 It is with a lot of pleasure that I get to welcome my friend and our frequent colleague here at New America, Emma Sky, who as many of you know, had a very distinguished career in Iraq, working as the political advisor to General Odierno, and also advisor, you also advise David Petraeus as well. She is a fellow at the Senior Fellow at Yale University's Jackson Institute. Emma started life as an aid worker and aid worker in Gaza and had a sort of, before she started working with the U.S. military, she just published this very well-reviewed new book, The Unraveling, High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq. So she's going to talk to the big themes and stories of her book and then we'll open it up to Q&A. Okay, well, thank you very much and thank you all for coming today. So the title of my book, The Unraveling, High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq, and I want to talk a little bit about why I actually wrote the book. So I did three tours in Iraq and I'll get to talk about those. But when I left Iraq, 2010, middle of 2010, I struggled after I'd left and I thought, what had it all been for? What had the sacrifice been for? What had all the efforts been for? And I kept going back to Iraq as a tourist to see Iraqi friends. And I thought I'd witnessed so many key events that I almost had a duty to record them. And I thought, you know, we can honour the lives that were lost by trying to learn the right lessons from this war. And I wanted to acknowledge all the hard work and efforts that those who served out in Iraq year after year had put in. And I wanted to pay tribute to Iraq, a country which I came very much to love. The style of the book is memoir, it's not history. It's my personal odyssey, but it's also the story of Iraq and the US military. Now, as Peter sort of hinted in that introduction, I was sort of quite an unlikely character to turn up in Iraq after 2003. I'd been against the war. And when the British government asked for volunteers to go and administer Iraq for three months before we handed the country back to Iraqis, I volunteered. I thought, this is my chance, I can go out for three months, apologize to Iraqis for the war, let them know that most people in Europe were against the war. And I'd been working in Jerusalem for a decade in the West Bank and Gaza, so I had skills in capacity building and conflict mediation. Now, I had no idea what my job was going to be. The British government on the phone said, turn up RAF Bryce Norton, get on a military flight to Basra, and you'll be met there by someone with a sign with your name on it and taken to the nearest hotel. Well, it's the British government, I assumed that they knew what they were doing. I assumed they had a job for me, but they just hadn't told me what my job was going to be. So I followed the instructions, got to the Royal Air Force Base, got on a plane. It was kind of full of soldiers, there were no other civilians there. Ended up in Basra, and it was quite clear on arrival that nobody was expecting me. Nobody had heard my name, there was no sign, there was no nothing. So that's how I initially arrived in Iraq. And I wandered around, I got to Baghdad, met some key figures there, and they said, you know, we've got enough people in Baghdad, try around the north, see if you can find a job for yourself somewhere up there. So I travelled around for a bit, and after a week or so I got to Kukuk, the province of Kukuk. And was told that I was now Ambassador Bremer's representative to Kukuk, the governor-coordinator of the province. And I thought, gosh, it's not exactly what I was expecting. And in my first week there, insurgents came to the front door of my house, I was living downtown, and blew up the house with me in it. So this is how I came to meet the US military. This is Colonel Maval, now Lieutenant General Maval. So I went to see him, he was sitting in his office in the government building, the office that used to be the governor of Kukuk's. And he was sitting there, feet up on the table, and I came to see him, and I said, Colonel, it's slightly embarrassing, my house has been blown up. Do you have any accommodation on the airfield that I could move into? And his response was, you know, we're going to find those people, we're going to hunt them down. And I was like, oh, my God, you know, they're attacking me because I'm a symbol of the illegal occupation. I just want a house, tent, any accommodation, not looking for people to be killed because of me. So I turned up to see him again the next day, and I brought with me my laptop on which I'd got the 4th Geneva Convention, and I read it to him, article by article, and told him if I found him in violation of any of the articles, I'd take him to the Hague. Those early days of working with Americans, I didn't know you couldn't take Americans to the Hague, or they didn't recognise International Criminal Court. Anyway, so that was the start of an unlikely partnership because he thought this is fantastic, the first of the civilians to arrive, she's going to replace me. So he explained that we were to do this left seat, right seat, or right seat, left seat in my case, and he would hand over his role to me. He thought that I was coming with a whole team of civilians that would take over and administer the province. Well, that didn't actually happen. So even though he was the commander of the 173rd Airborne Brigade out of Vicenza, his unit had jumped into Iraq, paratroopers, taken, cooked, and thought they were going home. Well, they didn't go home for about a year. So during that time, I got to work very, very closely with him and his brigade. And I found extraordinary characters. I couldn't understand why anybody in their right mind would join the military. It's like, were they in trouble with the law? Had they got no other jobs they could do? And yet I found in this unit people, you know, very well educated, even with degrees from Harvard. I thought, wow. So this was quite new for me. And they wanted to administer everything. So trying to explain to them that success meant actually the Iraqis running their province rather than the 173rd Airborne Brigade running the province. You know, they got to that. And so they drew back and they helped advise Iraqis. And the colonel said, look, you understand how to do this nation-building stuff much better than we do. That's your experience, development. How about I put a whole bunch of my soldiers under you and you work out what to do with them. So that was my first experience of dealing with the military. And it completely changed my perceptions of the military. So after the brigade left, I thought I can't stand cook, cook without them. I was sad they were going. I decided I would go down to Baghdad to work for Ambassador Bremer down in Baghdad. So this was Coalition Provisional Authority Headquarters Baghdad. And the man that I have fallen asleep on top of is the president of Iraq, Sheikh Raziel Yawa. So he had just been appointed president, the first president after Saddam. And part of my job when I was down in Baghdad was to sort of be his aide, be his staffer. So I got to travel around with Sheikh Raziel. This is a trip I think we've just been up to Mosul, which is his hometown, flying back. We landed back in Baghdad. Bremer goes off. There's a car for Bremer. Bremer whizzes off. And there's no car for Sheikh Raziel, the president. So said Sheikh Raziel, I think we're going to have to hitchhike. Sheikh Raziel, who's got a wonderful sense of humour, lifts up his dish dasher and he starts hopping on one leg, thumbing a lift. The car's going by. Eventually we did find a car and Sheikh Raziel found his way back. So he was, you know, the first president after Saddam. And it wasn't an easy time. He had the US military trained his bodyguards and then other members of the US military beat up his bodyguards because they didn't know they were his bodyguards. So he was constantly having to deal with the difficulties of his new post while we were still there. Here's another photo, which sort of dubbed the Great Escape. So we'd had, this was the CPA, the Coalition Provincial Authority was coming to its end and Ambassador Bremer had a farewell party for everybody who'd worked at CPA. And as the bombs were going off in the background and all the shooting around the palace, he said to us, you'll remember for the rest of your lives how you helped bring democracy to Iraq. I thought, yes, I'm going to remember many things about my time in Iraq. Bringing democracy wasn't foremost in my mind. So this photo is taken of June the 28th. We were supposed to hand over authority to the Iraqis on June the 30th. We were very fearful there'd be a spectacular attack against us. So we crept out two days early. So this is the Great Escape. Ambassador Bremer's sitting there. Next to him is Baham Saleh, who was Deputy Prime Minister at the time, who came to wave us off. And he said, I've got on the left the new colonial masters and on my right the old colonial masters. Going to say goodbye to both of them. So CPA ended. The palace where we were based became the U.S. Embassy. And a couple of years later, after Iraq had sort of descended into civil war, a couple of years later I came back to Iraq, this time as political advisor to General Odierno. So General Odierno was appointed as the operational commander for the search, had portrays as the strategic commander and Odierno was the one managing the day-to-day activities. And so this meant a whole change of approach back out among the people, new tactics. And here we are, what we call BFC, battlefield circulation. So day in, day out, going to see Iraqis, making sure that the troops were protecting the Iraqi people from the insurgents. Now during this time, Tony Blair decided to visit. This was his last visit to Iraq. And I was introduced to the British Prime Minister by two American generals, which was kind of a little bit weird. And they told him I was British and he said, are you really British? I said, no, I really am, born and bred British. So what are you doing with these guys? So I just said Stockholm Syndrome. And then before I could speak to him about what was, you know, where did the decision to go to war come from, not a good idea, Mr. Prime Minister, before I could get on to that conversation, we came under attack and he had to run for cover and everybody else sort of moved away from the windows. So it was a very short conversation I had with Blair and never got on to the issue about the decision to go to war. Here in the middle is Dr. Bassimer. And Dr. Bassimer was the military advisor to the Iraqi Prime Minister. Now nobody would expect the Iraqi Prime Minister to have a woman as a military advisor. There were many things about Iraq that people didn't expect. And she was a woman who I got to know very, very well. She was portrayed by the US military as, you know, the root of all evil, the leader of sectarian death squads. But I was sure that she couldn't be as bad as they made out. And I made a big effort to get to know her, went to see her and said, look, you know, we're two women about the same age, we're going to deal with military guys and they're not easy to deal with. And she said, yes, you are right, we must work together. And so at the beginning she felt that everything that happened in Iraq had been part of a conspiracy by the US to destroy Iraq. So my first objective was to convince her that it wasn't a conspiracy, it was incompetence. And of course she couldn't believe our incompetence. You can put a man on the moon, how can you not do these sorts of things? So that took a while. But I managed to build up, you know, build up trust between us. And she and I met with a number of insurgents and tried to get people who were insurgents to stop being insurgents to turn against al-Qaeda and then to move and join the Iraqi security forces. She was very influential on Prime Minister Maliki and it was she who convinced him that we've got to work with these Sunnis who are awakening, who are turning against al-Qaeda. So she was the one who really convinced Maliki. This is in Diyala during, there must have been about July. So while the violence had gone down in Baghdad, a lot of the insurgents had then moved to Diyala province. And I like this photo because even though war nowadays is seen as so high-tech on the ground at the basic level, it's still very much a human endeavor. And so this is a bombed-out health clinic. You've got the battalion commander briefing from maps to General Odieno about the plan of battle for Diyala. And then off the side in rooms you can't see, you're just soldiers, all in their kits, fast asleep, exhausted, having done raid after raid. And we're standing here in front of a striker vehicle. We've just been out in to Diyala and that's with General Townsend leading that group. And the person you probably can't see is actually me, looking a bit weird, but anyway, that is me. And at the end of the surge, General Odieno gave me a photo album. Some of these photos come from that album because he said, you can't deny you were here with the US military once you've left. So wind on, General Petraeus goes off to Sankom and he hands over to General Odieno. So General Odieno then becomes the strategic commander, the overall commander of US forces Iraq, and that's Secretary Gates overseeing that. And this was President Obama's first visit to Iraq as president. The visit all went very wrong, as things do in Iraq. So we arrived at the airport and then he was supposed to go by helicopter downtown to meet with the Iraqis, but the weather came in. So the helicopter couldn't go. The secret services said he couldn't go by road. And we were like, oh no, the President of the United States comes all the way to Iraq and he's not going to go off the US Army base or meet anybody other than US soldiers. This will not go down well. So General Odieno instructed me to go and try and persuade Prime Minister Maliki to come to the base. And it all somehow, it does work. I managed to wake up the Prime Minister, beg him as a big favor to General Odieno to agree to come on to the Army base and then try and get hold of every checkpoint to make sure they didn't stop the Iraqi Prime Minister, get him permission to come on to the base. So it's all very, very last moment, very hectic. So I end up there with the Prime Minister, sit in the meetings with the President. And afterwards, after the meetings were over, the General introduced me to the President there. And he said, you know, she's been a big fan of yours for years. And President was a bit, you know, interested and so he said, is this true? And I said, yes, you know, I've been reading your speeches for years. I've read your autobiography. And I was, you know, he said, why were you sending my speeches to General Odieno? I said, well, I was trying to make the General a liberal. And he took one look at the general and thought, you know, the guy doesn't look very liberal with his sort of shaved head. So that's why Obama is smiling in that photo. And as the security gets better, you can see we're not wearing helmets there. We left in 2010, General Odieno and myself. And that was after Iraq held a very good election, a very closely contested election. Unfortunately, the U.S. didn't have the patience to try and help broker the formation of governments after that election and didn't uphold the right of the winning bloc to have first go at trying to form that government. So instead, the decision was to maintain the status quo to try and keep Maliki in power. And this is when we started to see the disengagement of Iraq taking place. So Maliki lost the elections by two votes, really, really didn't believe in the results. And sat in his seat and sat in his seat, tried to get recounts, tried to use deep balthification to change the election results. And this went on and on and on. And eventually, the U.S. said, look, the easiest, quickest way is going to be to keep Maliki in power and get the others to support him. Well, the others didn't want to have a second Maliki term. And in the end it was the Iranians who stepped in and it was the Iranians who pressured the Sadarists to support Maliki for a second term, which is when we started to see Maliki move much more over to the Iranian camp and we started to see people lose faith in the political process. And Maliki in his second term just went after his political opposition, arrested lots of Sunnis, pushed Sunni politicians out of the political process, which led to the protests across the Sunni provinces and created the space which allowed for the Islamic State to come back. So I'm going to leave you with that photo because I think that photo really shows sort of the disengagement, a soldier walking one way as the Iraqis are walking another. So how do you come down on how we left Iraq? I mean, there's a debate about did the Obama administration kind of make a sufficient effort or not? Did the Iraqis never want to do a deal? Where do you come down on that? I come down that it was, you know, there are many missed opportunities during our time in Iraq and that for me was one of the key missed opportunities. The Iraqis from 2008 onwards, the Iraqi elites have been trying to remove Maliki through a vote of no confidence in the parliament and each time we'd intervened and said, look, don't do it now, wait for an election, vote him out an election because during this period there's so much instability we need some constants and it's important to work with Maliki. So in 2010 there's a very good election where people have been insurgents before whether with the Sadarists or with al-Qaeda all turned out to participate in the political process and it was important to show them that change comes about through politics. If you can't show change through politics people lose faith in politics. So having gone through insurgency, civil war and we got to the 2010 elections everybody thought let's give politics a chance and I think this was a real missed opportunity by the US to try and help broker the formation of the government after the elections because if we'd upheld the right of the winning bloc led by Yed Alawi to have first go I think it could have led to a political agreement among the elites. It could have led to Alawi and Maliki reaching agreement or it could have led to Alawi choosing somebody else to be Prime Minister but would have been within the political realm. The fact that it ended with these conspiracies as people saw taking place in closed rooms created a lot of damage to the political process. What about on the issue of the American long-term presence not happening? It was a Bush agreement to get out at the end of 2011. The security agreement signed in 2008 had an end date of 2011 but at the time the US officials believed it would be renegotiated. So was there a good faith ever? The question really was was the Obama administration negotiating good faith or not? Well because the US didn't get to broker the formation of government in 2010 and the Iranians did the price that the Iranians extracted was no US follow on presence. So that was already agreed in 2010. And was the Obama administration aware of that? Judging by what is said, no. But Iraqis were aware of it. The Sadarists only supported Maliki and Iran only supported a second Maliki term. On condition there'd be no continued US presence after 2011 when the security agreements expired. What should the United States be doing now? Should there be US special forces in the Mosul operation? Forward air control? How can we resolve the situation in Iraq with the United States? Iraq has really gone far down a very negative road and there are no quick fixes to this. And you look what's happening in the region and a lot of the instability that we see today in the region is a result of the Iraq war. The Iraq war and the way in which we left Iraq. Left Iraq is a very weak state and empowered Iran. Iran is seen as the biggest winner from this war. And so we've now got the geopolitical competition between Iran and the Gulf states playing out by them supporting extreme sectarian actors in different countries which is turning local grievances over poor governance into these regional proxy wars. And so the solution in Iraq is not just, in Iraq is not separate from the rest of the region and it's whether the US is going to play a role in trying to create a better balance in the region to try and, you know, a better balance between Iran and the Gulf states. At the moment there's a fear that the Iran deal is going to lead to an alliance between the US and Iran and so the Arab states are mobilizing against this. So all of this is power struggles taking place. Now for ISIS, we become obsessed with ISIS but ISIS really is a symptom of a much bigger problem which is the regional power struggles and it's to do with the poor governance in Iraq and also in Syria. ISIS is only going to be destroyed, really destroyed when the Sunnis of Iraq and Sunnis of Syria turn against ISIS. Is there any evidence for any of that happening? Well they're only going to do it when they see that ISIS can't win that there are better alternatives and that we're supporting them and at the moment when you look at what's going on there is not much effort to gain Sunnis support against ISIS. So the use of Shia militia and the use of Iran, yes you can blow these guys up but they will lead to greater grievances and son of ISIS in the future so unless you're going to deal with the root causes you just, if you keep whack them all with the symptoms you just get iteration after iteration as the grievances get more and more. Is it a good development that Abadi has appointed Al-Jubari to be the head of the Iraqi army operation in Ninoa and Mosul? He's a Sunni right? He is. I don't know yet, I think it's very hard to tell who is going to be his forces who is he going to be leading? The Sunni population is very, very divided so there's no clear Sunni leadership at all the tribes are divided. If you were advising President Obama about how to fix this, the overall situation what would you say? Say have a long term vision for the Middle East this is not short term. What does that look like? A long term vision, a regional strategy not just dealing with each country on a bilateral basis can America become the balancer in chief and try and push back on Iranian expansion try and keep these countries in their proper boxes and try and create a regional security architecture. Is that beyond our ken? It seems like a Rubik's cube which if you try it's basically insoluble because you move one piece and you mention the negotiations for the Iranians all the Gulf states start thinking and the Saudis start their campaign in Yemen and basically destroy the country more or less because they want to get ahead of any Iranian deal so if you move in any direction there's an impulse in the opposite direction that makes it very hard to have a policy that's sustainable. I don't think it's beyond our capacity I think it's beyond our will because there's no consensus on what. Is there a Bush or Hillary Clinton administration then? Is it in 2016 there will be a new president? I think what's difficult is there's no consensus in the US on America's role in the world and so what happens? One administration can do something for three years and then somebody else and yet this sort of thing requires a much longer term vision that would go from administration to administration. Look at Iran, it's had one person managing these portfolios for 20 years. That's such a good job. The thing is also that gets to the nature of the American body politic which if you look at polling data about go back a year and a half and you ask Americans do you want to get involved in another conflict in the Middle East that numbers were overwhelmingly against. Now with the entry of ISIS Americans have a slightly higher desire but they really don't want anything big or anything on the scale that you participated in in Iraq I mean it's not just the politicians that are it's the nature of the American kind of back and forth between interventionism and isolationism which right now we're basically more or less than a more isolationist phase. I think there is a problem that foreign policy is made by public opinion polls. You want to have your elected politicians come up with a foreign policy and a strategy then they have to convince the American public of this strategy. You could argue for isolationism and say look what happens in the Middle East just leave it there and if it could be contained in the Middle East I think that would be a valid argument but the question is can it be contained? If you're living in Europe you can already see it's not been contained. Humanitarian fallout the refugee flows are immense. This doesn't go away. You're going to have generations of generations of young people growing up who have been possessed, displaced, angry with no opportunities. Is our de facto policy and has it been for a long time the maintenance of Assad in power? Is the worst of three evils with the other two being ISIS and Nusrah of the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria? None of these are good options. It's Assad's brutality, Assad's mass murder of the Syrian people that has created the space for ISIS. And so Assad is not the solution to ISIS but the collapse of the state is also hugely problematic and who will take that over? And the judging from Iraq it can often lead to the most extreme violent armed groups that they can then take power. And so it's very problematic. It is. So does that make President Obama's lack of desire to get involved in Syria sort of more understandable? I mean, his view is basically that the two most effective forces fighting in Syria two years ago were al-Qaeda and Hezbollah and they were fighting each other. And if you're sitting in, let's say, Duluth, Minnesota or something why would you want to get involved in what looks like a multiple decade regional civil war which is also inflamed by sectarian tensions? There are many good reasons for not getting involved. Initially Obama's policy was, you know, do something, not something do it so it's gone back and forth. And it came out very early and said, Assad must go. And people in Syria thought, ah, America's coming to help as they helped in Libya. And so that led to increasing people protesting because they thought America was coming. Then you've got the red line, not the red line. All of these things create, you know, America's not reliable. America's not predictable. You don't know which way it's going to go. When two Americans got their heads chopped off then having explained for ages why we were going to do nothing then we did something. And it almost seems that the policy is to be seen to be doing something and just to keep things as calm as possible to hand over to the next administration. Well, mention of Libya, I mean when historians write the history of the Obama administration it's actually seen as the greatest failure because it was an unforced error. It was almost like a political science experiment where you overthrow an absolute dictator. It's replaced by something even worse which is anarchy and civil war. There's two ways of arguing it. One is that we should just not have got involved at all. Libya doesn't really matter. The other way of arguing it was after the fall we should have done more with security sector reform and demobilizing the militias. If you don't do anything of course this is going to happen. It was puzzling because we'd already run this experiment in Iraq in 2003. It's like we spent almost a decade supposedly learning from that and then we did exactly the same thing again. We have an absolute inability to learn anything. We're now back at war again in Iraq and Syria as if the last decade hasn't happened. What do you mean exactly by that? This challenge of how do you use military means to bring about political ends. This is the big challenge and we went for a long time in Iraq not doing that. Now we're back at war and where is the political end that we're trying to take anything to? The obsession becomes ISIS. The obsession in Afghanistan is how many troops to keep there as if troop number is a strategy. Well it isn't a strategy at the end of 2016 right? But it's about having a strategy and a policy and not bring it down to how many bad guys have we killed or how many troops we're maintaining. So tell us what the lessons of Iraq are for Afghanistan because we have a chance to not get it completely wrong there it looks like. Well the lessons there are many lessons but particularly the importance of politics. It is all about their politics. We tend to frame things in terms of good guys and bad guys and the bad guys that we exclude from power end up doing everything they can to pull down the new order that we introduce and the good guys that we put in power end up taking all the resources for their own interests using security forces to go after their political enemies and subverting the very institutions that we try and put in place. In a nation building is very very difficult you can overthrow one regime and it doesn't have to but it can lead to chaos rather than a better order. And we always look for technical solutions to problems which are inherently political. So all that money and all that effort in Iraq if you don't get the politics right all of that goes to waste. So tell us about the book in terms of the way you reported it and did you keep it diary? Did you re-interview people? How did you build the book? So I had kept a diary for much of the time I was there. After my first year in Iraq I got out and I wrote up everything that had happened so I got copious notes. I also got lots and lots of emails that I sent. So I had a good body of knowledge I had far too much information that was the challenge so what to do I mean I had stacks and stacks but what story do I want to tell? Because I haven't written it as history I don't feel that somebody like myself who was so closely involved can write history. All I can do is write memoir from my perspective what I saw. And so I wanted to and I thought about what are the themes? Part of it was the bonds that people build when they're in these very difficult circumstances. So the bonds I have with US military and Iraqis. And I wanted to show leadership in these environments, the challenges of being a leader in these environments. But I also wanted to counter those who believe that everything that happened in Iraq is inevitable because of ancient H's between Sunni and Shia or those who believe in Huntington's Clash of Civilization I wanted to counter those arguments and let people see how Iraqi society was. We tend to be very simplistic in the way that we see them. They're either terrorists or victims. But I mean I completely agree with that impetus but is now the you know can you put this back can you put the toothpaste back in this particular toothpaste container? I mean right now Iraqis in a sense the Biden plan came true right? He is making his plan come true yes but it didn't have to go that way and that's the thing none of these things that happened were inevitable. Iraq could have had different futures and so I think with the Republicans you want to tell them about the limitations of our power with the Democrats it's the opposite you want to tell them about what it is we can actually do in the hope that there is something we can learn from the Iraq experience we can play a role mediating, pushing people closer together that's a key role that we can play there are things that do work. Did you have to submit the book for review to the Pentagon? Yes I did. And was that an easy experience? It takes time but it was easy. And how long did it take you to write the book? About one year of writing and then it went through a year of being reviewed it got reviewed by the Pentagon reviewed by the Brits and edited so that process in itself was almost a year as well so two years or not. Did you enjoy writing it? Enjoy. Having to relive some of these things was very very difficult sometimes there would just be in floods of tears and very some of the characters are no longer alive for me it was important to capture them alive to remember how they were and so remembering how good times spent good times bad times some of that was very hard but by the time you've gone over a draft over and over and over again it's quite therapeutic you've said it so many times so I feel as though my anger is gone so I'm glad I did it but I had no idea how hard it is to write a book. Well I know that I've had my own personal experience I've had where convoy got lost in the middle of some Sunni insurgent zone and she really gave the whoever was in charge of that convoy a pretty severe dressing down so we'll open it up for questions if you have a question please identify yourself and wait for the mic and we'll take the ones in the back first David? Question about the Abadi government you've been eloquent about Maliki government and a failed democratic experience but it does seem that the Abadi government is better what would you predict for it in terms of governance Marcia Wiss I'm with Hogan and Lovells I think Prime Minister Abadi wants to do what is the right thing and he's in a very very difficult position Maliki in his first term also did many of what we thought of as the right things but anybody who is leader in Iraq is constrained by the Iraqi system and that system that we put in place after 2003 has really got inherent flaws so it's a system that's based on sectarianism institutionalized sectarianism so ministries are divvied out between sectarian political parties so that's one aspect so whoever takes hold of a ministry it's their personal fiefdom also the Iraqi economy 95% of it is based on oil it's not based on people's hard-earned tax money and so you don't have the relationship between those in power and the people in the 2014 election it was Maliki who won the election but as the system had been so twisted last time this time Haida Abadi who's not somebody who's well known I think he got 5,000 votes was then put as Prime Minister as a compromise candidate so he's got issues within his own block Maliki hopes that he's going to have a comeback and Abadi is struggling within his own block then he's struggling within the Shia community that don't want to see concessions made to Sunnis as they see Sunnis having supported ISIS so there's a reluctance to improve the formation of a national guard within the Sunni areas so that makes it hard to gain Sunni support to turn against ISIS the state today is weaker than the non-state actors the strongest man in Iraq today is Qasem Soleimani the head of the Iranian al-Quds Force and the strongest Iraqi in Iraq today is Hadi al-Amri who heads up the Badaqa and is also a general in the Iranian al-Quds Force so these are severe constraints if Abadi had been made Prime Minister in 2010 I don't think Iraq would be in the situation it's in today but that didn't happen so I think he's got the will very constrained to turn this around What about how would you rate the Iraqi army has had some successes in taking back territory and also some setbacks how is that looking I mean the battle to take to Crete so there were about 20,000 forces that went up there most of which were Shia militias there was only about 2,000 which was the Iraqi army there was only when the Shia militias got bogged down that the Prime Minister turned to the Americans and said please would you provide air support and the US did that but conditioned on the Shia militias drawing back so it is hard how do you build an Iraqi army if you don't have Iraqi state so when you look at the militias they've got much better morale the Iraqi army was four times the size of ISIS that took Mosul but the leadership had all been the leaders who had worked with us had been removed by Maliki and he'd put in his cronies who had taken the money meant to buy food and ammunition and just taken it so there's a problem of the morale not a problem with the training and equipment these guys had been trained in equipment they had no leaders to tell them to fight and so how do you build a national army when your nation your state is so in such a bad situation would it be better to leave Saddam in power? better for who? I'm just asking Iraq the Middle East it's a really it's a horrible question to ask it's a really difficult question to answer when you look at Saddam he was one of the most awful mass murderers that the world has seen and you think of the amount of people that he killed in Iraq year after year after year so if you're an Iraqi from an Iraqi perspective most Iraqis will say thank God Saddam has gone for the Kurds they're better off for a lot of the Shia in the south they're better off for those in the north and the middle they've had a very hard experience and hundreds, 200,000 have lost their lives you could say for the west would it be better to just keep Saddam in power the sanctions regime was causing the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people deaths by starvation it was being eroded how much longer would that have held what was the future with Saddam would he just hand over to his sons would the region have been more stable with Saddam in power would there have been an Arab spring in Iraq I think what happened in Tunisia in Egypt would have happened without Iraq or I'm talking about in Iraq itself would there have been an Arab spring these are all counterfactuals we don't I think there would have been and I think it would have been brutally crushed but I think what happened in North Africa would have affected Iraq I don't think we'd see to the level what's happening in Syria or Yemen I think that's a consequence of what's happened in Iraq Would ISIS exist without Saddam being overthrown I mean there was no al-Qaeda or no ISIS before 2003 so yes the overthrow of Saddam wasn't inevitable that this would lead to al-Qaeda and ISIS taking control but that is what has happened Yeah I'm back here Hi I'm Perry Kamak with policy planning at State Department I'm asking the question kind of in a personal capacity I wanted to pick up on two things you said one which I whole-heartedly agree and one which I wanted to push you a little bit further the statement I agree with is that it's the lack of in all these situations it's the politics and lack of reconciliation it's driving things the thing I wanted to question you about a little bit is the idea that we haven't learned anything and I come to the question looking around the region we've got essentially four civil wars in which the U.S. has played four different roles so in Iraq we tried occupation force, nation building we see what we got in Syria we've stayed out we see what we got in Libya we kind of try to light footprint no boots on the ground we see what we got in Yemen we've kind of let the Saudis have obviously taken the lead and we see what we got and so the takeaway for me is not that we haven't learned lessons but that the use of that we need to have kind of to understand better what the role of U.S. military force is and what it isn't and I think where we've managed to have kind of very clear very clear military objectives the military has done wonders but when we've had kind of amorphous political objectives we've done much much more poorly thank you I think the biggest problem we have is not really with the military it's with the civilian leadership it's with the White House that doesn't set an overall policy or strategy to which the military can contribute so it all becomes about the military rather than use of the military tool to achieve a political outcome what I saw in Iraq in 07 to 08 was young officers on the ground negotiating and mediating between different groups bringing about ceasefires so on the ground we had guys taking on that role effectively as diplomats and doing that very well but it never built up to the national level so at the national level it would be well this is an elected government so we can't interfere in their affairs well kind of we have been interfering but so it doesn't build up and I think this is problematic these are civil wars we frame them as insurgencies so regime good those who oppose regime not so good and that's problematic because it's about power being contested yes they may have had an election that doesn't mean to say that the election results are not contested or the election framework so it takes time for systems to be accepted so I think the military has learned and adapted I don't believe the State Department has learned and adapted to the same degree I don't believe the White House could come up with a sense of how it's going to win it's how to maintain or how to minimize how to contain but I don't see strategies to win and you might say it's too difficult to win but if it's too difficult to win why are we deploying force well maybe it's just management is winning managing the problem because there's no surrender ceremony it's just carry on for a long time but we've said we're going to defeat ISIS and if your policy defeats ISIS then you need a strategy to meet that policy so we say one thing but the strategy doesn't meet that yeah General Kimmet in the front here David you actually started answering the question that I was going to ask when you talked about the role of the State Department the military is a means and it's a tool to reach its political reconciliation the political accommodation talk a little bit more about your sensing of what the military was able to do and what the State Department diplomats perhaps as you just suggested fell short I'd be more interested in the latter when you look up other countries you see they're brightest and best go into the foreign service they're very experienced specialist ambassadors from other countries in the US I don't believe the State Department has that same status in American society you meet some fine individuals I met some very very impressive individuals but as an institution I don't see it's an institution that attracts America's brightest and best secondly when you're in meetings and there's a general an ambassador all the visitors want to have their photo taken with the general not with the ambassador and again that's not something you see with other countries General Petraeus always referred to Richard Holbrook as his wingman which is not the way it's supposed to work in this country right yeah so the status of the State Department is of a lower status than of the military St. Com commander is hugely powerful a general has huge resources State Department doesn't have that when you look at funding from Congress how the funding is allocated people like the military they're quite happy to give funding to the military so you don't see as the military as a subset supporting the diplomats to achieve a political solution the State Department is seen as like the poor relative and I think that is problematic because it doesn't mean that everything is working in support of the political solution which should be negotiated by the diplomats what I have seen is Americans in uniform taking on the roles of basically negotiators and mediators so it is a conceptual problem and it's a structural problem as well I don't know how you would change that America likes to see its military going out to do things people like to see the soldiers how do you gain support that these very difficult conflicts around the world actually can only be resolved really by diplomatic solutions which requires the diplomats to be up front or whatever we do militarily must be in support of that political outcome don't think we're structured here to do it there are examples of that actually happening though a recent one being Secretary Kerry's kind of basically getting a rapprochement between Abdullah and Ghani which is basically holding in Afghanistan so it does happen it does happen, how many years is it taken to get to that and you think that's where we should start before we go into a war you have to have a sense of what's the outcome you want a gentleman with a green shirt thank you for telling me from the Oxford Char group you were there from the inception I want to ask you about the training of the Iraqi army first banner cuts their head off and dismisses all of them and many of them are now working for ISIS or Daesh and then you hear reports from Gates which I want to quote you on where he said handing over Iraq to the Iraqis I think we accomplished our objectives and then Panetta the next Secretary of Defense said Iraq has developed a very good capacity to be able to defend itself so what happened to the Iraqi army and what happened to the 20-30 billion dollars that were spent to train them the Iraqi army has been trained and equipped by the US from 2003 onwards and what we saw particularly after the surge was these units were gaining in confidence they were able to do operations we were partnering with them then we were advising them and by our measurements they were performing well so you train and equip so by the way that we measure things they look like a good army but at the end of the day it's about the leadership and if you haven't got competent leaders if those who are leaders have been removed from the system that's what happened with Maliki the whole system breaks down and there's nothing no matter of training and equipping can compensate for that soldiers are soldiers you can take people anywhere train for six weeks soldiers but it's the morale the supplies all of that requires leaders and in Iraq when the politics are so contested when the political elites are stealing the wealth of the country for themselves that politicizes the military and those we thought were good leaders were pushed to the side so what happened to all the equipment a lot of the equipment is now in the hands of ISIS because the Iraqi army fled and just left it behind some equipment is with the sheer militias the sheer militias have taken some from the Iraqi army so it's really about the governance and the leadership of the army that's what's going to define whether it's successful or not gentleman with a tie here thank you Charles Kestenbaum I was in the embassy in Baghdad in the mid 80s a little background there what happened to the future of Iraq project I'll get your book and read it the future of Iraq the city department put together 17 volumes the whole post war from the first day that the Pentagon threw aside I've never seen it I don't know if anybody else has ever seen it I actually worked on it as did many of us in this room with thousands of hours and millions of dollars that the State Department spent to prepare for the first day when the US liberated Iraq and then the State Department and Chalabi, is he in your book I hope threw it into the trash can with the neo cons so it was all you know it was when I got there we had a plan never saw it Fred Hyatt from the Washington Post David thank you for a very interesting presentation you said that the Sunni will turn against ISIS when they think ISIS is losing and when they get support I wonder if you could just tell us in the meantime what you hear about governance inside Mosul and do people want to be liberated or is there mixed feelings about that or how do you think it's playing out I don't know the answer to that question I think it's very difficult to get information you get a few data points and when you speak when you look at the Sunni population of Iraq tens of thousands are displaced so of Fallujah and Ramadi and Ambar people have been displaced from their homes in Nino where a lot of people have also been displaced and the humanitarian catastrophe is it's awful and they just feel nobody cares about them they're just left in the desert and the lucky ones have got to Kurdistan or to Jordan when I meet young Iraqis who are displaced the place that they'd like to live the sort of country they'd like to live in looks like Dubai it doesn't look like DASH and I think it's important to remember that Dubai DASH Dubai DASH most young people everywhere kind of want the same things and I don't believe that DASH offers a future that is attractive to people when they first came in heard stories that the Sunni population will, you know, thought Iranian backed regime of Maliki or DASH and some of them believe that DASH was the lesser of two evils I don't hear any reports coming out of these places that talk about how great life is so you hear reports of universities what subjects they're now limited to studying all the women clothed head to toe in black so people put things up on their Facebook pages there are little glimpses that you get into life there but it's certainly not a life that people are enjoying living I think they're very very fearful anybody who shows any sign of complaining against it is fearful for their lives they're fearful of what might come after and I expect many are just waiting to see what happens but I don't see any signs from Mosul that, you know, there's an uprising about to happen any sign of dissent those people have their heads chopped off why would you, I mean the Sunni awakening has turned out to be you know, I mean it would be very implausible for that Sunni awakening to happen in ISIS areas right now, right? I think it would be extremely difficult to organize from within it's whether those displaced can organize and then come back with government support and with our support but to organize from within Mosul seems very difficult when do you think Mosul will, will, when do you think the campaign will happen, when will it fall is it impossible to predict I don't know, I mean the question is what comes the day after because yes, you can drop bombs you can do all of that but what is the better future that comes afterwards ISIS was allowed in because it was seen as better than what was there so people have got to have a sense that what comes after ISIS is going to be better than ISIS and what was before ISIS gentlemen here in front there from Army G2 don't feel bad, I was an MNFI I never saw the plan the gentleman alluded to either so don't feel alone in that you've mentioned Kurdistan several times but I wondered if you could expand on that a little bit both the performance of the passion what's going on now but also look to the future what does the future hold for Kurdistan vis-a-vis the rest of the country so Kurdistan is the success story of the war that when you look at Kurdistan today it is it's vibrant it has issues with Baghdad over budget it has issues with oil it has all of those issues I think the Peshmerga there was a lot of mythology about the Peshmerga from old times when the Peshmerga turned out against ISIS they got into difficulties at the beginning and the issues affecting the Peshmerga were similar to those issues affecting the Iraqi security forces in terms of management and leadership that they still came under two political parties rather than under the Kurdistan regional government but they have recovered and they have performed impressively over the last month after the initial problems also seeing the PKK now which is still a prescribed terrorist group but the PKK has been very active in helping the Yazidis and in fighting against ISIS the Kurds want to be independent in the future but they're landlocked and they know that's difficult and so strategically they took the decision to remain part of Iraq part of a federal Iraq and it's whether those issues can be negotiated with Baghdad a Badi is much easier to negotiate with than Maliki so there have been agreements on allocation of oil but Iraq with the drop in the price of oil Iraq has got severe budget crisis so this is also affecting Kurdistan but I think the future for the Kurds is bright and I think they will get through this instability the question will always be where will be their borders and are they willing to compromise gentlemen the yellow Ty Hi Professor last week was the 40th anniversary of the fall of Saigon in 1975 and I think it brings up interesting questions about whether for the American experience occupying Vietnam trying to manage that civil war ultimately leaving that civil war ending in a unified Vietnam under the north and however many decades later we have sort of evidence that Vietnam turned out okay and the question I have is are there any is there a point at which we hold a line and say no more like no more efforts are going to lead to the conclusions that we want and the best thing we can do human tragedy aside is to stop expending effort that is going down a drain are there any elements of the crises the multi multiplying crises that we see in the Middle East that fit that paradigm it's interesting you bring up Vietnam because some people take the long arc of history and say look it turned out okay in the end so maybe Iraq will turn out okay in the end if you really take a long long arc of history I think after each war we always say never again we won't intervene again but it doesn't take long before we forget and it's almost something that we can't help ourselves there is a sense of when you see things happening in the world and you feel there's something you can do about it shouldn't you try and I think that's very much part of the American psyche isolationism comes in phases but it quickly reverts back to a much more proactive role America has maintained Pax Americana for years around the world that has made the world more stable yes we've been sidetracked into some of these wars but the bigger picture you take aside these small wars the bigger picture has been one of stability and America has benefited from that stability I don't believe in this globalized world that it is possible to withdraw and just things won't be affected the question is how to have a coherent strategy to be aware of what it is we can shape to not be overconfident but to have confidence that we can make a difference in places it is possible and we sort of oscillate between do everything to do nothing so I think whoever comes next and the next administration will move more back to the middle and be more rational what's new now is the Iraqi and Afghan governments are begging us not only to intervene but to stay and to stay longer and stay bigger that's a relatively new development Hamer Khalsa kept saying he was not somebody who was enthusiastic about our presence it's not quite that way in Iraq you're not hearing the Iraqis saying we want the US military back the groups that want the US military back are the Sunnis and the Kurds and the Shia come back because we were seen as the moderator is there any polling data about views of the United States when you were there there was very consistent polling data and it was always quite hostile to the United States I'm wondering if there's any new polling data I've not seen new polling data all I can give is anecdotal where people like good you're leaving and now when are you coming back we need you here and you hear that really with the Sunni and the Kurds among the Shia there is no call for that at all Muqtada al-Sadr has basically said we will attack American soldiers question here while we're getting to this question what is happening to Muqtada and what is happening to Sistani this gentleman here both of them have actually been moderating influences surprising on Muqtada Muqtada I've always saw Muqtada as a big problem because he was anti-ars but he was despite everything he's very much Iraqi nationalist he's suspicious of us he's suspicious of Iran but he is the one who's always reaching out to Sunnis he's the one when Sunnis ask for help they'll be in touch with Muqtada with the same thing that cannot be said about the Badaqor the ones that we thought were the good guys but the ones who are much closer to Iran and so Muqtada sees the Badaqor as a competitor with Ayatollah Sistani he was the one who put out the fatwa calling for Iraqis to join security forces in order to protect the state because there was real fear that ISIS was going to take Baghdad that was then taken by militias to set up militias and to join the security forces he reiterated that Sunnis are not just our brothers they are ourselves and he is the one who's saying to these militias now take down your sectarian flags that the only flag that be flown be an Iraqi flag so what happens after Sistani is the real fear because Sistani has been an amazing moderator and decent human being thank you for your keen insights you mentioned earlier the threat to Europe that's posed by an unstable Middle East and North Africa how should the Europeans be responding right now to the mass migration what should be the long term strategy of Europeans with respect to that does that migration pose a long term threat to Europe it's it's a very difficult question to answer because there is obviously a large anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe because of the numbers that have come in you can see in Britain election coming up and people are blaming immigration for everything and people have to be reminded that you know thank God for immigration because you would have terrible food in the UK if it hadn't been for immigration and many other positive points the whole national health service in Britain took out the immigrants what would be left of it so you know there's always that thing about reminding people of where they came from so it is very very difficult because of the economy but when you see these people fleeing you saw those boats taking people to Europe it is tragic the instability that they're fleeing if we can't help make those countries more stable then we have a duty to save human lives and I think it's going to be something that different countries are struggling with there was wonderful pictures the other day of people coming ashore I think it was in Greece and people on the beach going out to help people come ashore feeding the babies doing all of these things so that basic humanity is still there I think I think I think it's difficult he was put in an impossible position he was I think painting his house somewhere and he gets the phone call and says will you come and be this guy in Baghdad so he is plucked out he was kissing associates or something at the time another person who volunteered and went out there you can think of the decisions that were made early on debathification dissolving the army those are made on day one well everyone now blames him for them it's a mystery wrapped in an enigma because no one will take responsibility for this I do not believe on day one came up with these ideas out of nowhere and he worked for Donald Rumsfeld technically it wasn't the whole reporting chain you had Rumsfeld who didn't want to do the occupation you had others who wanted to hand over the country to Ahmed Chalabi you had Bremer who said look there's no Iraqi leaders who can take over so everything that went wrong everybody blamed on Bremer but I think there's many other people who should take responsibility for what happened so I think it's not all his fault what happened George W Bush for instance for instance those big decisions had been discussed before the White House, the Pentagon they didn't just come from nowhere when he arrived and I think there's lack of willingness to really reflect on how these decisions were made nobody's been held account for the decision to go to war all the way in which we left we lost four and a half thousand soldiers Iraqis through this may have lost two hundred thousand and nobody's been held to account so how are we ever going to learn when everybody says somebody else was responsible do you think that's part of the American culture as it exists today because for instance, Admiral Kimmel was essentially relieved after Pearl Harbor and forced to retire after 9-11 there was no one retired and here we have this other sort of essentially unforced era that we brought upon ourselves so it doesn't say something about would it be handled differently in Britain there was a fairly big inquiry in Britain Tony Blair did take some political kind of hits yeah, I mean in the UK they held the whole chill-cutting inquiry so into decisions that took the UK into war in Iraq with the US and still waiting the results of that inquiry it's gone on and on and on for political reasons still hasn't come out supposed to come out after the UK elections we shall see I think it is crucially important to have such an inquiry to have such a reflection nobody in Britain is going to go to jail for this but until things are out in the open to learn when Republicans will blame Democrats for leaving Democrats will blame Republicans for going in nobody is looking at what works what doesn't work I guess on the American side there was a fairly serious Senate inquiry into the whole questions of how did we get to this bad kind of conclusion about Saddam's weapons and mass destruction program no one lost their job or was fired or relieved or penalized but there was an inquiry there was but we're left with the guy who whistle blew on torture is the only one who's really been held to account all those who have done stuff have not been held to account so I think that it is problematic I think there's almost a gentleman's agreement between Republicans and Democrats not to open up the Pandora's box Well President Obama specifically said he wouldn't yes gentlemen with glasses over here Hi Warren Strobel with Reuters you were joking much earlier about the Biden plan but I'm wondering whether you do see Iraq partitioning in the future more than it already is and more importantly do you see US policy begin to accommodate itself to that reality such as dealing more directly with the Kurds for example thanks I don't think Iraq is going to go back to the way it was I think it's gone way beyond the points of no return but what does it go to I think the best hope for Iraq is that it goes towards confederation with Kurdistan and decentralization down to the provincial level and the rest of the country Iraqis are very intermarried when we got to Baghdad 30% of people were intermarried there's Shia who live in Mosul there are Sunnis and Kurds who live in Basra so if you're going to start forcing people to divorce or forcing people to move partition doesn't happen everyone thinks it's a nice easy solution if only people just married of their own type and lived in the right places but they don't now you've got a million Sunni Arabs living in Kurdistan so this is it is problematic so I would go for much more decentralization to the provincial level with confederation with Kurdistan again this doesn't happen easily because it's hard for the center to decentralize when it's got less power than the militias but if you think of Iraq in terms of three parts where would the borders be you end up Sunnis controlling the water Shia controlling the oil that doesn't make for that's really problematic I mean they still haven't sorted out the internal boundaries anyway right that was still up for discussion some of these all of these things are contested so I think the more that you can decentralize power the more that you can create a system where the electoral system have a districting so people are representatives of their communities not the current system sort of this hybrid system with a list you might get a hundred votes and still be a member of parliament you don't represent anybody so to try and create a different form of governance I think that's the best hope not to go three ways Hi, Ahmed Khan I went to ask you I wanted to applaud your patience and resilience because I was there in CPA and ORHA in May and June and it was literally as you remember the biggest clown show that I've ever seen I was against the war and I went to try and be part of the solution and I lasted three to four weeks at the most and I could not stomach the level of incompetence and actually on day one people said you know it's a conspiracy to stabilize Iraq and I said no no no they mean well three weeks later I'm like maybe you're right I mean I could not imagine how incompetent we were and you know nobody knew what they were doing you remember all this so my point was I just wanted to ask you you know as the Vice President Cheney and Secretary Romsfeld have sort of doubled down on their on their policy you know they're blaming everything on the Obama administration did you see progress over those next five years let's say June 2003 to the end of the administration there was real progress from 2007 to 2009 and I think those two years or that period was the only time that we had the right policy the right leadership and the right resources the decade of war just in that period did we actually get it right and the difference that was made was extraordinary the trajectory all the indicators everything was going in the right direction and we and the Iraqis felt the worst was behind and so that's what I mean about not despairing that we can't do anything because we've proven that we can what was the I mean how much was that costing every year at that time when we were getting it right financially it was costing no more than when we were getting it wrong right but I think there's a large it's a large bill right I mean well if we hadn't got it so wrong at the beginning the bill wouldn't have gone so high so in that period we understood that it was all about the politics the Iraqis were using violence for political ends and so the challenge was to create the political space that everybody could participate in and to convince them they could achieve those goals through politics and we did that the early years it was very much black and white right and wrong 2007 to 2009 it was much better understanding that this is a power struggle struggle for power and resources yes it's got sectarian bits put on it but at the heart of it this is a power struggle that's going on all these different groups so how can we convince them that they can compete within a political framework and so the state was getting stronger the political framework was there we were holding the ring holding the middle ground we had moved to the middle we had learnt by that stage so yes that was the only period after that it became what let's go like Iraqis not fine you can't stop their politics you have to allow this to keep going the Iraqis in 2008 had this whole negotiation over the security agreement and we realised it really wasn't about us it was all about their fear that maliki was going to become a dictator and they wanted commitment from the US that we would maintain and protect their nascent democracy and they wouldn't sign on the security agreements until the ambassador had written to each one of the blocks and said the US is committed to democracy in Iraq and committed to protecting the political process Dan Green Dan Green from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy obviously memoirs are very personal affairs and it's very much a journey as you write these things I've spent two and a half years in Iraq and Afghanistan with the State Department, with the military now that you're home I know you're in Connecticut as you reflect on all these things all this energy that you've poured into other people's concerns the process of coming home for wherever that may be would you be willing to reflect a little bit as you sit in your home in Connecticut all these experiences coming home, the challenges what are some of your thoughts about that it is hugely difficult because the idea also is where is home anymore so you come back from these experiences very changed and you go back to the world that Iraq and Afghanistan they just didn't affect anybody so nobody in the US or UK was really affected by these wars very very small percent those who served and the outcome of those wars it doesn't really matter, not to people here taxes didn't go up everybody kept shopping life went on it did change and so afterwards coming to terms with everything collapsing and coming to terms with what was it all for that has been difficult what did all those people die for and so trying to find the answers to that what's been hugely helpful for me has been teaching because the teaching you got a new generation they were sort of 6 or 7 when we went into Iraq for them this is really ancient history and so having to explain things to them and they'll be like oh professor do you think you wasted your life without you or at least much of it and so you try and find meaning from it and for me that meaning certainly comes from the bonds the friendships the relationships that are formed from those I served with and from Iraqi friends so I can't say it was all for nothing because I have that is what I've taken from it and so I look back at my time in Iraq and think some of it was the best time of my life I felt such a sense of purpose I felt such strong camaraderie really felt I was part of something bigger than myself I know a lot of the focus in the media is on people coming back with PTSD the struggles afterwards but I think for so many who served out there they come back having grown as individuals feel stronger from that experience did things they never thought they were capable of and so there are those aspects and I think America is going to be changed in years to come by those who served going into politics and participating at very senior levels in government in the future final question here in the back Steven Lierz from German Embassy what would you suggest as first steps first measures for a post-ISIL period now that is starting in some parts of Iraq so the post-ISIL period has got to be better than the pre-ISIL period we've got to have a vision of something better and when you look at the Sunni leaders in Baghdad they are so disconnected with the Sunni population in these places so there needs to be a way of empowering new leaders on the ground to emerge and not to have the political space just given to those nominal representatives in Baghdad this is going to be challenging but it's whether local authorities can be given more powers so they've got more control over rebuilding their communities so it's not Baghdad just sitting there will they, won't they help new provincial councils new local councils could be empowered could be given the budget to try and make a difference so it's going to need local recruitment of security forces as well trying to get that economy going and trying to find ways to reconcile because some in those communities would have allowed ISIL in there's going to be revenge killings that will go on how to move forward how to create a narrative that we were all victims under ISIL how to reconcile how to try and build the future because this revenge revenge revenge never ends got to try and, we didn't get it right in O3 but how to deal with the past it's very difficult peace or justice which comes first to try and build a better Mosul needs to have people with vision of building and not just going after and taking revenge on others thank you very much Emma that was a brilliant presentation well thank you very much