 We're just going to get started. Thank you all for coming, and welcome to New America. Today's session is Ending Endless War, Lessons from the Counter-ISIS War. My name is Melissa Sallick-Furk. I'm a senior policy analyst with New America's International Security Program. For those of you new to New America, we're a think and action tank, a civic platform that connects the Research Institute, Technology Lab, Solutions Network, Media Hub, and Public Forum. The International Security Program aims to provide evidence-based analysis of some of the toughest security challenges facing American policymakers and the public from homegrown American terrorism to the United States drone wars abroad and the proliferation of drones around the world to the profound changes in warfare wrought by new technology and societal changes. Our first speaker today is David Sturman. David is a senior policy analyst at New America and holds a master's degree from Georgetown's Center for Security Studies. His current research focuses on terrorism and violent extremism in America, immigration and terrorist threats, foreign fighter recruitment, and the effectiveness and consequences of American counter-terrorism efforts. Sturman's writing on terrorism has appeared in CNN, foreign policy, Time and the Washington Post, among other outlets, and his research has been cited by CNN, Fox, MSNBC, The New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. Joshua Gelzer is an international security fellow at New America. He is the executive director and visiting professor of law at Georgetown University Law Centers, Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection. Josh served as senior director for counter-terrorism at the National Security Council, having served previously as deputy legal advisor to the NSC and his counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for National Security at the Department of Justice. Josh received his JD from Yale Law School and his PhD in war studies from King's College London. His work has appeared in the Atlantic, foreign policy, studies in conflict and terrorism, the Journal of Constitutional Law, and the Berkeley Journal of International Law, among others. Alexandra Stark is a senior researcher for the political reform program at New America. She received her PhD from the government department at Georgetown University and her MSC in international relations from the London School of Economics. She was previously a research fellow at the Middle East Initiative of the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfair Center for Science and International Affairs and the Nerva Jennings Randolph P. Scholar at USIP. Alexandra has written for foreign affairs, national interests, guardian, and small wars journal, among others. David will begin with a brief presentation of his research methodology and findings and then we'll move into our discussion. We'll save the last 20 to 30 minutes or so for audience Q&A and with that, I'd like to invite David to the stage. So the paper's titled Decision Making in the Counter-ISIS War and what really this paper does is it looks at more or less four key questions that I thought were both interesting regarding the Counter-ISIS War and why the United States initiated it. But also questions that, in my view, have been largely sidelined by the horror of ISIS's brutality and not really gotten at least public airing. So these four questions are what was the rationale for why the United States and the Obama administration specifically at this time initiated the Counter-ISIS War? What was the role of preventive war logic which I understand and define as the reasoning for the use of or justification for the use of military force to destroy the capabilities of a rival actor. Now before and in order to prevent a future conflict in which they have greater capabilities and it would be worse. Third, the third question that I look at in this report is was ISIS ever a direct threat to the United States? And then the final question I look at is is the United States and generally us safer because of the war? And then finally I draw some lessons for the broader question of ending America's endless wars. The main data source for this report is 28 official statements made by President Obama or otherwise written slash attributed to him that were collected from a review of all statements and speeches on the archived Obama White House website from January, 2014 to the end of September, 2014. That's the court period I look at. It's important to note that this is of course a final public statement of what the rationale justification was. It's possible that there were private rationales or that other changes in the process up to the final decision to make the decision public. I tend to think that the data I show tracks pretty closely. I tried to supplement it with a couple of interviews as well as looking at other sources beyond those. But that's a core aspect to keep in mind when discussing this report. So before I run us through the four questions my findings on them and why I think they're important I think we should go back to 2014 because that's actually a long time ago. And when I talk to a number of people about their experiences of decision making and to counterize this war or watching it you find that actually memory is already not entirely perfect for something like this. So what we have here is a graph of strikes in Iraq and Syria and it's divided up into four decision phases. Those decision phases are phases that I have imposed upon this timeline based on my review of the 28 statements. I begin with what I call a pre-war phase during which the Obama administration makes as far as I can tell no official public statements regarding either the threat specifically from ISIS in Iraq or Syria or regarding plans for waging war. In fact I think that it's quite clear that the Obama administration did not intend to go to war in Iraq or Syria because I believe May 28th might be May 24th of this year at the very end of this pre-war phase Obama gives his big counter-terrorism strategy speech at West Point during which he both doesn't mention ISIS specifically but also continues to tout the withdrawal from Iraq as a success. Despite what will be the beginning of at least a partial or reversal of that withdrawal within two weeks. The next phase goes from June 13th to early August. This is a phase I call recognition of crisis where at least publicly the administration begins to recognize that ISIS poses a threat to what their interpretation of key U.S. interests are and begins to publicly discuss the possibility and prepare for options including military action. That includes the deployment of about 300 advisors to Iraq as well as other actions at this time. Obama makes his first public statement and I begin this on June 13th. And to be clear when I say recognition of crisis this doesn't mean no one was paying attention to ISIS in this previous period. This is just when it comes into the public consciousness and discussion regarding a possible plan for war. This is marked by the memoirs of multiple administration officials including Ben Rhodes that this is a key moment as well as post facto statements by a range of administration officials regarding specifically the jolt from the fall of Mosul which occurred on June 10th. Really in my view the initiating factor for the shift. Then in early August specifically August 7th you get another shift into a phase of limited war. This is when the first strikes begin to appear as part of the campaign. Before this period there's only one as far as I can tell U.S. military action that would be the hostage rescue raid or attempted hostage rescue raid in Raqqa based on a variety of different sourcings including reporting from the post and interviews. The conclusion is that was not part of a counter ISIS war effort. It was specifically about hostage rescue. So it doesn't appear in this graph although it's noted in the timeline. So what drives the shift is the very beginning of August you have a rapid advance of ISIS into Northern Iraq that brings them close to Erbil which triggers a fear for U.S. personnel in Erbil and is also the key moment when they begin to really systematically and expansively target the Yazidis and other minorities in Northern Iraq. And that's what in my view and surrounding sort of again memoirs like Ben Rhodes which calls this a tipping point really triggers the two limited missions. One is airstrikes to protect U.S. personnel mostly that's about Erbil and then the humanitarian war and effort to break the siege on Mount Sinjar. And then this period continues and starts to blur into a new phase escalation which I mark at the beginning at September 10th when Obama comes out and gives a speech in which he says that the mission is now not limited it's to degrade and destroy ISIS and also announces the plan to initiate strikes in Syria which then occur within the month of September although a couple weeks after that speech. We can also look at this geographically both of these charts are based off of Air Wars is data which I'm very thankful for and is a key resource and they collected the coalition and United States statements about where airstrikes were conducted and this is now looking at the number of locations and specific differentiable locations named by the United States as targets of airstrikes by phases. So of course in the first two phases the U.S. is in conducting strikes except that rescue rate so we have no locations. At the beginning of the limited war phase it really is limited it's two locations these two locations are Erbil or the Erbil area and Mount Sinjar. On August 14th or August 14th authorization August 15th strikes begin it starts to broaden a bit which strikes around Mosul Dam and other areas like that that begin to broaden the discussion of what the escalation is but there is a real shift to the escalation phase with the appearance of multiple locations in Syria as well as you can see a growth in the number of locations in Iraq. So that's what the escalation looks like and hopefully a reminder of what the story looks like in terms of the strikes. So then I'll go through hopefully quickly these rationales and set up the core arguments of my piece or the core questions. My first question was what was the rationale that drove the war? So I divided it into five rationales that I thought were relevant and saw cited in discussions. One is preventive war logic which I define as again this use of force to prevent growth and capabilities under a sort of war now is better than later logic but specifically regarding the growth of capabilities. Secondly and also I should note specifically regarding homeland security of the United States. All of these other rationales could also be phrased preventively throughout this talk when I talked about preventive war logic I'm talking about it in relation to the US homeland. So second is direct self-defense which I'm defining here as military action or justifications for military action to destroy or lessen actual existing direct threats to the homeland. Then regional security, pretty self-explanatory protection of our preferred trade, societal arrangements and general security in lives and areas that are not the United States homeland. Humanitarian war defined as rationales for the use of military force to protect civilians outside of the United States who are not Americans and extra territorial protection of Americans. Rationals for military force to protect Americans outside of the United States and that really encompasses two core things in this discussion. One is military efforts regarding hostages and the other is military efforts regarding the threat to US personnel specifically in Erbil and Baghdad to some extent. What I found going through the statements is all of these rationales increase moving into the escalation phase but they increase at different rates and in different styles. Preventive war logic increases slowly through the processes. The first explicit remark regarding a preventive war logic in these official statements, the actual text not questions and answers occurs during the, I think it's the limited war phase is one, yeah, that's one that occurs during the recognition of crisis phase. There's not an explicit reference to that. In fact, the language used is preventive with regards to the broader concept of American interest not necessarily even the sort of threat to the United States. In addition, I should just note that throughout I find that all logics for war are absent into pre-war phase. We talked about that a bit before. We can talk about specific rationales if you want during the question and answer. I find complete absence of the direct self-defense logic throughout this period. I'll talk about that in a second. Regional security increases and is really the key driver for that initial phase shift and then continues to increase. Humanitarian war is key around that August part and a big part of that shift. And extraterritorial protection of Americans is similar to regional security and is the key part of both the shifts to recognition of crisis and limited war. But what I find also is that I think that these rationales to the right of this graphic which emerged first played a key role in generating the preventive war logic that by confronting ISIS's violence and brutality regarding these threats, the US begins to infer that ISIS has maximal objectives. I think that is accurate. ISIS at least to a large part did have maximal objectives. But what also is seen is the narrowing of the difference between the threat abroad and the threat to the United States homeland that generates a discourse of common threat often through threat to American values that pushes forward sort of a preventive war logic. The other thing to note is that this is an instance of what I call a snapback that the Obama administration did not want to return at very restraint oriented views at the beginning. But when there were threats from a resilient jihadist insurgency to continue to be perceived as American interests in the region, it generated a return to military force, not on a preventive war logic at the beginning, but on these more limited grounds that then grew into preventive war logic. So just quickly through the other key points, was the war preventive? I argued that it very clearly was preventive. In fact, on September 10th, Obama makes a statement regarding how if left unchecked, ISIS may come to pose the threat to the United States homeland and remarks that they do not at the moment pose such a threat. That is a remark that was noted at the time by other commentators, including Zach Buchamp and Vox and Kato's Gene Healy and the National Interest as the preventive war logic. People knew what they were hearing at that moment. There are other similar statements to the September 10th line throughout to sort of ramp up of the preventive war logic as well. So then did ISIS pose a direct threat to the United States? My answer to this is no. And I've come to this conclusion by slicing this through sort of four different looks. The first is what did the government say about the threat to the United States? And what we see is across a wide range of the government, there's a statement that there is no credible evidence of a direct foreign terrorist organization threat from ISIS to the United States from Syria and Iraq. That's stated by Obama in the September 10th speech. It's stated by people ranging from the director of the National Counterterrorism Center to the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the DHS Secretary. It's repeated through the DHS advisory system in 2015 and later for a number of bulletins. It's quite clearly this is the government assessment. But government assessments can be wrong. So I also look at indicators. What I find when I look at indicators is there appears to be a geographic split. There's a number of indicators that suggest high threat and they're all in Syria and Iraq. That's things like the large number of foreign fighters who went there and were present there. I think it was about 20,000 at the time period we're talking about. The latest numbers are 40,000 out of the Syrian conflict, mostly ISIS. So really large numbers. The territory they held about the size of Britain at the peak, their quasi-state nature, which allowed them to select and potentially generate more sophisticated external attacks. And finally, their substantial wealth. On the other hand, on the US side, there's a number of indicators when we look at it here that suggest the threat was not very substantial. There had not been a deadly directed attack in the United States by a foreign terrorist organization according to our data at New America since 9-11. There are no Syrian returning attacks despite us being five years into the Syrian civil war. There's only one Syrian returning plot to conduct violence that is publicly known in the United States and it wasn't connected to ISIS. It was connected to the Al-Qaeda affiliate, Shabbat al-Nusra. It also looks like that case was monitored from very early on by law enforcement. I think actually before the individual went over to Syria. There's only one known case where an attacker inside the United States, lethal or not, in this case non-lethal, we know had online connection with ISIS operative coaching them through the attack. And there's high law enforcement coverage of all of this. In fact, that one online coached attack was tracked by an informant right up to the beginning of the shooting. So what this suggests to me is that there's a question about the validity of measuring the threat to the United States by looking at the foreign threat rather than the threat to the United States. I'd then look at three exception indicators I think are relevant to talk. I'm not gonna talk much about them, just flag them up for future discussion. One is spike in inspired violence or violence inspired by ISIS but not actually connected to it. I'll just say that I'm very skeptical about waging war on the basis of the complex dynamics of terrorist brands. Second is the dynamic of online coaching which I think if you want to do hang a preventive war logic or preemptive war logic not preventive for the United States, that's the easiest spot to do it. I'm not convinced by it. I think we'll discuss a bit more about that specifically. And then the big one I think is aviation attacks because aviation attacks make that geographic indicator split less clear because most of the activity occurs outside of the United States. So you might not pick it up if you're looking at it from the way I am. In fact, two of the three foreign terrorist organization directed attacks in the United States since 9-11 have been attacks on aviation. And then finally I do a comparison to Europe which did have a preventive war logic. They did get hit directly from Syria by ISIS during the Paris and Brussels attacks as well as a couple smaller ones. My finding is it was clear that there were such a potential for threat. In fact, there was already a returning attack whether or not it was really connected to ISIS, really directed by ISIS. At the time, in fact, months before the United States begins its escalation phase. But one of the key aspects here is in Europe you see that the two indicator patterns align on high threat both in Europe and in Syria and Iraq. Which I think is different and suggests that there are challenges to projecting terrorist violence from a safe haven like Syria and Iraq. And you want to look for where those indicators align. So just quickly, does it make us safer? Well, because my conclusion is ISIS did not directly threaten the United States from Syria and Iraq during this war or at least in the main part of it. My answer is no, it has not made the United States substantially more safe. There may have been a brand effect. I think there's some evidence for that that ISIS because it lost its territory is less capable of inspiring attackers here. But we still saw attacks inspired by ISIS even at core moments of their losses including the attack in Manhattan, the same month that ISIS lost Raqqa and an attempted vehicular attack right here in the DC area. The same week, I believe, that Sencom announced that ISIS held no territory anymore in Iraq and Syria. So this brings to me to the dangers I see in this preventive war logic and its rise. One is I think there was a tendency to move from cost-benefit analysis because of the way uncertainty works in the futurology to a value-matching that encourages less attention to are we actually getting our interests set? Second, we need to be wary about the preventive war paradox to focus on capabilities and not to underline political conflicts. There was a lot of discourse about annihilating ISIS. The history actually shows the US is, I think, quite incapable of doing that. To make it worse, using preventive war logic tends to make it the political situation generally poorer because most societies, international law and just generally people recognize preventive war as an act of aggression. Finally, preventive war logic lowers the threshold of where the United States will intervene and that generates a danger for overstretching US power and an escalation of continued endless conflicts across a wide range of areas. So just because the topic is what are the lessons, my lessons are this key point about the danger of snapback, the need for restraint-oriented policymakers to pay attention to the ability of snapback to change the sort of conditions even under an administration like the Obama administration that said they did not want to return to Iraq. Not assuming that politicians who say they will end endless war will actually do that or be restrained when it comes to moments of crisis because war, once you've started, changes your sort of calculations, what you're experiencing, but also has psychological effects to how you read events. And then finally, the conclusion from those two key points is that ending endless war or a policy of restraint requires a full platform to end America's endless war, not just discussion of withdrawal. And I think we've seen this quite clearly with the Trump administration's announcement of a withdrawal that quickly turned into, well actually we're gonna stay both in the eastern area of Syria to protect oil and also in the Al-Tanf area. And with that, I turn it back over. Really excited about this conversation that we're gonna have. So thank you to our panelists for being here today. So before we get started with some, excuse me, moderated Q and A, we're gonna hear responses from both Josh and Alex to David's findings. Please go ahead, Josh. Great, well thank you, Melissa. And thanks to New America for letting me part of this conversation. And congratulations to David on a report that I hope all of you will spend some serious time with. That is my biggest and most important reaction, which is this is a real serious scholarly engagement with the counter-ISIS campaign, the lessons to be learned from it, and the part that perhaps I found most fascinating, which is the really detailed study of U.S. leadership language on the way to the counter-ISIS intervention that flowed, because I remember living through that language from government as it emerged, and I remember the logic that went into it, but to look back on it and study the trends and show how different themes emerged. You got a hint of it from David's presentation today, but I got a lot out of reading it in full and I hope you all will spend time with the report. Three points that I hope we will come back to in the course of this conversation. Three things that, and I'll use a word here that would surely have gotten me kicked out of a meeting while I was in government, but now I have the pleasure of sitting here at a think tank. Three things I'd like to problematize as we work through all of this. And maybe I'll take them in roughly the order that David mentioned them. One is, and it's in the subtitle, preventive war logic. There is certainly something ironic about an Obama administration that critiqued, rightly in my view, the preventive war logic that led the US into Iraq previously under the Bush administration, and that Obama of course ran against and as David said, fairly close to the beginning of counter-ISIS efforts, the Obama administration was touting the fact that it had gotten out largely of Iraq. In a sense to say, well, to prevent another threat from fully emerging to go back has an irony to it. What I question is, is preventive war logic actually wrong or is it just sometimes misapplied? I think the Obama administration rightly critiqued and many others have rightly critiqued its application to Iraq earlier. I think even those who are part of that decision making now question the intelligence that was relied on to apply it. The intelligence about ISIS strikes me is very different from the intelligence about WMD in Iraq and so whether preventing a dangerous adversary from getting worse is fundamentally a flawed idea or whether it's sometimes applied in really, really flawed ways but sometimes applied correctly strikes me as something we should grapple with. So that's point one. Point two is what does it mean to talk about an ISIS threat to, I would use the word Americans because it seems to me, and maybe more than seems to me, I recall being in government and thinking about the threat to Americans in perhaps a broader way than just was there a particular plot that American officials were aware of being hatched from Iraqi or Syrian soil and leading to an attack in a US city. Instead, inspiring attacks of the type that in fact were inspired by ISIS in California, in San Bernardino, in Florida, in Orlando, that was a very palpable fear and David talks about that a bit in here. Americans die when there are attacks in Europe, right? The Paris attack, the Brussels attack, they weren't just threats to Americans, they caused the deaths of Americans and so how to think about the scope of a threat posed to Americans and what it means to think that threat is sufficient to warrant US intervention is also something worth returning to. The last point, this idea of the forever war or the endless war has become something of a concept, a trope in discussions of counter-terrorism and I think it's worth trying to figure out what people mean when they say it. I'm not sure I understand what the forever war means. I know that for people who serve in our military, the strain on them and their families has been just extraordinary and unbearable at times since 9-11. So from that experiential quality of service, I think it's very clear what it means but from a strategy and policy level, I'm not sure the US has been in a singular endless war or forever war. There have been different things that have happened 9-11. There was an initial campaign in Afghanistan, there have been subsequent developments in Afghanistan. There was an Iraq intervention by the Bush administration that you heard me critique earlier. There was this intervention, which it probably won't surprise you from my comment so far, I think was largely warranted and largely successful, though I'm worried about where it's headed. But each of these strikes may as being a piece of post 9-11 national security developments and so as we talk about trying to do counter-terrorism more sustainably which I think needs to happen, I wanna problematize what we mean when we talk about the endless war forever. And I'll leave it there. Yeah, thanks so much for the opportunity to be here and to read the report. It was really a pleasure to read something so detailed and well researched and it's a fun read so everyone should go straight home and read it. I thought I'd talk about one thing that kind of struck me when I was reading the report which is that this preventive war logic that you document really well in US counter-terrorism operations in Syria and even in US interventions in the region more broadly, we mentioned Iraq in 2003, whether that logic might be causally linked to the fact that we tend to pursue maximalist and revisionist aims in these wars. So to me, I think I kind of made a similar distinction. The 2014 Syria-Colish intervention strikes me as a relatively conservative, small C conservative compared to other interventions like Iraq in 2003 because it aimed to restore the status quo rather than to replace a regime or to fundamentally transform institutions or societies. But I think what this report points so well to is kind of the insidiousness almost of that preventive war logic and the snapback dynamic. I love that term even though I can't say it. Snapback really describes this dynamic so well. And that's exactly because this intervention could be seen as relatively limited or conservative in its scope and in its aims. And I think also David, I would go even further than you do actually in saying that there may be or there are reasonably could be reasons to see ISIS's territorial control as a significant threat to the US and to Americans potentially because of the inspirational pull that the idea of the caliphate had. I'm sure we'll get into this more in the Q&A as well for many ISIS recruits. And because of the way that the fighting there kind of bogged down ISIS leadership so that they were less able to potentially develop and execute attacks on Americans. But I think this research also raises sort of a broader question about US policy in the region in which is what actually are US interests and what constitutes a threat to those interests. So I don't, I would argue that we haven't really had a coherent answer to this question. At least since the 2003 Iraq War you might even go back to Lebanon in the 1980s or I mean go back even further to Operation Blue Vet in 1958 Lebanon. And you see this dynamic where it seems like again and again the United States is doing something similar expecting different results. So we are going in using military force to tamp down on this emergent threat in a preventive manner saying we'll prevent it from becoming something bigger down the line but it's this kind of whack-a-mole approach almost where we're then we're going with military force in withdrawing without a longer term strategy to really prevent the resurgence of that threat if it is indeed a threat. And I think part of the reason that this logic that you articulate the preventive war logic is linked to these maximalist and transformational goals is, well in part because maximalist aims are politically and emotionally convenient kind of like this values laid in rhetoric that you point to they're really easy to articulate to explain to say oh we're gonna crush ISIS, we're gonna defeat Al Qaeda without really an explanation as you point out as to what that actually means. But more importantly I think they don't force policymakers to make hard choices about the cost and benefits of intervention in terms of the actual likely outcomes of those interventions rather than this value centered approach that you articulate that we're just going to they oppose our values and we're gonna crush them. And I think this is problematic because so often policymakers link these maximalist aims to means that they at least make appear less costly to us overall. So military planners might refer to it as the buy with and through approach. I think more politically we think about it as proxy wars but we'll be able to do a less costly intervention not by going directly but by working through partners on the ground and it'll be less costly and also we'll achieve these maximum goals that we articulated. And so we're promised that we can kind of have our cake and eat it too that we can achieve these goals at minimal costs. But we know from the scholarly literature on proxy wars that that's frankly simply not true that there are really significant patron client issues for example and that there are all kinds of sort of thorny things in there that makes this approach actually far more complicated in practice than sometimes is articulated in these narratives we hear about wars and counterterrorism. And so I think this is how we do end up in a situation like we saw in October with the SDF and I don't even know what to describe it as is it did the Trump administration make a policy decision? I don't think so but whatever happened it was probably executed in the most destructive and least productive way possible. But I think it still does point to this fundamental tension that we see and the need to keep engaging in making good faith efforts to make hard choices because what were the alternatives there, right? We could continue to leave troops in Syria to act as a buffer between Turkey and the SDF maybe indefinitely but even if we were to do that you'd still see this larger regional dynamic the shift where Russia, Iran and Turkey are kind of coordinating amongst themselves and largely leaving the US out of it. And I think even if we had left US troops in Syria as kind of a wedge of staying involved in that process the United States would have been pushed out by that regional dynamic regardless so thanks again and I guess that's kind of my reaction. Thank you those are two fantastic responses and I'm so glad you mentioned so many of those points you guys will definitely delve into that with the time that we have so I think just to kick us off David you mentioned in your analysis that ISIS did not pose a threat to the US during escalation periods and some of the pre and post during those times so just to begin do you believe and to our other panelists as well that ISIS at any point posed a threat to the American homeland in a way similar to the 9-11 attacks and then does ISIS pose a threat today and if so what's similar and different to 2014-2015? Yeah well first let me thank you do for responses that really go to the heart of the paper and I look forward to discussing some of that as well. My answer is no I don't think there is a ISIS threat similar to 9-11 I don't think there's ISIS threat to the United States similar to even lesser directed attacks we've seen in other areas since the sort of post 9-11 era. I think the government pretty clearly assessed that that they weren't seeing plots. I think the indicators when you look at the 470 plus terrorism cases in the US really show that. Now there's definitely always the chance of a major terrorist attack I think saying that there's not a major threat or it's unlikely it's not the same as saying it will never happen but I would put it very unlikely and I guess the comparison I think is interesting is looking at counter ISIS war period or it's just like 2014 to today versus say 2010, 2012 with Yemen and Pakistan where we saw it not only sort of this potential threat but actual attempted attacks inside the United States directed by foreign terrorist organizations. So you had a New York City subway plot with three men from the US who trained with al-Qaeda in the tribal areas and came back. We had the underwear bomber who simply as bomb did not successfully go off. And I think we saw a lot more of that than we've really seen. We haven't as far as I know and our review of terrorism cases seen anything like that. And Obama actually pretty specifically noted that in his infamous January interview with David Kremnick where he says, look, I think there's a difference between the JV team and a network of group like al-Qaeda that has actually directly targeted the US and give them all the criticism you want for calling ISIS the JV team. I think that's legitimate but like that actual differentiation I think has held up quite well over the five years and with ISIS having lost its territory now I think it's hard to make a claim that that threat is substantially higher now and particularly substantially higher in a way that you could tell a story about military action being useful to decline or reduce that. Well, I think the nature of America's defense against terrorism and the nature of terrorist threats had evolved from 9-11 to the period in question here. I mean, if you think about the Robert Mueller FBI and looking at the word preventive we had redesigned collectively as a country counterterrorism to be aggressively preventive. That was accepted as the right understanding of how not to let another 9-11 happen across party lines, across administrations, across branches of government, to my mind for good reason although we could drill down on that and so things had changed. If you were a terrorist group looking to attack the United States more than a decade later entering by physically having people cross US borders and then get on planes and then take over cockpits it just that would not be as available. Those vulnerabilities thankfully weren't the same so terrorist groups adapt all learning entities adapt. There was of course some similarity in the aviation plot that became public and as David mentioned in his remarks and mentions in the report. So there's not totally unrelated but there's also a real evolution and even though US borders had hardened European borders were somewhat different and of course you see the awful attacks in Paris in Brussels carried out by this group. You also see and this gets covered in the paper as well with citations to the discussion John Carlin has at the beginning of his book Dawn of the Code War. Junaid who's saying leading this effort to reach into the United States to as Alex mentioned draw on the inspiration that having a physical so-called caliphate gave and trying to get people to go down a road of killing right there in the United States where they already were. That was much easier by that point than getting somebody into the country. So I do think there was a very real threat. I think it may not have been a 9-11 threat because the defenses had changed and therefore terrorist actors who were trying to find vulnerabilities in those defenses had changed in response. So I think the question of threat assessment is really difficult in retrospect. As a political scientist we're all really obsessed with the idea of causal inference but you could also think of it as like the dog that didn't bark right. So how do you evaluate the success of the counterterrorism campaign if the lack of an emergence of a coordinated attack or even an attack inspired by ISIS is a marker of success but if that threat didn't exist in the first place which explanation is the correct one? Like I mentioned before I do think it's significant that ISIS was focused on dealing with challenges in the territory of the caliphate in Syria and Iraq and that gave its leadership less time and resources to developing these kinds of plots and that's something that's definitely changed today as a result of the intervention. So that being said though I think it's more appropriate almost to think of this moment as a significant moment but one that's the end of a beginning rather than the beginning of an end to use a cliche in the sense that I think we're only really beginning to reckon with the longer term consequences of the threat that ISIS poses. So for example we have this really intractable ongoing problem with dealing with returning fighters and their families how to deal with them in their home countries whether to repatriate them whether their citizenship might be stripped causes really complicated issues like Turkey's kind of forcing the issue on this at scenes but I think we're so we're facing complicated unsolved legal questions around that and we haven't really seen ultimately what's going to happen with potential returning fighters so I think if you look at the history of episodes of Jihadi violence returning fighters kind of have a long tail in the sense that not literally but chronologically in the sense that you can't really assess the effects of their return to their home countries for maybe decades. You see for example Jihadi fighters returning from the war in Afghanistan over the course of subsequent decades having really diverse and complicated and intractable kinds of effects in their home countries so I think that's something to kind of look out for. To pick up on your point about the dogs that don't bark I think that's one of the core questions here and I wouldn't encourage people to read this report as saying if the US had just done nothing ISIS threat would not have gotten to that point. I think that that's important to keep in mind and it's also one of the core questions when it comes to preventive war logic and particularly when it's just logic which I differentiate from saying the war as a whole is preventive but that people are thinking this way to go back to one of Josh's initial response remarks I think that it's not entirely wrong to have a preventive war logic that you do want to be thinking about that to some extent. My concern and what I think is very dangerous and one of the reasons why I'm very critical of this sort of emergence of that preventive war logic discourse is the way it wipes away the possibility of knowing what the future would have been which generates this condition where people can always claim the threat would have been high with really no way to demonstrate it. I think that connects with the sort of value matching discourse in a way that really pushes towards endless war and a lack of sort of calculation what you referred to as the insidious nature of the logic that it keeps coming back even when you have small C conservative goals which is one of the core things I really want to convey with this report. And to my eyes, regardless of where you come down on was it right then? I think we're seeing the cost of that now and only so much of this sort of extension of the war in Syria to be about competing with Russia or competing with Iran or this quick flip on the Kurds can be attributed to Trump. He certainly bears a lot of responsibility for the chaos and unplanned nature. I think that was all built in from the beginning and can't really be wished away that had we had a good counter ISIS campaign we might have avoided this. Trump has probably made it worse but I think what we see from the beginning of the campaign is these pressures are always there once you go to war. Thank you. I'd also like to discuss some levels and methods of military engagement. So do you think the US ever considered its initial engagement against ISIS to be low cost and a quick fix compared to other conflicts we've engaged in? And then do you think there are other effective methods and tools for engaging that are non-kinetic and what would those be? Anyone can answer this one. I mean, I think you see something deliberately different from the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet putting aside whether there was a logic or an illogic to Iraq or putting aside what Afghanistan has become it's no coincidence that this one looked different. There was a desire to address what at least those who were in leadership saw in my view rightly as a threat but not to have another large boots on the ground campaign especially for some enduring duration but really for even the short term. And in that sense it took what had been described for a number of years going back to the end of the Bush administration and certainly in the Obama administration as an increasingly partner driven strategy to counter terrorism and then was something of an experiment to see how that could work when the threat was this much bigger when the numbers of the ranks of the terrorist group was this was as large as it was and as it became. And assembling a coalition of as many countries and entities as became part of the counter ISIS coalition was pretty remarkable and operating with on the ground partners who were in part non-state actors the Syrian courage was pretty remarkable. So there were elements of this that I think were designed to facilitate an approach that was deliberately different. Yeah, I agree with I think all of that. I think there's definitely a difference between like 100,000 plus US troops in Iraq and what's happening now. I would though, I think this comes back to your question about what is meant by the endless war and one of my criticisms of the way to counter ISIS campaign gets assessed in terms of success or not success and particularly the sort of framing as it's a successful low cost campaign is that I think there's a temporal error of analysis on two levels. One is that it starts the clock in 2014 with the intervention and cuts it now when we're sort of analyzing it. And looking back, I would read this as just the latest phase of a broader US war that goes in Iraq at least back to the 2003 invasion. We're in many ways fighting exactly the same group we started fighting then. I would pull it back arguably even further to at least the sort of Gulf War when we seem to have made a decision that we're going to police regional security in Iraq and in the broader region through Iraq. I think that's sort of not necessarily an unreasonable determination that that was the correct method but I think it's dangerous to look at only the current period. And then I think there's a problem of sort of cutting the analysis now when we still have troops in Syria where those troops come into conflict with Iranian and Russian forces or Iranian and Russian back forces that there doesn't seem to be a plan to remove them at any point. That's what I refer to as sort of a quasi-permanent presence. When we had our future security forum in April, we did a completely unscientific so it takes us with a huge grain of salt but a survey poll of the audience, mostly national security professionals and fewer than 10% said there would be fewer than 5,000 US troops or said there would not be any US troops in Iraq or Syria in 2030. And a good chunk, I think about a third, said more than 5,000. Now, like looking back from now, sure those aren't huge numbers but that's also at least 15 years of US war in Syria, a country we were not at war in prior to this campaign or at least in a meaningful way. I know there were a couple earlier raids into Syria and if you trace it back to the Gulf War, I think it's six administrations and multiple decades of war in Iraq. So I think that's what I'm thinking about with endless war. Yeah, I think based on my earlier remarks you won't be surprised to learn that I find the low-cost kind of quick fix framing to be really problematic to borrow a term. But I also think that, I mean, it's hard to even propose alternatives because I think we need to go really beyond to systematically redesign our approach to the region as a whole. That's not just a series of kind of whack-a-mole use of force type operations. So, and I think that the way that we thought about our interest in the region as a whole even over the past several decades has been really static in kind of a problematic way. So when we think about U.S. interests in the Middle East it's about the importance of oil and it's about the importance of the stability of these, the alleged stability of these authoritarian kind of entrenched regimes. And so I think before you even start proposing an alternative strategy you really need to think about or before you even, to Syria itself you need to think about that in a broader kind of strategic context. I don't have a perfect solution. I think an alternative really needs to center development and diplomacy efforts and to target the root causes or the reasons that we see people drawn to these organizations in the first place. But to go also beyond that counter-terrorism framing to think about why have we seen people protesting in the streets and the hundreds of thousands in Lebanon and Iraq recently or in Sudan or in Algeria or even to go back to the original Arab Spring protests around corruption and of governments around quality of life about people's aspirations to have careers and to have social lives that are really legitimate and important. And I think we need to find ways, start thinking about ways to address those things. So that's like a really broad agenda. I don't think it has to necessarily be a US-centric approach. Actually, I think a lot of it will depend on supporting the voices and the aspirations of the people in the region themselves. Thank you. So before we get to audience Q and A I have two questions I would like to quickly address. Picking up a little bit on what you've mentioned Alex for everyone, what are your general thoughts on air and drone strikes since we're talking about these right now compared to troops on the ground and then pulling that back a little more what would you say about the argument that gets made that air and drone strikes actually play into extremist narratives for recruitment? I guess for me, I think the core point that I look at is I think these are sort of connected and it's easy to think of air and drone strikes as a replacement for broader war. And I think in one sense it obviously is the current campaign looks nothing like Iraq in 2004. But on the other hand, there's a new country involved and also there are US troops on the ground and it began in many ways as sort of air strike-centric really air strike-centric throughout but that doesn't mean that we're not deeply, deeply involved in sort of the conflicts of the region. And I think that's in, I think the civilian aspect is important from a moral and sort of accountability spot but in some ways I think it can be a distraction from the broader question of are we fighting a war that actually strategically makes sense is just and is sustainable? And that's sort of what I focus on in this report is bringing out that question of this because I think even if the war were fought with no civilian casualties which of course could never be possible that doesn't mean that any of these other questions are resolved satisfactorily. Yeah, I think there's a lot of really significant debate about in the literature about the efficacy of drone strikes or those kind of decapitation tactics and approaches to dealing with terrorist organizations. So I think that's kind of an open question. I think more fundamentally to me I worry about the message that it sends to the people of the region that from our perspective it's a potentially less costly more effective means of achieving our goals but it's kind of saying that we want to reduce the cost to ourselves as much as possible in order to make our communities and ourselves feel slightly safer by making you and your community feel less safe. And I think that sends a really bad message and it compounds a lot of the existing narratives that you see in the region around US behavior and US policy. So that's something that needs to be challenged. Thank you. Yeah, for my two cents they are tools, right? Strikes from the air whether they're from manned aircraft they are tools of lethal force and tools of lethal force are both hold the possibility of avoiding putting one's own troops in harm's way at least in significant part and have the capacity to reduce a threat and have the capacity to do some real damage. And from those who dig into what reactions there are on the ground to them the reactions tend to be if they actually eliminate somebody in a community who's stoking violence and dangerous they tend to be fairly well received and if they kill civilians as they do sometimes they tend to be hated as would be understandable. They are not cost free, they are not perfect but no tool is and the question of how you as with so many other counterterrorism and national security tools calibrate it and use it and have it be intelligence driven and use responsibly and embed it in a broader strategy. That seems to be as important as trying to focus on the tool itself. Now when we talk about lowering costs to the country using them it's important to realize that doesn't reduce costs to others. So the America's own Osmot Khan has written eloquently of the civilian casualties caused including by the coalition in the course of this conflict Mike Iglio's new book Shatter the Nations talks about the just incredible destruction that even a campaign that many of us think of as successful in reducing the threat posed by ISIS still left behind just extraordinary destruction a physical destruction and a live loss. So tools of lethal force carry severe consequences. They have potential to be part of effective counterterrorism but they have potential to do a lot of damage along the way. Thank you. So my closing question for you all and I think also draws upon the idea of talking about long term strategy. What does that look like? David writes, calls in his report calls for withdrawal or an end to endless war must be combined with substantial efforts to change America's vision of its role in the world. Efforts to improve conditions on the ground and development of non-military policy options to avoid a snapback of war. So I'm wondering what are some tangible ways to do this non-military approach and then what does a policy change look like if we had to future cast? I'll quickly start with what I throw up in the paper which admittedly is just a couple of citations to some interesting work. It's not anywhere close to proving that this would have a substantial impact or even necessarily be positive. But first I think the core aspect of this returns to the lessons of not investing so much in particular policy makers but also not I think related to that is not viewing an effort to end endless war as being able to be done by just what we're not going to conduct strikes at all. Which I think is not really a sustainable meaningful policy when you get into the government especially given that my sense is American people value not just sort of Homeland Security but as you said American lives in Europe where there were attacks and in the Middle East. So I think we should not push that out of the debate because it's always a good reminder and forces people to explain what they're doing. And of course it may in some cases very much be the right option but I don't think that's actually a sustainable policy and focusing on it can drive a shift into this trust in politicians who say I will end endless war but when there's a crisis they're back to the war. In terms of actual policies at a full policy platform I'd like to see I think one thing is sort of efforts that expand trade and economic development through much of this region and sort of trying to address some of the democratic deficits and so on that may give rise to conditions for resilient jihadist insurgencies. I think there's also a lot of like non military options that might be possible to not necessarily stop a crisis like this but begin processes of diverting it and one that is perhaps controversial that I flag up is whether we should be looking at sort of ransom payments for hostages and whether they're if we had a more sort of developed willingness to negotiate or even just a stronger bureaucratic focus within the government which now there really is much more than there were thanks to substantial work whether that might have tamped down some of the worry about sort of the hostage crisis and that having got into such a crisis level. I think also we just need to have the discussion about are these actually interests we want to pursue and what is the legitimate interest for the use of military force and my tendency would be to think we can't pull that fully back but there's a lot of room to pull that back from what I see as pretty maximal objectives on the US part. So those are some things I'd throw out. I think that's really an area where there needs to be vastly more research. The last thing I'd say is the foreign fighter laws that there were so many countries that just didn't have foreign fighter laws and the allowance for private violence is something that has begun to be shaped but lots more work to do on you shouldn't be able to go from a country to fighting in other countries wars. I don't think that's a beneficial to global stability or interests. Alex, should we have something to say? I think a good place to start in the short run is to look at Reconstruction Aid and there I would flag that I think it was in fiscal year 18 Congress appropriated more than 200 million to Syrian reconstruction efforts that the Trump administration decided just to not disperse and the rhetoric around it was kind of like well why are we spending our money on these problems abroad and it's so expensive and when you compare that to the orders of magnitude more that we're spending somewhere in the billions on military operations in Syria right here I think that points to the absurdity of that argument. Of course there are really legitimate conversations to have around who receives that aid does that inadvertently empower actors like the Assad regime who we find distasteful to say the least and those are legitimate conversations but the way to one way to not engage moving forward is to just kind of systematically cut that aid or say like well the Gulf States will pay for it. Thank you. Yeah I mean there's a whole complicated spectrum of tools in the counterterrorism toolkit that range from our own military force to others military force but using our or at least buttress by our training, our weapons sales, even partnered operations to sharing intelligence to those who are able to act on that intelligence on its own to our own efforts to counter or prevent violent extremism through messaging amplified by or in some cases created by the US government to efforts to tutor others in how to do that. I think when counterterrorism is going well you're not just putting all your eggs in any one basket but you are trying to be careful about which ones make sense for a threat in what place rather than thinking you can use every tool in every place because that strikes me as going beyond what the US can sustainably do. What I worry of is that we're actually headed in the wrong direction on this in many ways and there's been a remilitarization of how the US government thinks about counterterrorism that's diminishing the emphasis on those other tools and diminishing some of the dollars going to those other tools and that strikes me as the opposite of the direction we might want to be going in. Just quickly. Sure. I think one of my big worries is that remilitarization is ongoing under the like a faux rhetoric of restraint that I think most like scholarly and actual people who talk about restraint pretty roundly reject but the Trump administration is pretty willing to use the rhetoric of we're ending endless wars as they continue this as a way to pull back a lot of the activities that might address some of these concerns while keeping pretty explicitly a commitment to military snapback. And I think that's a route too and we actually saw this phrase used I believe today by Defense Secretary Esper sort of the Israeli model of mowing the grass which I don't think we should reject entirely some of the strategic lessons of that but it's a really dangerous both phrasing and concept for how you counter terrorism and there needs to be resistance explicitly to that attempt to smuggle in a militarized US policy of snapback or mowing the grass under the language of ending endless war. Great, thank you. So now to you all, we'll have a microphone come to you and then if you could introduce yourself and your affiliation before you ask your question. Hi, Eric Bordenkircher, UCLA Center for Middle East Development. One issue that I thought you guys were gonna maybe touch on particularly when you started talking about the FDF and I don't know if it informs the discussion or kind of could actually develop the discussion further but this issue of credibility and is credibility driving these endless wars or unwillingness to get out but also kind of maybe under this umbrella of this war on terror and that it's pulling us into these wars because then this is kind of two questions here. When you look at the study and it's interesting if there's these substantial threats to Europe ahead of time, why haven't the Europeans put more military power into this situation in Northeastern Syria early in the conflict or even after this quote unquote withdrawal because I mean like 2,000 troops, 1,000 troops the Europeans can't fill that if this is a significant threat and continues to be a significant threat and then also the other question is in regards to I can understand intervening on the Iraqi side we rebuilt this army, we've poured millions or billions of dollars into the Iraqi state and we have an interest to try to maintain that but on the Syrian end, why are we helping the Assad regime why did we help the Assad regime out? Why did we help out Iran and Russia? These are our enemies, why don't we let them what do you call it get stuck in this swamp further and we've kind of done them a kind of nice. Okay, go ahead. So I think credibility question I didn't see much focus on the question of credibility I think it probably is a key aspect for a lot of these discussions I think there was often a more direct either sort of there's an actual regional threat ISIS had territory the size of Britain that was being responded to so it wasn't about credibility on that or was this sort of almost a jump beyond credibility that ISIS is a threat to our very values or the norms of the international community or they're just evil and should not exist in the world which I don't think relies on credibility yeah, I don't know if you all have thoughts on the others. Well, maybe to pick up on the question of Iraqi side Syria side, I mean, if you believe that this entity that this tens of thousands of fighters that ISIS had the claim to govern the physical caliphate the claim explicitly to wanna build from that through violent attacks and otherwise to threaten the rest of the world the border becomes in some ways a false border I mean quite literally as ISIS pushed through Syria into Iraq, it paused to tweet out to the world images of demolishing the big pieces of earth that marked that border that was symbolically important to them because they were rebelling against the Psych Pigo divvying up of the Muslim world as they saw it but it was actually something happening in the physical world, they were demolishing a border that they rejected and replacing it with a caliphate that they wanted to build and expand on so if one starts from the premise that this was a problem worth reacting to and you can tell that I do start from that premise I'm not sure that halting and allowing it to fester on one side of a border that they quite deliberately demolish would have been any sustainable way to address the threat. Yeah I would just totally agree with that and if you look at the history of ISIS over the past decade or so you more or less see them sloshing back and forth across that border that they don't recognize so if we can make a distinction in terms of maybe US interests in the region between Iraq and Syria but if the question is how do we minimize or eliminate the threat of ISIS I don't think you can think about that border in a really meaningful way because as long as there's that instability kind of festering you're going to have a safe haven for groups like ISIS. So one of the sort of things I just say quickly on this is that I do think there's room for a much needed study on could the campaign have been sliced at an earlier moment whether that's don't extend it into Syria whether it's no US in Syria but a commitment to back others whether it's we're done after the Mount Sinjar and the Erbil protection and I think there are very strong reasons for why that's not possible. I'm not actually sure that beyond the just sort of general question of the sort of fluidity of the border whether that's really been explored sufficiently publicly and in comparison to other interests but I think we should get some other. We could discuss some of these more as we want to make sure we have enough time for everyone else. Yes, Heather. Thanks Heather, Robert from New America. As David knows I'm a little bit obsessed with the politics around this period and the it's very interesting the periodization that you choose at least one of the last two quarters of 2014 you had swing women voters telling pollsters that ISIS was their biggest worry. You had just about the period where you document more kinetic action being taken. You have political ads showing up in the US mentioning ISIS and trying to if you forgive the phrase weaponize ISIS in the 2014 midterm campaign. David your choice to use public logic and rhetoric is really interesting but I think you then really have to engage with the politics of it and so Josh since we have you here I can't resist seeing if you'll comment a little bit on how the internal strategic conversation in fall 2014 whether or not it was affected at all by the way ISIS became I mean ISIS may David or not as you point out have posed a security threat to the homeland but it certainly posed a political threat or was used as a political threat in those elections so I'd love to hear you both talk a little bit about that Alex I was really struck by your point about the emotional quality of some of the logics which of course goes back to the political point and then that also leads though to the question of how much US strategy in the region is actually about the region and how much it's about American politics at this point and I kind of can't help remarking that if you are an administration of any partisanship and you can't get the money for the non-kinetic approaches that both David and Alex mentioned then you kind of end up back with this sort of let's drone from a distance approach so I just wonder if you can reflect a little bit more on the limitations of thinking about war logics apart from political logics. I'm happy to start and the White House I experienced or this process which in some ways I experienced first from the Justice Department then from the White House it was driven by not political actors though of course you have then people who have to be conscious of politics delivering the very word that I think David studies so carefully and so interestingly in this report so what you have even just in terms of boring bureaucratic process are civil servants from the intelligence community, diplomats reporting on this push that at some point we really worried could go as far as bagged at as a threat certainly it was a threat in the north you have the intelligence community talking about the growing threat and reporting on and David quotes me on this in the report not just ISIS's in some ways surprising threat but the Iraqi army's surprising weakness or lack of will to stand and fight and all of that yields recommendations that ultimately go to political actors and of course there are conversations that must happen at the highest levels in which people who need to be both national security officials and ultimately advisors to an elected president have to figure out how that comes together but perhaps blissfully I wasn't there I was in what had been quite deliberately protected as a counter-terrorism community that even up to fairly senior parts of the National Security Council had been kept civil servants and apolitical actors across Clinton, Bush, Obama administrations there's been some recent alteration of that which is another story but I saw this as a process that largely built from apolitical actors sent recommendations that were largely then followed how it got messaged I suspect people thought hard about that but then again those messages had to be checked with people who felt that they accurately reflected the threat or sometimes the lack of a discrete plot or threat and that was how that played out at least in my experience I think the point about public opinion is super interesting in political science we at least historically tend to really devalue and downplay the role of public opinion especially in foreign policy and to say it doesn't really matter all that much so why pay attention? We have this idea not only in the scholarly community but amongst members of Congress and senior folks who've been around a while that politics stops at the water's edge and politics isn't really going to enter into these foreign policy decisions but what you highlight is I think a trend that maybe could have started all the way back in before 2014 but in 2014 as well and then leading up through the Trump administration which is kind of the 2016 election and this administration has kind of exploded those boundaries where we used to think that people would go maybe they think about foreign policy and they're interested but when they go to vote when they go to submit their ballot they're thinking about things like healthcare and I don't know jobs, the economy, not ISIS or what are our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq look like but now you see this rhetoric you have trade, immigration, terrorism to extend these endless wars rhetoric really seeping in at the core of our politics and becoming increasingly partisan in a way that I think a lot of people certainly find worrisome in one sense because of the increasing polarization and the way that that really tears at the fabric of our society and also how we think about those issues but maybe the silver lining of it with a helpful element is that I think it's really useful actually to bring these conversations in more fundamentally to how Americans think about politics and policy. I'd cite your article on this in the paper and think it's the key point. Also a lot of my vision of snapback is based on sort of public opinion polling and that and I think one of the interesting things and I don't really have the evidence to show how public opinion polling drives or is not a driver of the actual decision process but I thought it was very interesting that in this period the American public generally supports the military action but also at the same time often retains restraint oriented views. So there's one poll that a plurality of Americans do not or a majority of Americans support re-intervention or sending advisors. At the same time the same poll shows that plurality of Americans think it was correct to get out completely in 2011 and I think there's a lot of these things where also things like polls showing that people react angrily to the heading of hostages not just upset but anger which we see whether or not the like people are reading the polls and reacting to it. I think you can also see like this is how people largely think and then match sort of polling reactions to how decision makers say they think. So Carrie similarly talks about this after learning of the first of the hospital murders and says I was angry and I want to do extinguish ISIS from history and bring the person back. I could only do one of those and that's when we just really decided to annihilate ISIS. I mean I'm vastly paraphrasing but he uses the phrase extinguish he links it to that and it reads very closely in my view to that poll. So I think it is really politics and even if it's not politics all the decision makers are Americans who have similar reactions or anxieties and questions. Thank you. So I think we have time for one final question. Thanks very much Jeff Selden with VOA. One of your conclusions you say that ISIS did not pose a direct threat to the United States that would have supported the thinking of a preventive war. But in some ways the idea of a preventive war was based on the idea that if terrorists are allowed to have a safe haven like al-Qaeda was able to have in Iraq that that does pose a threat. With people pointing to the example of al-Qaeda. From what you said in the report is the idea of a terrorist safe haven now overblown or was it always overblown and how does that play into how the US might need to approach these types of situations going forward. Thank you. I think my differentiation there is insufficient to support a preemptive logic. So there's not that kind of actual specific plot. It's a preventive worry about exactly the safe havens. But that's sort of not the key aspect of your question. On the safe havens I think there's a lot of evidence from this case and also some other scholarship that begins to really challenge the understanding that safe havens anywhere are a threat to the United States homeland. And I think in this case there's a strong challenge to that. I think people also need to not take that and go to there's no threat from safe havens. And one of the core pieces of evidence that that's the incorrect route to go is that ISIS had a safe haven and it was from that safe haven that they struck Europe and also projected violence through much of this sort of Middle East based on the number of foreign fighters they're training in Syria and Iraq. I don't think you could have done the Paris attack without having sort of that kind of safe haven. Maybe it could have been prepared from within Europe and to a large extent a big part of that network was in Europe. But I think it's easy to overestimate and I just go back to the, I think one way to get at this is to see where threats, threat indicators of safe havens and threat indicators of weakness of defensive measures align. And I think in the United States, for most of these cases, they don't align. The United States is an extremely hard target. I think for Europe, they did align and I think for much of the broader sort of Middle East, North Africa region, they can often align as well and probably more so than Europe. Anyone else? David should get the last word, this is a report. So any closing thoughts then? Nope. Okay. Well, thank you all so much for coming today. Thank you for your engaging questions and a big thanks to our panel. And please don't forget to check out the report. It is live on our website. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Freedom.