the Westphalian state is coming to some struggles. And that arguably is probably down to the rise of a lot more power within individuals as opposed to earlier times when states had a lot more control and were able to do things. You mentioned different elements of national power in coming to address some of these problems. My question is, are our political systems constructed in a way which they can apply those different elements of national power towards the emerging complexities in the environment? And also, is the military place to leverage those different elements and contend with the emerging potential environment? What a great question. It's as if, going back to the earlier question on Syria, we're going back to a pre-Westphalian idea that we can kill each other over religion, what cut Europe's population by a third or more over those years or decades of war. And I think that somehow we've got to save the state system and I'll get into why in just a moment. But we try to teach in America that America's got two fundamental powers, the power of inspiration and the power of intimidation. And too many times in the last dozen years, maybe 20 years, maybe the Cold War years, we've turned to the power of intimidation instead of the power of inspiration, which is why I believe we need to engage more with the world and intervene militarily less. And why are we doing it? Because our State Department, our Treasury Department are perhaps not organized to compete in a way where the ideas compete. But our CIA and the military, of course, they're organized to compete. That's what they, that's their environment. So we reach for these hammers when we should be reaching for other ideas. What would have happened in 2002 when the Australian, the Americans went into Afghanistan if every year since we'd funded for one boy and one girl in every high school in Afghanistan to go to the Netherlands, to Australia, to Canada, to America for a year of school after 10 years of being there? What would it look like with that many thousand, tens of thousand of kids back home again with a different mental model of what's going on? I don't think we are using those kind of powers correctly, but they are still there, and they're mostly there with the least cynical. And you know who they are? The people who live out in these areas. The power of, I'll give you an example. One night I was out at a forward operating base on the Euphrates River and my Marines had captured a fellow laying an IED. He has a little wheelbarrow, two artillery rounds, car battery, wires. He's out there whistling, digging a hole, and he looks up and here's five guys pointing rifles at him. Not a good night for him. They bring him in and they tell him, hey, General, you want to talk to this guy? It's a little 50-man outpost I was going by. He speaks good English. He's trained in Switzerland. I said, really? Yeah, an engineer. So I went and I sat down with him, give him a cup of coffee and a cigarette, and we're shooting at him. I said, why are you doing this? I mean, you're a SUNY, you know the Marines are the best friends you have out here. Why are you doing this? He says, oh, you crusaders who want you out here. I said, just knock that off. You're an educated man. What are you, and I'm giving you a long answer, but this makes sense, trust me, bear with me here. And finally, he said, well, you're right. He says, in my heart, I hate having you guys here, but in my head, I know we need you here for a while. And he says, I guess I'm going to Abu Ghraib prison. I said, oh yeah, you're gonna go wear an orange jumpsuit for a while, a couple of years probably until we leave. And he said, well, if I'm a model prisoner, could I immigrate to America when I get out? Now think about that. Where did that, he's literally trying to kill us, but the power of inspiration allowed him to talk to an American in that way. We have too often turned to the military to deal with non-military problems. And as far as going into countries and overturning them, you have no moral obligation to do that if you don't believe that there's a reasonable expectation of a better administration afterwards. I mean, I'm not just talking about Iraq right now, take a look at Libya, where NATO decides they've got to go in and look what's happened now. I mean, I don't get me wrong, I'm not gonna make a moral argument for Qaddafi, but I think that's the sort of thing you have to look at. And when you look at these, are we organized right to have this violent global argument that's going on right now? It's mostly an argument. Yes, there's violence, but we've got to use education the way I think it's intended. And remember that if you didn't have your navy and your immigration people doing what they're doing, you'd have a million immigrants a day coming into Australia. And the power of what you stand for is very, very powerful as an idea. And right now we are not fighting the war of ideas in a way that allows us, I think, to win that war. That's probably just for fun. Thank you for coming tonight. My name is Leah. I'm an undergraduate student studying security studies. You mentioned that intelligence sharing is going to be very difficult in the common news. I was wondering how you propose the intelligence community should change or be modified so that there's less of an issue? You know, some guys gave me my coffee cup from SENTCOM. There's a thing called NoFORN, some of you have heard of. It says, and I understand why each nation wants to hide its sources and methods of intelligence collection. We call them the crown jewels. But there is no need to share the sources and methods. And usually you can clean up the intelligence in a way. I mean, frankly, I didn't care about the source and methods. And I was a four star general. I just want to know the intelligence. So there's a way to do it where you don't compromise the parts of it that you cannot reveal in good conscience because your secret agents could die or whatever. And I think that what we have to do is, again, we have to get the political alignment correct and all military and intelligence operations are run at the speed of trust. And if you cannot create trust across international lines now, when you come together, then we have to, that person, that officer's leadership is obsolete and they need to go home. You have got to be able to do this. And there are officers sitting here in this room that I assure you had access to some of our most sensitive secrets in America. And there are Australian officers who are not American. So I know how it can work, but there's a special arrangement for fewer than a half dozen countries where we're able to do that. We're going to have to use that theme and carry it more broadly because you cannot ask for countries to send their troops in harm's way and say, by the way, we know something that would help your troops. We're not gonna tell you. It's immoral. Besides being militarily stupid, it's immoral to do that. So we have got to find a way to do it, but remember it's built on trust and we have got to make certain that we don't violate the trust either. And part of that is keeping things secret. When another nation shares their secrets with you, the Americans got to learn how to keep it secret then. We can lose a lot of confidence when we don't. So it's got to be a process and it's got to be set politically and then it's got to be jealously carried out by the people down below. But I have seen it work, so I know it can be done. I'm not talking about Nervon out there. This can be done. Good evening, sir. My name is Eric Gerber, former regulator and negotiation instructor currently. For a preference to the question, I'd like to, you know, I want to think about reclaim Australia and the Reverend in Florida who decided to burn Koreans. And the reason why I bring that up is how important do you see the domestic responsibility of the Western society in limiting our isolating behavior towards, excuse me, peaceful Islamic society, such as the numerous Muslims that we share our land with? Well, I think the most important thing is that we explain that in our system, we believe the government cannot restrict free speech. And you may like that, you may be contemptuous of it, but the bottom line is for those of us in the military, if we swear an oath to uphold the Constitution, we can't turn around and insist to our political masters that they've got to restrict someone's freedom of speech as it's defined by the law. I don't get to define that. Nobody elected me. I'm a pointer, it is an officer. So in dealing with it though, I will tell you that I was in numerous capitals in the region. In many cases, they understood the issue very well that what we were dealing with was basically people act in horribly and disrespectfully toward others. It was tough on our relations, but I don't think there is something at least under the American Constitution you can do to stop people acting like jerks, frankly. What you have to do is have such a degree of rapport and communication with those other countries that they understand you don't buy it one bit, you don't believe in it, you condemn it. I mean, I have freedom of speech too. And I made it very clear what I thought about it when I was the commander of CENTCOM, but the idea of restricting someone's freedom is not for a US military person to do in our system. So unless I can persuasively make the argument, like any citizen, there's not a whole lot you can do about it other than try to keep open lines of respected communication with people who are being insulted. And I've seen a lot of insulting of people and it's quite conducive to keeping people like me and you when we were wearing uniforms in business because the very contempt and lack of respect like you're bringing up there, when you see that in a social setting or you see that on an international setting, it generally has the same result, creates hatred and it's pretty darned ugly. But I don't know how we get around it right now other than trying to get people to walk and other people's shoes for a while instead of walking out cynically and contemptuously dismissing a religion. I have fought many times for America. I never fought without, because I did so much fighting in this region, I never fought without troops who had the Muslim religion both American in my own forces but also the other foreign forces right alongside me. So there's no reason for this to become, I would say the characteristic of our society. Every society, I tell people, look, Jesus of Nazareth had one out of 12 go to crap on him, okay? So you're never going to have it perfect. You just got to deal with this kind of stuff, you know? Best answer I can give you. Yes, ma'am. I think we need to wrap it up. Well, this lady's got a good question I can tell. Go ahead, please. Thank you very much, Landon, I wanted to ask you please about a common contradiction I think we may face. You talked about the US having lost moral authority in Middle East and in other parts of the world and about how it should be using more its power of inspiration and intimidation. And yet, you were also talking about our need to have allies with countries with whom on many other issues we made journeys. And it seems to me that that is a contradiction in a nutshell, okay, we're working with countries like, let's say, Saudi against ISIS because we have to. And it's the very fact that we have an alliance with a country like that that causes us to lose moral authority among the people in Middle East. I don't think that's a solution I would love to hear. Yeah, no, it's a great, sometimes you don't have solutions. You just manage problems. And I think the question is very good. You know, I remember reading about FDR, relatively progressive president, and he made common cause with Joe Stalin to defeat Hitler. So what I tell my young officers is the Constitution's not a suicide pact. We've got to keep the experimental life. I had, I was, I brought this very problem to a former prime minister of a country you know well in Europe. And he just laughed at me. Said, Jim, if you can't ride two horses in the Middle East Circus, you better go out of the circus. He was not trying to be flippant. He was trying to say, this is the very complexity that we have to deal with. And I think that if I was to sum it up, it was so nice when I was a young officer, I could make certain that not any innocent person died around me, I knew my troops, I knew them all. And as I went up higher, I had to deal more and more with polarities. And nothing was black and white anymore, it was gray. And dealing with those polarities was very exasperating. So what you end up having to do is recognizing that you do the best you can with the information you have at the time. And you try to keep a moral balance with it. But not to the point that you decide, I'll give you an example. We can align with or ally with countries that have at least the effort there to be responsive governments to their people. As I watched the Arab Spring break out, I was thinking, all these people were saying, oh, they're going for democracy. My CIA gals, they said, we're not so sure about this, General. There's a lot of decisions to be made. They said, what's going on here is Paris, 1789. People who are furious about unjust, unresponsive governments are fleeing from them. They are not necessarily running toward democracy. And so what you have to do is you have to put yourself in other people's shoes for a bit and think about where they're coming from. They were under colonialism very recently. They want some kind of democracy. And it helps if you just look at the people in Tehran, the ones who were beaten and imprisoned when they came up and revolted against the Mullahs there. They now have looked around. They've seen what happens when you have a revolution without democracy in their own country in 1979, or you have a revolution with chaos in Syria. So what they want is they want democracy without a revolution. So you look at something like this, you say, how do you get there? I don't know how you square these kind of polarities with the situation that's costing us so many innocent people killed and wounded in Syria. And so I think what you end up doing is you accept that in the short term you may have to make awkward alliances that you may not be real happy with in the long run, but it's always easier to be far from any responsibility and condemn those who tried to deal with it at the time. And so you just do the best you can, but never lose sight of what you stand for either. And that's very easily done in the urgency of some things. That's the best answer I can give you. Thank you very much. I enjoyed every question here today. Thank you very much. And I appreciate it. Thank you.