 Thank you. You mentioned that the Americans were able to engage more than one front. So there's Afghanistan, Iraq right now, and there's all the bellicose rhetoric towards Iran. So my question to you is sort of forecasting because you've been there on the ground and you sort of have a sense of what's going on in the Middle East. Did America proceed that it was going to create such a nightmare in Iraq? There was talk in the beginning that they expected people to be putting flowers in their barrels and that it was going to be an easy occupation. So now the country looks like it's being separated probably into different factions like Shiite, Sunni and Kurd. So is America not hemorrhaging in their occupation and what is all this rhetoric that they have towards Iran and where is that going? The only reason there has not been a draft in the United States and the only reason that they've been able to keep these two fronts going is by private contractors. The privatization of the military is the only thing that's making this doable. Right now in Iraq there's 175,000 U.S. military personnel. It's the highest number of U.S. military personnel in the country of the entire occupation. They have not decreased it at all. There's rhetoric about it. They're floating these balloons out there making it appear as though they're either going to bring home a brigade or maybe two or whatever. They have not brought home anybody. The number has only escalated since January 2005. But as big as that number is there's over 180,000 private contractors in Iraq. All of them on the U.S. payroll. Not all of them are mercenaries. About 50 to 75,000 of them are arm mercenaries. Guns for hire. But the rest of them are the KBR employees. The people working on the embassy, et cetera, et cetera. And they're all on the U.S. payroll. Of course now along with the concerned local citizens. But the... So it's really, you know, as my friend and colleague Jeremy Scage older who wrote the book on Blackwater that has caused them a bit of grief has said that there is no coalition of the willing in Iraq. There's a coalition of billing. There's 680 Western corporations operating in Iraq as we speak. And over 100 of them are mercenary contractors. So that's what's making it possible. We have the number of mercenaries is on the road. If trends continue it will eventually surpass. Actually our mercenaries will surpass the number of U.S. troops. Eventually if both trends continue. And with Iran, again, this is, you know, you brought up did they really envision it getting this bad? And I think the ideologues, the people like the Rumsfelds and the Wolfowitz's and the Pearls I think probably did believe their rhetoric. That, yeah, we'll go in and we're going to, you know, give them a neoliberal economy and open some McDonald's and Walmart so people are going to love it. And I think they did buy that. Rumsfeld Secretary of Defense did not even have a counter uncertainty plan whatsoever. There were basically not much plans for anything. It was really astounding and I think they had no idea that there would be a resistance as fierce as there's been. And then with regards to Iran, again I would go back to veteran journalist John Pilger. I was talking to him about it at a conference last summer about Iran because I was expressing my doubts and he looked at me and he said, never underestimate the ruthlessness of power or greed. And when we have these people, if we applied logic to these people we wouldn't be approaching the five-year anniversary of the US-led occupation of Iraq. And the plans, I'm in the camp, the plans for a bombing campaign on Iran it's not if it's when. And Cheney himself said it less than two years ago there will be regime change in Tehran before this administration needs office in 2009. So that leaves us about 11 months. A little bit less now I think actually. And that couple were just talking with people like Cy Hirsch and some of the CIA, F CIA folks that I know, I mean everyone's saying the same thing is that the decision's already been made. And then of course when you look at what the right wing elements in the Israeli government and the Israeli lobby groups in the United States after this NIE report comes out basically blowing out of the water all of these bogus claims being made about nukes in Iran literally the next day if you watch the press in Israel they were like foaming at the mouth like you still have to attack Iran and then a couple days later we start seeing our press doing the same thing. So that's a critical element that can't be underestimated. Who's leading whom? Who's leading whom?