 Welcome to New America. Thank you for coming out in what the weather forecast is called a wintry mix. And thank you also to C-SPAN for covering this. And welcome to the C-SPAN viewers. I'm going to introduce our moderator, who is Sharon Burke, who's the Senior Advisor of the International Security Program. She runs the Resource Security Program at New America. She's a longtime Department of Defense official in this recent position was Assistant Secretary of Defense for Energy Security. I'll hand it over to Sharon now. Thank you. Thank you very much, Peter. Apparently, you all don't realize it's snowing out there. So we're grateful that you've braved the weather to come and join us today for a very important conversation and a fast-moving situation for sure. I wanted to start by just acknowledging something that we just did with Peter. Peter, of course, has a new book out that you should read. You should all read. And when we were here talking about his book, just about two weeks ago, I asked Peter. I said, you know, you're writing about a president and a national security team before the story is over. We're still in the middle of the story. So what's the next chapter? So you see where this is going, right? He said, this president has not actually had a genuine foreign policy crisis yet. So we don't actually know who he is, who his team is, and what their capabilities are. So make sure you ask Peter for his projections on the market and everything else on the way out the door. And here we are. So I would encourage you to read the detailed biographies of our panel here because we would be here all afternoon, just going through their qualifications. But what I want you to know about these three people is that they're not only the top scholars in the country on Iraq and Iran, foreign policy, and international law. They're also practitioners. So they know the information, and they also know how hard it is to actually make policy and implement options. So we're very lucky to have them here with us. And what I'm going to do is just let each of them give an opening salvo, if you'll forgive the term, about the situation. We're going to start with Doug Alavent, who has spent a great deal of time in Iraq as recently as September, and can give us unique and interesting and deep insights about what's happening in Iraq, what's going to happen in Iraq. And then after that, we're going to actually jump over to Dr. Valina Nasser. And Dr. Nasser is going to talk about Iran, which he's an expert on for all kinds of reasons and also as a scholar and a practitioner in the broader situation there. And again, I want to be clear that we don't need to talk about who Qasem Soleimani is for this audience, but this is a fast-moving situation. So we need to start with a context setting. Then we're going to turn to New America's CEO, Ann-Marie Slaughter, who's one of the country's top foreign policy experts to talk about the broader implications here for policy and law. So with that, Doug, would you start us off and give us, both as a soldier and now a civilian, you have unique insights about Iraq and about what this means? Sure. Thank you very much for being here. I want to start with a story of how we got here. I want to be very modest and say this is a story. My story is going to be very Iraq-centric. There's obviously a very USG-centric story. There's an Iranian-centric story. Mine's going to be Iraq-centric. I'm also very modest about it, one, because there are people in this room who know far more about it than I do, but also because I think things are shifting so quickly that it's sometimes very difficult to know how much of the things that you've really understood and leaned on and saw as solid bases upon which to do analysis are no longer true. And they're starting to shift out from underneath us, particularly in this region. I think this story, this particular chapter of the story, obviously we could go way, way back in time on the Middle East. But this particular chapter of the story starts on September 27 of last year when Lieutenant General Sadi is fired by the Iraqi government and is moved from his position as the deputy commander and the de facto operational commander of Iraq's counter terrorism forces and is moved to the Ministry of Defense. This serves as a catalyst for grievances that have been held by the Iraqi population and primarily Iraqis young people for a very long time. Iraqis youth were tired of the sectarianism, tired of the corruption, tired of the ethnic spoils system. They were tired of a government that didn't produce, that had handicapped their economy, despite having huge oil reserves. They were tired of all of that. This symbol of removing this extremely popular general who had symbolized the liberation of Iraq from ISIS was the last straw for them and they went to the streets. Now at first, it was exactly who you'd expect. It was the civil society activists, the entrepreneurs, kind of the upper middle class of Iraq, probably disproportionately English speaking. But it quickly metastasized, particularly as the government went to put it down very, very strongly and just started killing them in the streets, both with bullets and with the tear gas canisters. So the protests metastasized and pretty soon you had the young men coming from Sotir City, not Sotiris per se, but Iraq's underclass coming out to join the protests. And then the Sotiris proper and they took a little break for their religious holiday and while they were on the break they watched the Lebanon protests and said, oh these protests look a lot better if there are women involved. And a few days before they were scheduled to restart the protest on October 25th, you could see the messages going out on WhatsApp and Facebook and Twitter, my sisters, we need you, you need to come out. And so when the protest started back on October 25th there were women everywhere and they became really the symbols of this. Liberty is always a female symbol. And they were draped in Iraqi flags. They were, I said symbol, draped in Iraqi flags and this quickly became a very serious threat to the regime despite the fact that the regime is killing these protesters is quite a clip. 450 at least have died in the official count, the number's probably significantly higher than that. It's for those of us who are used to thinking about Iraq in terms of Sunni Shia Kurd, we've been hearing this dichotomy for 15 years at least now. What's important is that these protests were not sectarian at all. These were primarily Iraqi Arab Shia youth coming out to protest what is primarily an Iraqi Shia government. So it looks, it looked very similar to our 60s. The children coming out to protest what they see as the failings of their fathers and grandfathers in terms of government and how society is set up and what it should look like. On November 30th, the prime minister finally resigns under the weight of all these protests. This is an important detail. This is why there's not a official government in Iraq right now. There's a caretaker government because the prime minister resigned on November 30th. So everyone knows there will be a new prime minister and as part of this agreement, there's going to be new elections held. So really what they're talking about is appointing a new prime minister who's going to oversee the next year and how the elections are going to be set up. This is obviously a very big deal and who is going to be the guy who sets the ground rules for the elections, personnel or policy, this matters. So several names are floated, they come back, no one can settle on one. Finally, the Iranian-backed party, Fatah, nominates the Basra governor, a man named Assad al-Adhani. He's very closely linked to the IRGC. He had been the president of a bank through which they had funneled a lot of money. So he is widely seen, fairly or unfairly, as the Iranian candidate. On the 26th of December, President Barham Saleh refuses to nominate him, nominally on constitutional grounds. He finds a constitutional thread to use, but really this is political. Barham Saleh realizes the Americans are against this, Najaf is against this, the protesters are against this. We can stand up against Iran. Iran in this moment realizes it's been checkmated. To use the metaphor, the chess board is in front of us and they can see that three moves down the road, they're in a bad place. So the Iranians start thinking. This game is not to our favor. We can't tip over the board, everyone will know we did it. We need the Americans to tip over the board. So on December 27th, they shell a U.S. base. Our red line on this is extremely well communicated. No one is under any illusion what will happen. And that then begins the tit for tat for which we are all very, very aware. But I think my point, at least in this telling of the story in this narrative is that the Iranians wanted us to do this. And this is all about Iraqi politics. They realized that they had lost the fight for Baghdad and they could not stand to lose the fight for Baghdad. So they had to overturn it. Couple points follow. I think since then, the United States has largely mishandled both the events and the aftermath. There are two third rails in Iraqi politics. Things that in our modern parlance just trigger them. That's sovereignty and that's sanctions. For obvious reasons, they are deeply, deeply touchy about national sovereignty. Our occupation last decade, the British before that, the Ottomans before that, as a natural culture, deeply, deeply touchy about their sovereignty. My experience is that Iraqis will choose sovereignty over otherwise rational self-interest almost every time. It's simply in their national character. And the second is sanctions. They lived under them for 13 years. Sanctions decimated Iraq, its institutions, its educational system. Many people died as a secondary result of sanctions. They are deeply, deeply touchy about the subject. So to have that floated is not terribly helpful. I think it's by the president in case you're not tracking that. Thank you. You're welcome. The United States is now attempting to retain a U.S. presence. We know the Iraqi government has voted to eject the U.S. forces from Iraq. The legality of this is not entirely clear. It is not clear that there was a quorum in the parliament. If there was a quorum in the parliament, it's not clear if that vote is binding. And because the prime minister is an interim prime minister, it's not clear if he has the authority. And frankly, the Iraqi constitution is so vague and so poorly worded that there probably isn't a firm constitutional answer to these questions. And so frankly, other sides can claim that they are legitimate or not. Were there to be a U.S. withdrawal, it would be, there's no way to characterize it other than a major Iranian victory. Frankly, I think that what is happening is far beyond the Iranians' wildest expectations. All they wanted to do was get their prime minister in. That we are now to the point where we're not even talking about that, we're talking about desperately trying to salvage the American presence shows just how much we have lost in this round. But I wanna circle back to the protesters. That's what we need to be focused on. I think it's been the most undertold story in the United States this year. These protesters who are out there, who are demanding the simple things that everyone expects, a responsible government, a lack of corruption, basic services, to have a normal life, they're still there even if the United States loses on this round. And I think if the United States lose, the protesters lose. There's still some hope for Iraq. I wanna do one final little coda on Abumadi Mohandas. Yeah, we'll ask about that, because you tweeted that you thought his death may even be a bigger deal. I'll defer to General Qasem. I'll defer those questions to Valer. But Mohandas was a singular figure inside Iraq. And to my mind, he's singular because he's bigger than any institution. Qasem was the head of the IRGC coups force. He was the head of an institution. And while he may have been an incredibly talented individual, he had an entire institution behind him. Mohandas was largely outside of institutions. He came into them when he needed them, but Mohandas was simply Mohandas. He was the figure who could hold together the entirety of the popular mobilization forces, the Hashid. So if you're a war hawk, the good news is you killed the head of the Hashid. You've totally disrupted their command and control. If you're looking a couple months down the road and hoping to restore some semblance of the status quo ante, the bad news is you've removed the command and control of the Hashid. I'm not sure that there is another figure out there who has the status, who is sufficiently respected and feared that he could be a guarantor of a deal. That, okay, no, no, we're not gonna strike Americans anymore. Mohandas could hold that deal. I'm not sure there's another figure in Iraqi political life who can guarantee that deal. I'll stop there. All right, Vali Nasser, let's hand you this chessboard. How does the chessboard look to the Iranians? Well, in some ways, this is a watershed moment for Middle East and for U.S. Iran relations. This is no way in which to under emphasize how significant it is. And just sort of going back, the beginning point is really when the United States left the nuclear deal. So the way looking at it from Iran's perspective, they did reluctantly, hesitantly trust the United States in a deal. In their view, they implemented their part. They gave up their most important strategic weapon, which was what they negotiated over, which was their nuclear capability in which they had spent a lot of money. They didn't get much economic benefit from it even when the Obama administration was there, but there was hope. And particularly among the Iranian public, there was a lot of hope. And I think Doug is right. I mean, we sometimes forget about the people and that to them this was a moment of hope. Comes in President Trump and he scuttles the deal and he proceeds to put draconian economic sanctions on Iran. In Iranian government's view, the President Trump's goals had nothing to do with another nuclear deal. That this was about regime change. That essentially when you shatter a country's economy completely, you're essentially forcing it to be toppled. And when the protests happened in Iran recently, and this is the line of the Iranian sort of security forces, is that yes, most of the protesters were unhappy, but about 2,000 or 3,000 professional activists that they believe had been sent into Iran to actually push things over. That in fact, the maximum pressure strategy was a two-punch process. One punch was economic pressure, people get unhappy, and then you instigate riots and protests and the regime would fall. So and then come September of this year where President Macron of France came very close to getting the Iranian president and the American president in the room. And the condition the Iranian president said is that if I'm gonna meet with you, I need you beforehand to lift some sanction or at least sign a letter in which you promise that if the meeting is successful that you would lift those sanctions. And President Trump refused to do that. He in fact at one point apparently said that he's willing to come to the meeting with an executive order in his pocket and after the meeting he would sign it. And the Iranian president said no. Again, in Iran he was understood that he really is not after a meeting. This is all about regime change. Now Iranians also calculated that the first year that the nuclear deal was removed they didn't do much about it. They sat down, they led the Europeans, tried to come up with some kind of a solution. The year ended, President Trump doubled down. He said I'm not gonna take Iran's oil exports to zero and nobody can do any business with Iran. And the Iranians concluded that they actually have to push back because Trump thinks his policy is too easy and it's too costly. And therefore that's when they began hitting tankers and they shot down an American drone and they attacked the Saudi facilities. And they had two messages in this. One is that we're crazier than you. If you think that you're gonna slap us around and we're gonna go under the table you gotta be prepared that we may actually fight. And so you have to put that in your calculation and then they think actually that worked because Trump sort of took a second look at proceeding with the confrontation. The second is actually they wanted to showcase their technological capabilities. So hitting Aramco with targeted drones hitting the exact places on tanks and nowhere else was for them to say that don't think this is Iranian maybe of 1987 which was sunk in a single day. So these were more in their views not provocations they saw it as deterrents. But in their view, and yes the Iraq was very significant and their own domestic protests were significant a status quo means they sit on the pressure the US doesn't suffer at all. So if there is no movement on the president actually translating leverage to negotiations the Iranian suffer they can't wait till 2020 elections unless he gives them something. And therefore the only way to get his attention is to do something. So again escalating further now choice of Iraq may have had double benefit but you knew that they're gonna do something. And particularly the fraction in Iran that is arguing that look this isn't working negotiation didn't work we have to do something was gaining ground inside Iran. And also Iran is going to parliamentary elections in February and presidential elections in June. And there's a lot writing on this and this was an opportunity for hardliners to basically say look talks are over it's all done. Now comes the US reaction. And I think now the conclusion in Iran is that the maximum pressure strategy is over in the sense of economic pressure alone creating a breakthrough with Iran. That in fact by killing Soleimani the president himself is acknowledging that it's not working I'm gonna go to hot war with Iran. And also to them that this is now a direct push to overthrow the regime because killing a sitting member of the regime and sort of a red line that they thought the president not of I would say legal virtual and we will speak about that but at least it was a norm that they understood would not be crossed that he's now really going for the jogular of the regime. I don't think they had a blueprint of the shelf they could present. This came out of the bolt out of the blue to them. They had to gauge how they would react to this. And I think there are two pressures on them. I think they obviously need to react because that's not what the public demands. They have to do something. But I also still believe that they believe they need to deter Trump. If he gets away with this then the next would be a drone that's gonna kill the supreme leader and is gonna kill the foreign minister. I mean Trump is not playing this game in a way that is extremely sort of with no particular rules if you were to say. Although Iran has done this themselves but we hadn't done it. So I think they will have to do something. Now when they do it, how they do it, how much they prefer to escalate all remains to be seen. There is no back channel between the two countries although the Omani foreign minister is in Tehran today. But that's not at a level that might actually have an impact on Iranian decision making. And meanwhile the president's public rhetoric is incredibly menacing. And even if we say don't believe him the problem with this Twitter diplomacy or whatever you call it, I don't call it diplomacy but with this Twitter storm I guess is that it doesn't give the other side any political maneuvering. Because you continuously are embarrassing him, humiliating them and you're challenging them. Now I think the most significant piece of this ironically is the people. So you know the outpouring of the funeral I would say has taken everybody by shock. I think there's no way for those cynics that on Twitter that the regime could manufacture this in a two days notice. If they can do that then in total control of the country and you can push a button, people coming out. This is no question that this was an outpour. Now quickly because this is important to the public dialogue in America. There is a vision of Soleimani here which is now continuously becoming, we keep adding adjectives to how evil he was. But the way Iranians see him is very different. He became a household name in Iran when ISIS appeared. I mean an average Iranian had not heard of Soleimani during 2006, 2008. But when ISIS appeared and Assad was about to fall Iran saw this as a strategic moment. Their view was that if Damascus falls, Baghdad falls and then you have to deal with ISIS inside Iran. The logic is not very different from President Bush. You said you have to fight them there if you don't want to fight them here. And he was sent on a mission to organize the Hashdash Shabbi, the PMF forces in Iraq with the help of Ayatollah Sistani, put up resistance so Najaf Karbalov, Baghdad wouldn't fall and also defend Shia sites and Damascus and Assad in Syria. And to average Iranians and particularly religious Iranians those who go on pilgrimage to Iraq, they very well remember what happened in 2006 when insurgents blew up one of the most revered shrines for the Shias in Samara which actually started off the sectarian war. So in their eyes, Soleimani's the man is sort of a national hero that you can pick your own historical analogy general Roma or whatever it is think that he will handedly basically prevented this from happening. That's why Shias in the rest of the region revere him because they see him as the protector. It's obviously not necessarily blown out of proportion but there is that feeling about it. And we often forget that people in their minds can have more than one idea at the same time. They can dislike the revolution regards but like this one particular general. Soleimani's not the man that they read about on a daily basis in the newspaper over abusing women for a job or arresting dissidents, et cetera. He's out there fighting a war on the frontiers. And he also had an aura of being a humble general spending time with his soldiers. He wasn't known to be corrupt. He wasn't part of the sort of cartel machine of corruption in Iran. So there was genuine sentiment for him. But had he died of natural causes, you would not have had this funeral in Iran. And so for Iranian it's a national moment. It's a transformative moment. I don't know necessarily what the political implication of this would be down the road but I think the reason for it is truthful. It's one is that the Iranian people may be tired of their own government. They're angry, they're fed up but they believe that this particular fight was picked by the United States and that it's unfair and unjust. And that he's escalating. And he's first has ruined their daily livelihoods and now he's actually basically is coming over the border menacingly threatening war and showing that he's willing to do it. And so this was a massive act of defiance if you were to say. And say, you know, today in this day we're all together. We're all, as somebody mentioned that anybody, one journalist said, everybody on the street I asked, what's your name, he said, my name is Soleimani. Today they're all the same. So you know, Soleimani's been transformed into something else than what his real career or persona was. And finally, I do think Iranians have always believed that the only way to deter the United States from attacking Iran is to show up in force in the street in support of their government. Because everybody in Iran knows that if the US smells any distance between the public and the regime it's much more likely that they would attack Iran. So and I would just say that now, you know, I think the Supreme Leader, the other commanders, they're all absorbing what these two, three days mean. But I think one conclusion they come away with is that the people are with them to resist. It is not a demand for conciliation at this point. And finally that if the United States hit them again it's gonna only solidify this support. And that is gonna make them much more recalculated in trans-agenda I would say in terms of de-escalation, even if we had that in mind. All right, so I would like to, both of you to be thinking about what escalation looks like. But first let's talk with Ann Marie Slaughter about, so we've got a picture of Iraq and what that looks like and a picture of Iran, including some surprises. Let's come home. What's the picture here? What does this mean for us? So let me just start, first of all by thanking Peter and the International Security Program for making this happen very quickly. And particularly again, Sharon mentioned, but Peter's new book, Trump's Generals. I promise you if you read it before to this crisis and we're worried, read it now. That's kind of a bit complicated. Yeah, but one of the first things I thought of when I heard about this strike was, oh my God, and all those generals are no longer there to be offering restraint, wisdom, all sorts of sort of beneficial constraints. But let me look at this as an international lawyer and bring it directly home. So as somebody who taught international law for 12 years, if somebody had said to me, okay, the United States has just killed a Iranian military leader who may or may not have been acting as a diplomat. But on Iraq's soil, is that legal? The first thing I do is I think of Article 24 of the UN Charter, which if you're an international lawyer you have to repeat morning and night, which says that nations cannot use force against the national sovereignty or territorial integrity of any other state. So start there. Well, they definitely used force against the national sovereignty of Iraq. That's, and with nothing else, you start with that because Iraq did not want this to happen. And indeed, as Doug said, it's, so let's say there's a prima facie case of illegality right there. But Article 51 says the exception to Article 24 is self defense. And that is exactly where the administration has gone and it says we were acting in self defense. Now Article 51 says self defense against an armed attack. Well, okay, there was no armed attack against, there was an armed attack against our facilities. Yes, the killed an American contractor. That's not really the way the UN was set up, of course, and I'll come to this. The UN's imagining a direct armed attack against a border, which is we have not seen for some time. So you could say, well, all right, it was retaliation. But that's actually not what the administration's saying. The administration is saying Sulamani was planning attacks against us and this was actually a preemptive measure of self defense. And preemptive self defense, there's a wonderful phrase from something called the Caroline case. It's supposed to be an imminent attack. So you're gonna preempt an imminent attack and an imminent attack is instant overwhelming, leaving no choice of means or moment of deliberation. That is not this case. That is definitely not this case. So then you move to actually something that the Bush administration started pushing, which wasn't from preemptive self defense, it was preventive self defense. At that point, pretty much all legal constraints are off because that means I see an attack coming down the road, I see it being planned and I'm going to attack first to stop it. Now, you can see as a matter of law, anybody who thinks we're going to attack anyone, anyone we think particularly in an age of terrorism, state sponsored terrorism, that pretty much opens the door. So as a matter of just straight international law, you're pushing toward a definition of self defense that I think is deeply worrying and indeed we pull back from preventive self defense to preemptive after the Bush administration. I don't think this qualifies. Even if you do think it's self defense, then the counter measures, the measure of self defense has to be proportional and that's the other place where this debate is happening is the killing of Sulamani, which I think as I think of it, it's like killing the American head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at least roughly comparable. For the killing of an American contractor and the destruction of American facilities and I do not want to minimize those attacks. I mean, Doug gave us, Iran sort of figuring out it essentially, it escalated and we did have to respond. I think if I'd been sitting in the Pentagon or the White House, I would have said we had to respond. But if you're thinking about tip for tad escalation, this is going from about level seven to level two or level one and a half very, very fast. And there again, I think as an international legal matter, you would not say this is proportional. So then you come to domestic law and domestic law really, this has to come, well, they're two different doctrines. One, is it legal under Congress? The only way you can say that is for the Authorization of the Use of Military Force Act, all the way back to 2003, 2002. Yeah, this is 2002. You know, if you think of him as a terrorist leader and you don't think of him as a state actor, then you could say, yeah, we've killed lots and lots of leaders of terrorist groups under that. This, he was a state official. That to me is, and I'm going to come back to sort of the axes of change of a big difference. Equally alternatively though, you can say and the executive has the foreign affairs power. President Trump thinks that Article Two of the Constitution is a sweeping power for anything he wants to do, but even let's leave that aside. The foreign affairs power is very broad. The debate between where the executive has power, where it isn't a formal armed declaration of war situation, the executive has won almost all the time since the War Powers Resolution of 1974. So if you'll recall, we passed the War Powers Resolution to stop something like the Tonkin Gulf Declaration and our engagement in the Vietnam War to say if the President uses force, he's got to report to come back to Congress, it's gotta be approved. Nobody, Democrat or Republican, has done that consistently enough for it to be a real constraint. The one example, the counter example I can think of is Barack Obama going to Congress before striking Syria on the chemical attacks and Congress said no and Obama said no, but that was the very unusual case of the executive actually seeking a congressional constraint rather than Congress approving it. So bottom line, illegal under international law, very murky under, I mean, if you take this to court, domestically, the court will not resolve it, so it's really a question of congressional will to push back and we can discuss the wisdom of that. But here's where I think the bottom line is. Very worrisome in terms of the expansion of the definition of armed conflict. And here we study the future of war with ASU. When you talk about the future of war, you move immediately to it's going to be, it's increasingly offline, I mean online completely, so non-physical, although online with physical consequences, it's hybrid, right? It's a blurring of traditional physical attacks and virtual attacks and attacks that you could say were by an army versus attacks that are harder to trace. This pushes that in a way that I find even, if rocket strikes against a facility can justify the taking out of senior military officials and you think about the precedent there and we were just talking in the green room about the Indians saying, well, why can't we do this with a Pakistani general? And you can take that to any conflict among any two countries anywhere in the world and this will be used as a very dangerous precedent. The second is exactly that it blurs who's a combatant and who's, what first, who's a state actor versus a non-state actor. So the AUMF, that's al-Qaeda, that's ISIS, that's all the offshoots. You could say, look, you know, we're in an era in which non-state actors can inflict the kind of damage that once only states could and as murky as it is, you have to develop new rules and the army is actually in our military has been trying to do that with our own constraints. Soleimani's different, right? He's not an al-Qaeda leader. He's not an ISIS leader. He is an Iranian official. Now you can say he was there with Iranian-backed militias but they are acting in Iraq with mostly the approval of the Iraqi government. So there too, this looks to me like a very worrying blurring of state versus non-state. And the final thing I'll say, so you know, is it legal? No, I think it's illegal under international law. Is it precedential? Yes, precedential. It is in dangerous ways for us. This is, you know, I immediately thought of, well, okay, so Iran, Russia, North Korea designates any one of our senior military officials as a terrorist or whatever designation they want and come after them in Washington. And you know, remember, the Iranians have tried things, the Chileans tried things way back when. But the final thing I will say is you've seen almost no mention of the United Nations in the weeks since this happened, almost nothing. We are, you know, Ian Bremmer talks about the G-Zero world in which the traditional kind of U.S. role or countries who charge themselves with keeping the peace or were charged by the Security Council as badly as the Security Council has worked. It was, until very recently, still the place that you looked to when something like this happened, almost no mention. And that is very dangerous. Because then it's us versus the Iranians with the Russians, maybe with the Israelis, whoever wants to mix it in with no institutional constraints. I started with Article 2.4 of the UN Charter. You haven't heard much about that from anybody else. I'll leave it there. A quick follow-up question for you. And then I want to get to the question of escalation. You've had the Pentagon talking in terms for a while like asymmetric war and hybrid war and greyscale war, meaning that this system of laws and norms that have made this country prosperous and stable for a long time have now become a weapon. Are we at a point where there's still a chance to reform these laws so that they can enable us to deal with a world where the law itself is a weapon, or are we now talking about an irrevocably broken system? Especially if we start with 9-11, 2003, the invasion of Iraq, 2011, the killing of Qaddafi, and now this assassination. Are we dealing with something that's broken or something that can be fixed? So let me say, you are right to take it back, which is one reason I went back to the preventive war. That was something United States put forward, preventive. And yes, I think responsibility to protect, which again, I supported, but definitely was then used as a way of overturning Qaddafi. So I am supposed to be writing a piece right now on the expansion of the liberal international order. And my conclusion is more or less that for the only way to strengthen it and spread it is to work as much with governors and mayors and non-state actors as with state actors because I do not see the will among state actors for even the minimal enforcement of these rules. We've never had maximal enforcement. Well, we did have something you could call an order. If there were, and this president and I think President Putin and others, although not President Xi, doesn't want any rules. He wants back to the 19th century. He wants whoever is biggest makes bilateral deals with anybody else. And again, Putin wants that world too. He wants no rules. If we had a president who said, no, we've got to rebuild and build a new international order, I think there are rules we could create. I think as a matter of prediction, it will take maybe this attack and a couple of other really horrific ones. I don't know how many. It will take a cyber attack that levels, creates massive casualties. And it may take a couple of other, and it takes those kinds of threats to mobilize the world in the way that World War I and World War II did. And it's hard for me to see something big enough that would pull states together right now. But with the right leaders, I could, I think it could be repaired, but I'm not optimistic. That's a very good segue to a conversation about escalation. Where, you know, I think everyone's holding their breath now. Like, where can this go? Because I don't think anybody really knows. So, you know, what do you think, Doug, Bobby, where do you think this goes? What might Iran do next? The ball's in their court right now. And I think to say face, they have to do something. What's it going to be? What could they do? What would they do? Well, I mean, what they would do it could actually surprise us. I mean, for instance, when they hit the drone, and particularly when they did the Oranco attack, it was just both in terms of their capabilities and the choice of target. 19 missiles, right? 19 missiles, well, cruise missiles and drones, that sort of technology that we didn't even know they had. And at least this publicly was noted that neither the US military nor Saudi radar has actually picked these coming. And this, by the way, is the biggest oil facility in the world, half of Saudi Arabia's production. So hitting that target is no small thing, so to speak. But it went to the element of surprise in the sense that we always are thinking about the past model. So they're going to do this with Hezbollah or they're going to do that with ships. It might be a massive cyber attack, for instance, which might not elicit the kind of response that President Trump is threatening. A response, but not necessarily that. I think at least one thing I could say at this moment, they're not really keen on picking on their Arab allies. And the reason for that is that during the summer, when they decided that they actually need to flex their muscles, they did send some powerful signals. So some of what they did was not directed at the United States, was directed at their Arab allies. So when they hit the tankers in Fujairah, which was going to be the first plan, the message, essentially, to the Gulf countries was that we're not going to fight the United States in Iraq. If it comes to a war, we're going to fight them on your soil, and you can kiss your skyline goodbye, and all the money is going to leave here. So don't share the United States into a war with us anymore. UAE said they're going to come out of Yemen. They started some kind of opening with Iran. There was even rumor that they allowed flow of dollars into Iran, which allowed the Iranian currency to appreciate. The Saudis similarly decided that it was time to maybe bury the hatchet in the Qatar. They haven't progressed very far, but at least they opened the door. And then Iranians tried to take advantage of this sort of moment, and also the fact that the Arabs thought that America is not going to defend them to also launch their own initiative. So for the first time, you had actually conversations about collective security, multilateral, bilateral, that there is no more Pax Americana here. And even, you know, I would believe the Iraqi Prime Minister more than I would believe Secretary Pompeo today, that when he said there was no such thing as a letter from Saudi, because we know this has been going on. The Saudis and Iranians had these messages through the Prime Minister of Pakistan, but Adel al-Mahdi had been a go-between for some time. And I'm not saying anything has resolved, but, you know, there was a message coming and a message going back. And if we say there was some progress, the Iranians allowed the Houthis to go to Riyadh and start serious negotiations with the Saudis, and the Yemen war has tamped down. I don't think the Iranians necessarily, they're waiting to see also how the Arabs will react. But if the Arabs sort of maintained their distance from the U.S., I don't think they were going to go after them. But that's also not to the advantage in the United States, because we're sort of, I mean, no today or yesterday, a mystery from Mohammed bin Salman was here. And the Deputy Minister of Defense was at Royal to persuade President Trump to back down. So who would have thought that the Saudis would be the peace ongoing here, but they're more or less than anything upside down? That's a big year ago. Okay. It's, I mean, I'm on record saying that if you think you know what's going to happen, you're a fool or a liar, I think we're in really uncharted territory. I can't think of a historical analogy. You know, we have a superpower in conflict. They're, you know, only a regional power. So I think guns of August comparisons are very miscast. They're not a peer competitor to us. We're not in a tit for tat with the Russians or Chinese. That said, it's really hard to see where this goes. I was just before this panel on a Middle East television network. And I, you know, Iranian on the other side of the screen, and he was quite clear, I think I believe a former parliamentarian, quite clear that they had to strike American assets inside Iraq because that's where this offense against Iranian dignity occurred. Now, I don't know if that's the official government line. I don't know if that's what's going to happen. If that does happen, it's hard to see how that then does not trigger another American response and get us into, you know, some type of... And each one has to be a little bit more... Right, each a little higher than the other. And I would just, you know, continue, or a lot higher. If the president's words are... Right. And I think what needs to be kept in the forefront of our mind all the time is that petrochemical infrastructure is inherently vulnerable because of what goes through it. There is no way to effectively harden oil, gas, and so on. And that stuff in, you know, primarily in Eastern province and Saudi Arabia, but all the way around the Gulf through Iraq and into Iran is that controls 20-ish percent of world supply. That's a important factor, and I suspect that's really what's on Prince Khaled's mind when he gets on a plane and applies to the United States. And just in case people don't know, even though the United States now is certainly self-sufficient in North America for oil and gas, and we would be able to increase production fairly dramatically and probably pretty quickly, if there were a disruption, it's still a global market. So our prices would track the global prices. Right, Americans would not go without... We can't replace 25% of the world's production. Right. Much higher price. That's a big problem for us, too. I guess, yeah. Somebody would go without it. Of course, we have to be thinking about as much as anybody else. Americans don't like high oil prices. And in an election year? Right. So it's not just the Saudis thinking through that, you know, he can't afford that. You know, I asked Peter Bergen before we sat down if the Iranians were capable of striking targets in the United States, and there's a difference between could they and would they? And he doesn't believe that they have the capability. Is that fair to say, Peter? Here, I'm like, you're sitting there, and I'm like... If you wanted to... Hey, David, can you give Peter the microphone, please, so that he's on the camera? Just so you know, when we get to you, we won't be on TV if you don't take the mic. Kevin Milano, the plan to kill the Saudi ambassador. But I think that plan was largely aspirational, not really operational. And, you know, the FBI is very much on top of as well as cigarette smugglers and the like. So I think their capacity is very limited here. I mean, American targets in Lebanon or in Afghanistan, it's a whole different matter. And then there's a question of would they? You know, would they... You know, there's still rational calculations going on here, even if you do have to respond somehow and you have to respond to the fact that you've got big crowds and you've got agendas in Iraq and all of that, would they? I think they have to do something, at least for a segment of their constituency. And the question is, what's the magnitude of it and how do we respond to that? And you could get out of hand after that. But I also do think that you're right, they're rational actors. So if you were to say, what is the most important strategic objective for Iran right now is that Trump doesn't get elected? So they also have a read of our politics. They know the difference between now and Iraq is that actually at least half the American population and much of the Congress is opposed to war. I mean, this is not like the way we were in 2002, where we were marching towards it. And you know, if an attack is out of proportion, it could turn the American public. I don't think they wanna do something to help the president in the election. I think the one leverage they have over him is that if they can time this right or if he's afraid they can time it right, as Anne Marie said, for instance, oil prices. That they could actually ruin his election. He doesn't know how they might do that, there is a Benghazi event somewhere. It might be Iraq, it might be somewhere else over there, it's oil over there, something else. But I do think that the only way Iranians can sort of survive this crisis is if Trump doesn't get elected. And I mean, if you said that they have to deal with five more years of Trump and this, then, you know, the strategic calculation would be very different. I wanna ask a very provocative question of you. Let's say hypothetically, something does happen in the United States, whether it's cyber, it could be cyber, which the, you know, what the proportionate responses is still not totally clear of or something like that. What kinds of powers does the president have? What kind of reaction might it provoke from him? What might he do here at home if you saw, say, a Paris or Mumbai-style attack in the United States? Paris or Mumbai, cyber or no, no, physical response. I think those are two very, very different questions. Okay. A physical kinetic attack in the United States, I think is a horse of entirely different color than a major cyber attack, whether attributed or unattributed. Then answer them separately. I just wanna clarify, I'm really answering. I'm listening, I'm really answering. Sorry, that was as if I have some window. So let me start by actually just adding on to Vali's answer about the Iranian calculation. If I think there's a very high likelihood of kidnapping if they can, one of the reasons I think we want everybody out of Iraq for many reasons, but if you're Iran, you wanna do something that makes it harder just to strike back, right? You want American service people who, if Trump strikes back, they get murdered. So you want something that is a retaliation but that cools things down, at least makes everybody think again, rather than a tit for tat military strike. At least that is one way I would be thinking and the strategic value of that and the hostage crisis and Trump got us back into this and what are we gonna do? So a kinetic attack would have to be met by some really severe physical attack on Iranian infrastructure but presumably one that you could try to limit. But I don't see what else you could do particularly if you're Trump. You know, a cyber attack, I think it's very different and Trump is perfectly capable of saying the Iranians just didn't do it. They're too scared of me, they didn't. I mean, if you think about misinformation and the difficulty of attribution, we've already seen the NSA can say they did do it and he will say they didn't do it and as far as he's concerned, he's altered reality. So that I think is a better, probably a more reassuring scenario although very still extremely dangerous again for precedent than you think, well you can do this and you don't ever respond. Or else we respond virtually and again, as with North Korea when we responded to the Sony attack, it was not public that that's what we were doing but we sent a very clear message to the North Korea. Yeah, and I think the Iranians maybe have already ratcheted up their campaigns on social media. Okay, I wanna ask all three of you one more question before we let the audience ask some questions. One thing that I wonder, both before this, in the Obama administration with the nuclear deal and now with this assassination, what's the long play here? What's the Iran that the United States can live with eventually? What is a credible vision for coexistence, a peaceful coexistence? As a defense person, this has been a long time coming. I wouldn't have foreseen that we would take an action like this but sooner or later, I think when you come out of the defense community you thought something, this was gonna happen. That the United States and Iran were gonna come to a break point even with the nuclear deal. That there were too many other things on the table that were gonna be hard to resolve. Maybe not but what, is there a way to get to a coexistence and what does that look like? How do we get there from here? Not easily now but even before this event I would have said that the significance of the nuclear deal was that it was the first arms control deal. This was not normalization. This was not Nixon to China. This was more like what we used to do with the Soviets. So the question was that yes, it's a first arms control deal. You don't come and sort of shred it just because it doesn't cover all the weapons. You would have said, okay, Iran's regional behavior is also a weapons system. So how do we get to a second or a third or a fourth arms control deal? And the problem with Iran is that, and look, when we signed the nuclear deal with Iran we compensated the Saudis and Israel with over $100 billion worth of new weapons. So actually in Iran, they used to say they're the big winners of the nuclear deal. So what happened is that we gave up our sort of strategic umbrella. They got even stronger conventional weaponry. There's many parts of this. I mean, if you want Iran really to come out of the region it basically there has to be some kind of an arms control deal regionally. Which means that you guys don't invest in missiles. We don't invest in missiles. You don't get this. We don't get that. And arms control deals take time to put in place because it's about trust. I mean, Iran beats its chest, but it's a country that its conventional military is very weak. It's airport belongs in a museum, if at all. So it relies on Hezbollah as its version of patriot missiles. It's a deterrence against Israel. It's investing in these missiles and nuclear technology. So ultimately, you have to sort of think of some kind of a security in the region. But that means that the United States has to get out of standing between the Arabs and the Iranians as sort of always taking that side. I mean, if you're sitting on this side, it actually has to encourage them to talk to each other. I think the Obama administration was right. You know, the Saudis need to share the region with the Iranians. It's not gonna be happy friendly. But you see what? Actually, now they were trying to do that. I mean, it's the irony of irony is that under President Trump, the Saudis have realized that they actually need to do that. But if they arrived at the point, and you can build small, like, you know, we can jointly agree on some maritime security rules. We agree to certain things, non-interference in one another's domestic affairs. For instance, that you could say you would build from there. But overnight solutions will get us back to 2003 with Iraq. And that, you know, you're gonna sort of fix this region and this country in one suit. Otherwise, it's really job for diplomats, which is we're not really relying on. And it's gonna take time. It's not a short-term measure. So the hardest thing for me in this is honestly, if we just stayed out, and I'm mindful of my own recommendations over time, but fundamentally, the youth in Iraq and certainly the youth in Iran were heading back in our direction with, I mean, I've always told the story of about 20 years ago being with an Iranian who was roughly my age and this Iranian saying, well, you know, the young people are just passionately pro-American. And I looked at him and I said, what? And he said, well, do you have teenagers? And I said, well, yeah. And he said, well, why do I need to say anything more than that? Right, the parents' generation was death to the United States, the young people taking their own course. But also, exactly as Doug said, and we're seeing, we saw across the region in 2011 and just because the Arab Spring is over does not mean you don't have massive numbers of young people, including in our own country, who are simply saying enough, enough with either the sectarianism or the religious repression or the corruption or just the lack of effective government. So one of the things that is most frustrating here is that you had Iraqi youth protesting and Iranian youth protesting and this will, I don't think it stops at long term, but I definitely think it changes the subject and makes it much harder. I will say, but to your point about a longer term vision, I recommend Kim Gattus' new book, Gattus G-H-A-T-T-A-S, which is coming out, which really talks about the kind of upheaval in the Muslim world pre-Shia Sunni split, which Bali coined the Shia Crescent, but that really said this was a religious upheaval that starts in 1979 in Iran, but then of course goes to Al-Qaeda and sort of the Sunni, Orthodox Sunni Muslim upheaval, sort of religious revivalism, religious orthodoxy of a kind we have seen in Christianity many times, that on its own time is burning itself out, but we are doing everything we can to make that a much longer and slower process than I think it otherwise would have been. Hard to be optimistic in this moment. We'll see how the next few weeks play out. The things that do give me hope, the two glimmers are, one, the youth, as Amri was discussing as I talked about earlier, although I agree, I think we've lost this moment and now we need to look at the next cycle of that and how that comes about for both in Iraq and Iran, although I think for very different reasons. But the thing that gives me hope is watching, actually, Turkish-Russian relations. Who would have thought in 2013, was it 13 or 14, when Turkey shoots down a Russian airplane that five, six years later, we'd be really worried about them getting too cozy? Things in the Middle East can turn very, very, very quickly and it is not impossible for relations to be reset on a timeline that is, I think, quite astounding to us. I think we tend to hold our grudges a little longer. So watching that example of how the Turks and the Russians have reconciled gives me hope that perhaps some other model of that could happen, particularly if, as we see with Prince College's visit, everyone realizes we're looking into the abyss and maybe this is a good time to back up. I think we may hold our grudges longer but our memories are a lot shorter. That's what worries me. I would just say, give the audience a chance to talk and I'll just tell you before you raise your hands, please identify. Really can I do one little two finger on that point? Yeah, because I have one other thing I want to say. For us, Qasem Soleimani and Mohandas are PMU, Iranian, Shia, terrorists. For the Iraqis, they're the only ones who stopped a genocidal group from taking Baghdad in June and July of 2014 when the United States was still fuzzy on maybe this is just a Sunni revolt and we need to set this one out. And for Iranians, this is not the first Iranian leader that the United States has assassinated. So, but not too many Americans would remember that. Right. I think what I worry about is that the Iranians know what they want in terms of a future relationship with the United States, which is they want us out of the region and they want to be able to protect and promote their regional interests without our interference. But I don't think we know what we really want from them. What a peaceful, other than some, we have some in the United States that want a war. But a war's never about the war. It's about what comes next. And I don't think we have a very good vision of what comes next. So that's what worries me. But so if you have questions, this is your moment and please identify yourself and your affiliation. And I just want to warn you that I may seem nice, but I am not. And if you begin to hold forth, I will try to twist you towards a question. So please make it a question. Okay. Or a comment, but brief. Sir. You caught my eye. So you just have to wait for the microphone because the camera won't pick you up unless you speak into the microphone. To Valley. Could you tell us who you are? Yeah. Oh, the Aberdeen consultant on this one. In Mike. My question is to Valley. Can the Iranians do something to undermine us in Afghanistan at a time when we're trying to talk with the Taliban who have lots of blood on their hands? You have a lot of experience there? No, no, no. Definitely Afghanistan is in play. Again, their interests are conflicted. On the one level, if they steal between the government and the Taliban, gets the United States to leave, that's something that benefits them and they want. They would welcome it. On the other hand, much like Iraq, they don't want the United States on their borders and having U.S. troops as a staging ground. But also there is a lot of capabilities of violence there. I mean Iranians have ties to the Taliban, they have ties to the Haqqani network, and ultimately if you thought about what the long game even over a year might be, is not to focus on a single place where the U.S. can respond, but actually stretch the U.S. military over a vast, over a vast strength, yeah, I think it's in place. Other comments, please? All right. See. Hello, I'm James Nize, I'm a student at the University of Pennsylvania. I just wanted to ask you about the obviously 2020 election and election security has been a big topic domestically. I was just curious, what are the capabilities of Iran and its allies as to interfering in our elections and whether or not this situation has now changed Iran's calculation and its allies on how they should go about election interference? I mean, if we take Bali's point that the worst outcome for Iran is Trump being re-elected, one of the surest ways of helping him get re-elected would be to intervene in any traceable way. Because I think it would just be devastating, right? At that point, even the Democrats have to line up against Iran and worrying about the results. So I think if that, that is not something that would be high on my worry list. If you're asking if they can, absolutely, because the last attack on al-Abqaiq was in Saudi Arabia was a cyber attack that the Iranians mounted that was quite successful. So they're good at this. They're one of the few countries in the world that really are good at it. And we fought an undeclared cyber war with them for a very long time. They're not as good as we are. Okay, in the back, please? Yeah, Max Blumenthal, I just wanted to pick up on two points Douglas Alavent made. First, that Mohandas and Soleimani were very effective in deterring ISIS and rolling back ISIS. Does the panel not see a troubling pattern here as I do of administrations, Republican and Democrat, targeting governments and figures in the Middle East who have been extremely effective in deterring Wahhabi extremist groups, Syria, Libya. And second point that I think I heard you make was that sanctions contributed to this escalatory cycle. Sanctions imposed on Iran. Does the panel think it was wise for the Senate Democrats in June 2017 to approve Trump's sanctions in apparent violation of the JCPOA on Iran? Do you think that contributed to this escalatory cycle? And how do unilateral coercive measures like sanctions which are not approved at the UN fit into a rules-based liberal international order? I mean, on the first part of it, I mean, Mohandas may be different as Doug said, but Iran will produce, if you would date, a successor to Soleimani. I think, you know, this, and Doug also alluded to this, it always sort of reminds me of the theme of Steven Spielberg's move in Munich. You know, every Palestinian that got assassinated was replaced by a worse person, which has actually been the legacy of sort of Israeli decapitation campaigns against Palestinians. So, you know, we might end up, maybe they're not as competent, but they might be much more vicious and nasty the people who are going to replace these guys. So in the end, there might be a time where we rule having eliminated these two both for their influence, but also because people who replace them might be far worse. But on the sanctions, they were. I'll let Ann Marie take sanctions. But on your question, no, I don't think that these individuals are targeted because they're effective against ISIS. Perhaps they're targeted because, you know, despite the fact that they're effective against ISIS, but those are two entirely different things. So no, I do not think that we're somehow going after effective anti-ISIS governments or figures. Can I ask you a somewhat personal follow-up on that? I think there's a perception that in the U.S. armed forces that there are strong feelings about Soleimani because he was, although he did not directly pull the trigger, he certainly provided the capability that led to a lot of American soldiers and Marines dying. Is that something that our uniform professionals can get past? It's certainly something. Yes, absolutely. It's certainly something that is felt. That is a thing. That's undeniable. It's not just in the military. You talk to the older generation of state department, the current senior lions of NEA, and they definitely have that feeling because of Beirut, because of other formative events for them. Why we have that for the Iranians and not for other figures has always been something that has baffled me. I mean, it's absolutely a true statement that Soleimani and the IRGC coups force are responsible for about 600 deaths of American soldiers in Iraq. That leaves another 3,000 odd to be accounted for, and I think we all know who was facilitating those deaths. And we seem to get over that very, very quickly. So I don't understand why this unending enmity against Iranian influence, and then the Sunni awakening guys, guys who were fighting with Al-Qaeda who were responsible for many, many deaths in Anbar, well in excess of 600. They flip sides and we forgive them literally overnight. I don't understand the disparity between these two sides. I mean, either you hold grudges against people, kill your people or you don't. I don't understand why for the Iranians, it's lifetime and for other extremists, it's something we can get over. Anything on sanctions? I mean, I agree with the spirit of your question that sanctions are a weapon of war. So yes, yes. It looks like Peter might wanna answer that question. Actually, I had a question for Amri, which is about the arguments that were made by the administration about immigrants and Soleimani and the planning are very similar to the arguments that were made about the targeted killing of Anwar Al-Aki, an American citizen who headed Al-Qaeda in Yemen. And President Obama, by all accounts, made this decision to authorize the killing of an American citizen the first time that an American president done that since the American Civil War. He didn't really, he made the decision pretty quickly. But is there something to be said about, I mean, clearly this kind of decision-making around immigrants and terrorists really came up. It started with George W. Bush, but it really, he was the drone president. And so is there something to be said about that? Yes, and again, I mean, this goes to Sharon's point about we're operating in a relatively rule-free zone here and you and the drone project know better than anyone how many times we've done this when it was a non-state actor who wasn't an American citizen. So we, and yes, when these issues have been raised by human rights groups, of course it's CIA drones, but there are arguments about well we actually do have various protocols, but they're not public. And I think there are, I think we try to reduce civilian casualties, but not as much as we want to, but none of them are public and none of them are shared. And that is a huge problem, but we basically let it go unless it was an American citizen and that did raise a lot of controversy and rightly, although I can see from Obama's point of view sitting with his military and as somebody who does, did believe that drones were the way to do it. The fact that he was waging war on the United States in the same way that other al-Qaeda leaders are and as a lawyer I could make arguments on either side or here where again the difference is he's not a non-state actor, he's a state actor. But the very fact that we notice in those two cases to me points out that we're not, we're accepting it in so many others and ultimately I don't think those rules will come until it starts getting used against us which is why the Iranian use of drones against the Saudis was so important. But it's, you know, we don't wanna live in a world in which individuals can be taken out with whoever happens to be riding with them in a car at will on anybody's territory. We'll take another question. Sorry. Yes, you. Just remember to please identify yourself and your affiliation. My name's John Corbell, I'm a DC resident and I just have, there's been barely a mention today about Israel and I'm curious on what you think are the potential escalations in response with respect to Israel and we also have a leader in Israel who might benefit from some sort of response. So just be curious on what your response is, what your feelings are on that. You know, there has been persistent Israeli attacks on Iranian positions in Syria and as of the summer, they even went over into Iraq and by many, some thought that actually this was basically the Israeli prime minister baiting Iran into a response that might help them domestically. As of summer, at least the estimates were that Israelis have killed upwards of 1600 Revolutionary Guard commanders and officers in Syria, which is a very heavy toll. Now of course they didn't brag about it on Twitter and that probably helped, but Iranians made a decision that they're not going to play into Israel's hands, that they're gonna remain focused on the Persian Gulf region and that they're not gonna be baited into a conflict with Syria. Although there's another play in Syria, you know, we don't know what Putin might be telling them in terms of why don't you absorb it for now and don't escalate this. But Israelis have been doing everything they can short of a direct attack on Iran in order to provoke an Iranian response and they haven't done it. I don't think, again, this is not like 1980s, I don't think that Iranians figure that you would hit Israel and the Arab world would rally immediately to the Palestinian cause and would be riled up. You're not gonna get that kind of a response in the Arab world. And at the same time, it would expand the conflict in ways that it gets out of control with the United States. So I would, I mean, who knows, but I don't think that's not necessarily a knee jerk reaction. What about unattributable attacks? Well, you know, those things can always happen, but that doesn't have the benefit of actually showing their own public or the United States that they reacted. That might be sometimes sort of a deterrence if you did something just to tell the Israelis to back up. But I think they also have a very good sense about, you know, Bibi's game, that this benefits him. He's right now in a very tough place. What he would really, really like is for an Iranian attack. And, you know, the Arab world is no longer a threat to Israel. He cannot pose as Churchill defending Israel among Gaza. There's no cash in it. But Iran is the one sort of enemy that might justify his claim to power. So I don't think the Iranians want to play into that. You don't think the hardliners could carry that? No, you know, these decisions in Iran are not made like this. Iran has a national security process. There's a national, Supreme National Security Council. We want state too. We want state too, exactly. And usually actually the Supreme Leader has a representative on it. After Soleimani's death, it was the first time after 20 years that he presided over it. Which to me means that he wanted... Open, anyway. Pardon me? Openly, anyway. No, well usually he doesn't. But I think in this case, even openly, basically we wanted to make sure that the recommendations that come out of it will not be out of his control. So, you know, things that I think even our president may take into account. But you know, they usually deliberate and look at all of these and the revolution regards and the hardliners are sort of bound by that, by that consensus that emerges. I mean, the security side in Iran is fairly bureaucratized and very sort of command and control driven. So, if a decision is made to go after Israel, it's a regime decision. We're at time. So, I just want to see if any of you have last comments on this conversation, on the situation, on what worries you and hopeful? It's hard to be anything. I didn't mean to stump you. It's hard to be anything but pessimistic in this moment. It is hard to see how we get to an outcome that has the United States and its interests and the interests of its friends and allies in as good a position as we were two weeks ago. That's, it's hard to see a path that gets us back to there in the short term. So, I think we need to be looking a little further down and perhaps do some longer-term thinking about how we start structuring our relationships in the Middle East, thinking a little further down the road. So, one thing that nobody's mentioned, but I do think, I was thinking about when you were asking the question about Bibi and Bibi would love to have an Iranian attack so that he could distract his own people. Well, nobody is talking about impeachment. I mean, if you just, I'm not going to argue that this was all designed to change the subject, but it has changed the subject dramatically. And I do think you have to just observe that. And that doesn't make me happy. Long-term, I guess, I'm not optimistic, but our relationship with the Middle East has been changing since Obama, right? Obama comes in saying, you know, Afghanistan's the good war. We have got to get out of Iraq. The American patience with our American soldiers dying in the Middle East since 2003 is over. And so, in some ways, I see this as a catalyst to a process that has been long and unguided or serially guided in different directions, but does have to come to a different equilibrium because this is not a sustainable equilibrium with enough soldiers there to be involved, but not enough to even be at the table. You know, you're talking about Russian and Turkey. We are nowhere in Syria. And maybe this completes that process in some way. I mean, I think the worst thing is that, I think the president is not surrounded by seasoned hands and people who have experienced or even know how to manage a situation. And that's, I think, worrisome to me. I think Doc's point is on the positive side, it's good everybody's looking down into an abyss and that might very well be provide an opening, but I just don't see in this team, I don't mean the president is in this team the capability to take advantage of this in a positive way. And again, this is, I think it's important to repeat. This really is different. This is an unusual foreign policy crisis for the United States and this president's about to be tested. So, thank you all for coming. Be careful out there, it's snowy. And we appreciate you joining us for this conversation.