 Well, thank you very much to the Institute for this invitation. I'm very happy to be here. My goal this afternoon is twofold. I want to explain and assess how we've arrived at this point of crisis, again, in the Middle East with respect to the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. And I also want to provide a brief assessment and critique of Obama's strategy with respect to ISIS. People at work, what are its strengths, what are its weaknesses. And if there's time left, I'll sort of insert my own set of policy recommendations in terms of how things should ideally move forward. This is a topic that's not going away any time soon. President Obama has stated on several occasions that this question, this particular issue, is going to be with us for several years, forthcoming. It will, I think, shape the politics of the Middle East in the coming years. I suspect President Obama will have to hand this issue over to the next administration. And I think it's for those reasons that because this is going to be on the agenda not only of the Middle East, but of the entire world for the next several years, it's important that the international community, Europeans, Americans, and others really start to think seriously and get educated on this particular subject. And that's why I've come here today to Dublin, and I'm happy for the opportunity to share with you some thoughts. Before I begin, I'll just show you a few slides just to sort of set the stage and establish a framework. There's some really good ISIS resources. A couple of weeks ago, the American television station PBS provided what I think is perhaps the most incisive backgrounder to the rise of ISIS. It's in two parts. I strongly recommend you look at it. It's online. If you want a good sort of background sort of look at the Islamic State, that documentary, which I showed to my students just before coming here, is really wonderful. And our website for the center that I direct, the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Denver, has an ISIS resource page that I'm happy to show to you. It provides, I think, some of the most useful links and background information on ISIS in all its various dimensions. And it's, I think, a great resource for people who are sort of thinking about this issue and want to know more about it. ISIS has expanded, surprising to everyone, within a short period of time, to occupy a piece of real estate in the middle of the Middle East about the size of Great Britain, but 81,000 square miles in the heart of the Middle East across the Iraq-Syrian border. I think that map here on the right, so it gives you a rough sort of layout of where the ISIS sort of proposed so-called Islamic State exists. And as you can see, the big challenge is that they are on the outskirts of Baghdad. That's how far they've expanded in a very short time. And so the big question here in terms of trying to understand this topic is how did we get here? And critically, what's the best analytical framework to use to try and explain the rise of ISIS? Is this problem fundamentally a problem due to something inherent within Islamic culture or Arabic culture? President Obama has spoken on several occasions of this problem of ancient sectarian hatreds in the Middle East between Sunni and Shia. Are we witnessing today some sort of Muslim version of the Christian wars of religion of the 16th and 17th century? Or is the problem with ISIS fundamentally due to the legacy of the American Anglo invasion of Iraq in 2003? What's the best entry point and point of departure to understand this particular topic? Now, my own view on how best to interpret this particular crisis, the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, is that I think we are experiencing this particular problem primarily as a result of the convergence of two sets of political processes and issues that when brought together, I think broadly explains how we got to where we are today with the rise of the Islamic State. And these two issues are, first and foremost, the very sordid and negative legacy of the politics of authoritarianism and despotism of the post-colonial Arab state, meshing with and converging with the predictable consequences of state breakdown and collapse. And it's, I think, important in this context to ask the question, why Iraq and Syria? Why is it in Iraq and Syria that the Islamic State has arisen, established territory and has laid claim to a piece of real estate? Why is this not happening in other parts of the Arab Islamic world? And I think the reason and the answer to that question is because it's primarily in Iraq and Syria where you have the most negative legacy of the post-colonial Arab tyrannies that have destroyed and deeply shaken up and ravaged these societies. If you were to put on a spectrum and compare the human rights record, the state society relations, the form and character of political rule of all of the 22 countries of the Arab League, Iraq and Syria should be located at the extreme end of a spectrum of repression. The bathest rule in these two countries was the most sordid, was the most horrific, was the most destructive. And I think that has left a particular legacy in terms of societal consequences. Also in Iraq and Syria, these are the two countries that are most adversely affected by the consequences of war and state breakdown. Take Iraq, for example. For the last 35 years approximately, Iraq has been facing some form of war in one form or the another. Eight years of war with Iran, Iraq. A brief interim period then the Iraq-Coate crisis. Incredibly robust and intrusive draconian sanctions that destroyed Iraqi civil society. And then in 2003 until today, the American invasion and occupation of Iraq, which has really broken that society apart in many ways. And then in neighboring Syria, similar situation. Since 2011, you've had an uprising, a conflict that has deeply shaken Syrian society. The nature of the conflict in Syria for the last three and a half years has been borderline genocidal. And that's not something that I, a word that I use lightly. If you read the human rights documentation on Syria, the terms, state-sanctioned war crimes and crimes against humanity litter the documentary record with respect to Syria. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, UN Special Commission of Inquiry, all of them sort of have copiously documented in over 40 collective reports what has taken place in that country replete with chemical weapons, torture archipelago, the mass arrest, industrial scale killings, the biggest refugee crisis of the 21st century, a global health crisis, a rape crisis. The nature of the conflict in Syria today has been described, I think, accurately by the United Nations on several occasions as the biggest humanitarian and moral crisis of the 21st century. That has destroyed Syrian society. And it's as a result of these two interwoven and overlapping processes of the legacy of political authoritarianism and state breakdown that you see in these two parts of the Arab Islamic world, a set of social conditions that have provided an opportunity, a ripe sort of set of social conditions for this type of militant extremism to emerge and to provide for some people an alternative sort of project for the future. So I think that's really the broad, I think, entry point for understanding how we got to this particular point of view. But there's other things that have been happening at the same time that I think explain why ISIS has emerged in these two parts of the world. The question of the political legitimacy of the state in Iraq post-2003 is a big part of the problem here. In the eyes of Iraq's 20% Sunni population, as a result of the rise of Shia political parties in Baghdad, over the course of the last 10 to 12 years, the Sunni population in Iraq has been marginalized, discriminated against, persecuted. And this is largely a function, I think, of the policies of Nuri al-Maliki, who has pursued these policies of Shia preference and also Sunni exclusion that has turned large segments of the Sunni population away from the central government and some of them are sympathizing now with ISIS as a group that perhaps can address and be a voice for Sunni grievances in the context of Iraq. That has provided a certain sort of territory in a population that is, in many ways, sympathetic to an alternative political project, in this case the ISIS project. And unless that particular issue is sort of addressed, the question of the future stability of Iraq cannot be resolved. And so the question of the political legitimacy of the state in Baghdad is a big part of the problem. And that same problem exists in the context of Syria. The only difference is it's 1,000 times worse. Because in the eyes of most Syrians, 70% at least who are Sunni, they view the government in Damascus as not only being a repressive fascist dictatorship, but they also feel alienated by a regime that is dominated by an Alawite sort of religious group that has, in the past three and a half years, persecuted and destroyed most of society, not to mention the 41-year rule of the House of Assad that has left a very sordid legacy. And so I think that's a big problem of the alienation and the marginalization of groups that have destroyed the political legitimacy of the two states and has provided an opportunity for ISIS to then step in and say, look, there's no future for you in your existing states. The legacy of political tyranny teaches us that we need to turn out square, come and join our Islamic state. That's the way forward. And that's unfortunately an idea and a message that has resonance in the eyes of some people in Iraq and Syria. Now, of course, Syria, I think, is really key also to understanding from a geostrategic and international perspective how we got to this particular moment. As I've said before, all roads lead to Damascus. And what I mean by that is that we are dealing with the ISIS crisis as a result, primarily, of the failure of the international community to take seriously and to respond effectively to the crisis in Syria that began in the context of the Arab Spring in March 2011. The story of ISIS really begins. You can begin it in different places, but generally it begins in the context of 2003 in the aftermath of the American occupation of Iraq. Sunni militancy emerges. A big part of that is al-Qaida, an al-Qaida franchise in Iraq. But what happens to that al-Qaida franchise in Iraq as a result of the American troop surge, as a result of this Sunni awakening plan that tried to sort of buy off and win over Sunni tribes back to an allegiance with the central government in Baghdad. If you look at what happened to this al-Qaida movement that emerged in Iraq after the American occupation, by around 2011, by the time American troops were planning on moving out of Iraq, al-Qaida in Iraq is basically a broken movement. It's defeated militarily, largely speaking. It's defeated ideologically. It's a shadow of its former self. But what happens in 2011 is you have the Arab Spring uprisings. And of course, the Arab Spring comes to Syria at that time. And as a direct result of the crackdown, the brutality, the ferocity of the Assad regime's response to a citizen's revolt, and the militarization of that revolt that an opportunity emerges for the remnants of al-Qaida in Iraq to move over into Syria, take advantage of a power vacuum, and within a couple of years to sort of reconstitute themselves to become the most prominent and efficient and powerful group among the Syrian rebel forces that are fighting Assad. And if you think about the whole question of Syria over the last three and a half years, when the uprising began in Syria in March 2011, there was no militant Islamic presence to be found. There was no radical Sunni presence. It was a citizen's revolt. It was largely sectarian, largely nonviolent. But that changes as a result of primarily Assad's crackdown, also as a result of the intervening sort of intervention of neighboring states, Saudi Arabia and Iran in particular. But also because the international community really chose not to come to the aid of the moderate Syrian rebels who did have a presence, I think, in the early parts of the Syrian uprising, but were effectively abandoned and left to themselves. And that created an opportunity for other groups to step in. And ISIS emerges by 2013 as a major force to dominate the landscape in Syria. There's a lot of, I think, testimony that's coming out from close allies of President Obama, Hillary Clinton, Leon Panetta, all of them who sort of said that Obama misjudged the situation in Syria. He should have acted earlier, should have armed the moderate Syrian rebels, should have taken it much more seriously. And because he hasn't, it has led to the ISIS crisis. And I think those are perspectives that I am sympathetic with. Right now, there is a major debate in the United States over this whole question of the future of Syria, now that the United States is getting back involved in the conflict. The whole question of Obama's Syria plan is a big question mark. What does Obama plan to do? We don't know. There's a lot of confusion and chaos within the White House over this particular issue. And recent reports, just when I left the United States last week, is the Obama administration has now called for a big review and reassessment of US policy towards Syria as a result of the rise of ISIS and as a result of these airstrikes that have begun against the Islamic State. But the key point here, I think, with respect to the ISIS crisis is that there's no fundamental solution to the ISIS crisis. President Obama, there's no way that you can fundamentally degrade and destroy ISIS unless you have a plan for the future of Syria. These two things are intimately linked. Because if you read American intelligence, two-thirds of the ISIS military forces are in Syria. Syria is the location where the five Western hostages have been beheaded. Syria is the place where ISIS reconstituted itself and reemerged after having been defeated primarily in Iraq as a major fighting force. It's where most of the foreign fighters have gone. It's where ISIS has its unofficial capital in the eastern town of Raqqa. And so ISIS and Syria, the political future of Syria, are deeply interlinked. And there's no way of getting around this. With respect to the international community, I'm struck by the parallels that I see today with respect to the conflict in Syria and what happened 20 years ago with respect to Bosnia. The abandonment of conflicts that involve gross human rights violations that in the case of Bosnia were genocidal, in the case of Syria are neo-genocidal, thinking that these problems can be contained within their borders, that they won't have a spillover effect, have proven to be much more complicated to fix the more you allow them to fester. I mean, that was basically the view of Bosnia 20 years ago with the Clinton administration. There was a sense that Bosnia really didn't matter for the West, for the United States. It continued for three years until you had the Shreber Nizam massacre and the destabilization of a large part of southeastern Europe. And then the United States had to get involved to try and resolve it. We're having a similar situation, almost a replay, broadly speaking, of what's happening in Syria today. The general view in the United States, you can listen to a lot of these realist theorists of international relations, such as John Meersheimer and Stephen Walt and others, who argued we can now see incorrectly that Syria just doesn't matter for US national security or for global security. Syria, quote unquote, could be contained within its borders. Yes, there was gross human rights violations, but from a realist perspective, so what interests, core interests were not threatened. And it's a direct result of, I think, that miscalculation that we can now see that actually Syria does matter. Matters profoundly destabilize. It has destabilized not only the border areas, but it's a direct result of inaction and failure to respond effectively to Syria that we have the ISIS crisis. These two things are intimately linked and here we are again. Obama thinking that he could ignore Syria, he could ignore ISIS has now begun a global campaign to mobilize the international community and is now sending advisors, troops, aircraft, mobilizing the world to re-intervene in Syria, but of course the challenges of trying to put Syria back together today are far more difficult than they were three and a half years ago. The other element here, I think with respect to the rise of ISIS that explains, I think, some of the ideological appeal and the recruiting of ISIS from the region is that there was quite a bit of optimism and hope that the Arab Spring could produce some democratic gains for the region if it was allowed to continue on a particular course of democratization. But as a result of the failure of the Arab Spring or more accurately the crushing of the Arab Spring by the deep states, by the authoritarian regimes in the region, primarily the old state, I mean the big case here is really Egypt with respect to the military's reassertion, it's a version of democracy, supported and financed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. That the prospects for political democratization in the region have been shut very firmly and have been closed and as a result of the inability and the failure of moderate political Islam to have a stake and have a foothold in the politics of the region, the crushing and the attempt to label the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization and to eradicate them. That has produced as an ideological alternative and option the rise of an extremist political Islamist movement. There's a deep and intimate connection between the crushing of moderate political Islamic alternatives and the rise of a radical Islamic alternative. You can see this quite clearly in the case of Syria. When the Syrian uprising began in 2011, no radical Islamist movement to be seen. They emerge and they gain currency and support as the doors for peaceful political change are closed and people start to look to alternative solutions and options. And this all just confirms I think what we've known for a very long time that when peaceful revolution becomes impossible, violent revolution becomes inevitable. There's a lot of evidence to suggest that that's the case if you sort of look at some of the narrative statements that were put out by al-Qaida as a result of the Arab Spring. They were completely perplexed, befuddled, their message was incoherent and ineffective when dictators were being toppled as a result of peaceful political change in Tunisia and primarily in Egypt. There's a really good study that has been put out by the Center for Combating Terrorism at West Point called jihadi discourse in the wake of the Arab Spring where they chronicle what al-Qaida was saying in 2011 primarily. They had a message that simply could not make sense. Their message was the only way for political change is through jihad and through violent revolution. When revolution was happening and dictators that they had targeted were falling as a result of peaceful political change, their message did not have resonance. But now that the doors for peaceful political change are closed, now that General Al-Sisi is back in power, you are seeing the radical message of the radical Islamists resonate, reports that I'm getting from Egypt or that there has been a major influx and transfer of young men looking to the Islamic state as an alternative. You see an uptake in violence in Egypt as a result of the closing of that political process of democratization last summer. And I think these two processes are deeply connected. It's not a coincidence that ISIS is emerging as becoming an attractive alternative in the aftermath of the crushing of the Arab Spring. The other I think key element here, if you wanna understand the rise of ISIS is that a big part of the ISIS crisis is related to a development that has been taking place in the Arab Islamic world and the broader Muslim world for the last 50 to 60 years. And that is the development and the main streaming of a particular interpretation of Sunni Islam that is deeply sectarian, that is anti-women, anti-minority, deeply intolerant justifies the support of violence against alternative interpretations of Islam. This trend of Islamic interpretation is fairly recent historically. It really has its roots, I would say, in the last 50 years of the Islamic world. And it is deeply connected to what UCLA law professor Khaled al-Fadl has described as a phenomenon that he calls the rise of a culture of ugliness in modern Islam. It is this culture of ugliness that he describes as a recent development and it continues to be the single and most important obstacle to articulating reasonable narratives of the legitimate possibility of Islam's contribution to human goodness in the world. This interpretation of Islam, the dissemination and proliferation of this extremist, ultra-conservative and puritanical interpretation has its political roots in the internal policies of various countries in the Middle East, but primarily it is a direct result of the policies of one particular major country in the Middle East, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Just to give you an example of what we're dealing with here, there has been a lot of justifiable horror and outrage at the beheading of Western hostages in the last few months by ISIS. But how many people know the number of people that have been beheaded in Saudi Arabia this year? 64, public beheadings. And so one of my students asked me, Professor Hashemi, why is the beheading of four Western hostages the cause of global outrage? But the far greater monthly, sometimes weekly, routine beheadings in Saudi Arabia, not the cause of a similar form of outrage. We're dealing here with a particular country and an interpretation of Islam that is deeply connected to the rise of what is widely known as Wahhabism. This puritanical interpretation of Islam is, I think, deeply connected to the ISIS crisis. If you look at the political theology, the justification of the brutality, the attack on Yazidi minorities, on women, on violence, the justification of violence, the demonization of Shia Muslims, the attacks on other Sunni Muslims who happen to have different interpretations of Islam, this is all deeply connected to the teachings of Muhammad Ibn Abdul Wahhab, the sort of founder of Wahhabism in the 18th century. His ideas have been spread, disseminated and taught in Saudi Arabia. But then, as a result of the marriage of Saudi Arabia and oil money, there has been, over the last 50 to 60 years, a spread of this particular interpretation of Islam across the Islamic world. The Saudi education system, the scholarships that have been provided to students from different parts of the Islamic world that come to Saudi Arabia to become, quote unquote, religiously educated and then go back in their communities has, I think, spread this particular form of Islam and has become so mainstream within Sunni Islam that a lot of Sunni Muslims simply think that the Wahhabi interpretation is authentic Islam. The idea that you can't listen to music, that women have to be deeply segregated and marginalized, you can't wish your Christian friends marry Christmas, all of these issues that didn't have any particular grounding in Muslim societies until relatively recently. If you look at Muslim societies in the 40s and 50s, they were much more tolerant, much more open than they are today. And a big part of that has to do with the spreading and the mainstreaming and the negative effects of Saudi education. Just to give you an example, I was in Malaysia in late September and I was actually shocked when I went to Malaysia how mainstream Saudi Wahhabi views had dominated the periphery of the Islamic world. And so the big debate when I arrived in Malaysia is how there is this debate in Malaysian society as to whether minority groups, Christians and Hindus primarily, can use the word Allah, which means God in Arabic, in their own religious scriptures and texts. And these Sunni Muslim groups were saying, no, that is a word that can only and exclusively be used. And this is a big debate. And this comes out of a particular Wahhabi interpretation of Islam. But of course, you can't, I think, understand the negative and corrosive effects of Saudi Arabia and Wahhabi Islam, unless you also honestly look at the very close and symbiotic relationship that Saudi Arabia has had with the West since 1945 when President Roosevelt met with then-King Ibn Saud on an aircraft carrier and struck on a certain alliance with Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is often referred to as one of those moderate Arab states, but I don't see any moderation within Saudi society. And we're really exposed to this. This is not something new. Everyone sort of instinctively knows this. And on September 11th in the United States, it was reported that 15 out of the 19 hijackers came from one country. That's not, Saudi Arabia, that's not, I think, an accident, it's not a fluke. It suggests something deeply problematic, something deeply wrong with internal Saudi politics that a lot of young men, and we're not talking about the poorest of the poor, we're talking about middle-class educated men feel that their best way to spend their lives, or in this case, end their lives, is to engage in this type of suicide operation. It's been reported that Saudi nationals have carried out 60% of the ISIS attacks in Iraq since September and October of this year. 60% of the ISIS attacks are coming from Saudi nationals, many of them coming across the border, for reasons that I think are deeply connected to, 9-11. And the fact that 15 out of the 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia, so this is a big part. If you look at the actual textbooks that are used in the ISIS schools, the interpretation of Islam, the sighting of Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab, it comes straight out of the Saudi Wahhabi narrative. That's the dominant ideological interpretation. So in summary, I think it's due to this particular puritanical, idealized, and thoroughly mythogelized view of the past that Wahhabi Islam cannot, I think, reconcile its theological interpretation with the complexity and the diversity of cultures that constitute our modern world. And as a result, Wahhabi influence has added a dimension of oppressiveness and vehemence to contemporary Muslim life that frequently borders on the morbid, and you can see it in the theological justifications and the behavior of the Islamic state. This also, I think, partially explains why some young Muslims in the West have left their homes thinking that the Islamic state somehow embodies this model of Islamic authenticity because it's very much the mainstreaming of Sunni Islam in North American communities and in Western communities that contributes to this type of radicalization. There's a lot more to the question of youth radicalization, but this is a big part of it. So in summary, just by way of a conclusion here, I think we're now facing in the Arab Islamic world a series of events that in many ways were predictable and were actually forecast many years ago, 14 years ago, in a series of Arab human development reports written by a leading team of Arab social scientists, they actually forecasted and predicted that the region was heading toward a deep crisis and a coming explosion. In 2002, in the first of these UN Arab human development reports, these reports concluded that the Arab world is at a crossroads and that the region is hampered by three key deficits that are considered to be defining features of the Arab world. Number one, a freedom deficit. Number two, a women's empowerment deficit. And number three, a knowledge deficit. Compared with the rest of the world, the Arab countries have the lowest freedom scores in the 1990s and when measured by indicators such as political processes, civil liberties, political rights, and free media, the Arab region had the lowest value of all the regions of the world when measured by voice and accountability. Similarly, in terms of the status of women, the Arab Human Development Report of 2002 revealed that by applying the UN gender empowerment measure to the Arab world, it revealed that this region was suffering from a glaring deficit of women's empowerment. Among the regions of the world, the Arab world ranks next to last as measured by the gender empowerment measure. Only Sub-Saharan Africa had a lower score. The 2004 UN Arab Development Report on the theme of freedom and good governance focused on questions of civil and political rights, popular participation, representative institutions, political accountability of leadership, the existence of the rule of law, quality of treatment and independent judiciary, et cetera. All of these were in short supply. And so I'm reminded of, I think, the words of one of my favorite commentators on the Arab world, Rami Hori, who in commenting on the rise of ISIS, had the following words to say. He said that in the 45 years of his writing about the Arab world, observing and commenting on it in terms of the conditions on the ground, the only thing that surprised him was why such an extremist phenomenon, such as ISIS, had not happened earlier. At least since around the 1970s, the average Arab citizen has lived in political, economic and social systems that have offered zero accountability, political rights and participation. States have been characterized by steadily expanding dysfunction and corruption. Economic disparities have driven majorities into chronic poverty and humiliating inaction. And he goes on to note that these trends are a direct result of the existing authoritarian political order in the Arab world. This political order has virtually banned the development of one's full human potential in terms of intellect, creativity, public participation, culture, identity. The Islamic State phenomenon is the latest and perhaps not the final stop on a journey of mass Arab humiliation and dehumanization that has been primarily managed by autocratic Arab regimes that revolve around single families or clans with immense and continuing support from foreign patrons, foreign military attacks on Arab countries in Iraq and Libya, I think of, in some cases, exacerbated this trend as has Israel's aggression against the Palestinian people. But the single biggest driver of this kind of criminal Islamic extremism that we see today in the form of ISIS is predicated on the fact that several hundred millions of individual Arab men and women find that generation after generation that their own societies, in their own societies, they are unable to achieve their full humanity or potential or exercise their full powers of thought and creativity. And in many cases, they are prevented from obtaining the basic necessities of life for themselves and their families. There was only one anecdote to the antidote to this long run process that can, I think, fundamentally eliminate the Islamic state and all that represents. That is to stop pursuing the abusive and criminal policies that have demeaned millions of Arab men and women and shaped Arab societies for the last half century. Bombing Iraq and Syria, I think, will gain some needed time and probably must happen in combination with a series of military actions by local governments and Kurdish forces. However, if the ways of the corrupt Arab modern security state are not radically reversed, the mass desperation and hysteria that the Islamic state represents, I think, will only reemerge again in more extreme forms in the years to come. And so I think that, in a nutshell, I think provides the broad political and historic context that explains the rise of the Islamic state. I wanted to comment on the whole question of Obama and his strategy, whether it'll work or won't work or what the best plan forward is, but I want to leave some time for questions and answers and I think I've gone over the 30 minutes that I was allotted. So I'll stop there. I thank you for your attention. I look forward to your questions. Thank you.