 If you could all take your seats. Welcome to the Institute of Peace. I'm Jim Marshall. I'm the president of the Institute of Peace in essence. Put very, very simply, what the Institute does is stop fights globally. We do so working with governments and NGOs, both foreign and domestic, and with many, many individuals. It's collective violence that we're attacking. It's a very challenging, complicated job that we do. We are successful only a small number of times, but when we are successful, it's usually important to the United States and to the world, and certainly to all those who are affected. We are absolutely delighted to host this first peace game. It follows hard on the heels of how many war games. And so I think appropriate venue, obviously the weather has diminished the ability of a lot of folks to get here, kids not going to school, et cetera. But we're blessed in one sense in that we have shade probably for the day, so we won't have bright sunlight here in the room. We've got assembled an enormously talented group of people who are going to tackle an enormously difficult question having to do with Syria. I have to thank Christ and Lord and David Rothkoff for all the work that they have done in conceiving this and moving this along and turn this over to David to move things along. I think this will be a great day. Thank you. Thanks very much, Jim. Good morning, everybody. I'm David Rothkoff from Foreign Policy. It's a real pleasure to have you here today for this, the inaugural peace game. The idea for the peace game came out of a conversation, actually, that Christ and Lord and I had at lunch was actually at the palm. And any of you have actually been at the palm, the fact that we could even hear each other represents something of a breakthrough. But we were talking about the fact that Washington and the policy community worldwide devotes a great deal of resources to very serious gaming out of possibilities where it comes to conflict. But they don't do the same when it comes to peace. And that indeed, because peace is so complex, has so many working parts and involves often protracted periods of time, it would benefit from the same kind of rigorous approach. And from this was born an idea that, as you can see, is now being brought to fruition. Thanks, first of all, to Jim and Kristen and the fabulously talented team here at the US Institute of Peace. But also because of the support that we've gotten from the embassy of the United Arab Emirates here in Washington, who have agreed to underwrite this process, which includes one game here each year, one game in the Middle East. It includes the establishment at foreign policy of something called the peace channel, which will be a regular component of our coverage. And I encourage you to go to our website, which is brand new, freshly redesigned as of today. And take a look, because part of what we want to do at foreign policy is also approach covering peace, peace making, peace keeping, emergency economic intervention, development, that whole set of issues with the kind of clarity and focus that we have addressed, issues of conflict in the past. And so this broader process requires a great deal of support, and it required some vision. And it is my great pleasure to say that the ambassador of the United Arab Emirates, who's sitting beside me, Yusuf Al-Ataiba, is somebody who has that kind of vision. And as soon as we began to talk about the idea, he said, let us help you and support this thing. And I would also add, and I think this is important to add, he said, let us help you and support this thing. But we will provide the financial wherewithal. But in terms of the substance and the focus and how you tackle these things, we will not be involved in that. We will leave that to the US Institute of Peace and to foreign policy. And I should also add that because of the nature of the beast, the United Arab Emirates has supported foreign policies side of this thing, and the event, and the peace channel, and so forth. The US Institute of Peace, being a government funded entity, doesn't require that. And it's important that that distinction be made. But in any event, this idea came together extremely quickly thanks to this vision. And therefore, I think it's only appropriate that before we begin, I turn it over to Yusuf so he can make some brief remarks. Yusuf. Thank you, David. So a few years ago, we moved away from an era of unilateral military operations and into an era of coalition operations. Once again, more recently, we left an era of unilateral foreign policy and entered an era of multilateral foreign policy. And a few good examples of that we see today are the P5 plus 1, the friends of name your country here, and most recently, Geneva 1 and hopefully Geneva 2, which hopes to address the dire situation in Syria. Similarly, I think we're entering an age of collaborations in the academic and policy guidance business. And today's example is a perfect iteration of this. Peace Games is a unique initiative. And it promises to change the way we think about war and peace. The UAE embassies pleased to partner with both Foreign Policy Magazine and the US Institute of Peace to bring to life such an original program. I congratulate both groups for their vision and their commitment to peace games. Many of us here have long been involved in planning and participating in war games. And that term always struck me as a contradiction in terms. Just think about it, war and games. Even so, war games have had a useful purpose. They've helped prepare policy makers and military planners for conflict. But even more so, I believe they've also helped to avert conflict. When faced with stark choices and bleak outcomes, war game simulations have helped to restrain decision makers' worst impulses. However, the results were never very satisfying. War games often highlighted the fact that while we have been very good at planning for war, we too often have failed to anticipate and plan for peace. Peace games will help us change this. It's designed to bring the same discipline and focus on planning for peace as we have always had for war. It will change and raise our game in thinking about how we can chart new nonviolent paths to a better world. And it's precisely this type of out-of-the-box problem solving that will help us think through many of the current challenges we face in the current global environment, especially in the Middle East. I share with David and Jim big expectations for this effort. I really do. Let the games begin. Thank you. OK. Can we bring this down a little bit? Yeah. So let's see if this microphone works. If it doesn't, I'll just stay up there. In any event, the idea behind this is to develop a scenario about how we can achieve the best possible peace in Syria. We approach this thing with an enormous amount of humility because we realize this is one of the thorniest problems that exists in the world today. We also do not seek to predict the future. And I really want to underscore that. The purpose of this exercise is not to predict the future. It is also not to hope at an outcome. There are lots of discussions that take place that say, this is what would be ideal in Syria. This is what we need. This kind of a peace process, and it will lead to this kind of a government, and so forth. We approach this, or we seek to approach this with the kind of commitment to a realistic viewpoint that you would see in a war game, where you would say, look, that's just not going to happen, where this seems extremely unlikely. And based on what is likely or what is possible, we can then craft a vision of how we might get to a lasting peace. And the structural concept behind this is pretty straightforward. The structural concept is we're going to have a discussion here in the very first session in which we sketch out what peace in Syria might look like. And we're going to do that in the way that we're going to approach everything, which is through a conversation among all of you around the table and periodically involving polling that actually brings everybody in the room into the conversation. And once we establish what that peace might look like, then we're going to go back to where we are right now. And we're going to say, OK, how do we get from here to there? How do we get from here to there in a political process? How do we implement that? How do we do it in economic terms? How do we do it on the security side? What problems might arise? What threats might possibly knock this off track? How do you deal with those? And then how do you produce a sustainable peace? And in so doing, we will hopefully identify the critical drivers of peace and we will identify the critical challenges that we face. And that will be a success. In other words, we are not going to solve the toughest problem in the world here. We are not going to sketch out something that's impossible. We are not going to predict the future. What we're going to try to do is identify the critical drivers of peace, the critical challenges we face, and come up creatively with some ideas about how to tackle those things in a way that will inform the discussion more broadly. Now, one of the other things that we're going to do, as I indicated at the beginning, is we are going to have this discussion here in the United States. And then in about five or six months, we're going to have this discussion in the Middle East with a similar group of experts from the region. And so collectively, we are going to get perspectives addressing this thing in a way that hasn't been done before. And we hopefully will stimulate a dialogue among the broader communities, policy communities worldwide in a new way, giving them some new visions to look at, giving them a new approach on this. Now, as I said, the way we're going to do this is slightly different. It's interactive. It's using scenarios. We're going to, as you can see around this table, there are role players here who have been asked to speak to how the United Nations or how Turkey or how Syrian civil society might respond in specific situations, and thereby provide us with the kind of granularity in our analysis that might otherwise be impossible. We ask everybody that they go along with the rules of the game, which is we're trying to move the scenario forward. We may make some collective decisions as a group that some of you may not like. And you may say, this would never happen. And you could say that, but then stop saying it. In other words, let's not beat a dead horse when we get to points like that. We'll note it, and we'll move forward. So that's, I think, the overall approach that we're going to use here today. Before we get into that, I'm going to do something which, well, I hope, set the tone for the rest of the day and for tomorrow, which is I'm going to ask everybody to introduce themselves around this table. And in the way of setting the tone, it's going to do several things. One, it'll let you know who's here in case you don't know them. Two, it'll let you know that everybody is supposed to be involved from the very beginning, and that's why everybody has a microphone in front of them. And so it'll encourage you to start speaking. Three, it'll also encourage you to stop speaking after you've said what you need to say, because this will work best if there is a real dialogue among the group. And so we should resist the temptation to speechify, keep comments and interventions brief and crisp, and thereby give everybody the respect of a chance to get involved in the conversation. And so what I'd really like to do is I'd like to go around the table and for you to say who you are and why you're here and do it in 15 or 20 or 25 seconds. And let's see if we can get around this group very quickly. We'll introduce our additional experts up here, and then we'll dive into the substance of this particular session. Mr. Kutuf. Ted Kutuf, during a 30 year foreign service career, I served at the US Embassy in Syria three times, starting in the 1970s and culminating as ambassador from 2001 to 2003. Thanks. Morhavej Rejati, professor of Middle East studies at NISA Center at the National Defense University, I'm a Syrian opposition activist and the chairman of the day after, and chose to play the role of the Assad regime because it's the easiest one here. This will probably be the last time today you hear anybody say any dimension of this is easy. My name's Julie Smith. I left the White House this summer where I was the deputy national security advisor to vice president Biden. I'm now a senior vice president at Beacon Global Strategies and I spent an enormous amount of time on Syria while at the White House. Hans Benendijk, retired from the federal government currently at CIS and RAND. Andrew Tapler, senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. I spent about seven years in Syria, 15 years in the Middle East and I've been working on Syria almost that entire time. Steve Heidemann, vice president for the Center for Applied Research on Conflict at the U.S. Institute of Peace and director of the Institute's Syria program. I also wrote one of the background papers for the meeting today called The Big Picture, envisioning a best possible piece for Syria. George Lopez, vice president of the Academy at USIP. I am Andrew Axon. First off, I'm gonna be playing husband with Rhonda Slim who just landed at BWI due to weather, she'll be here in just a little bit. I'm at the Boston Consulting Group, but until recently I had Lebanon at the office of the Secretary of Defense and wrote my doctoral dissertation on Hezbollah but mostly the reason I was chosen is because I'm the biggest pain in the neck that Kristen's ever worked with and so when she was looking for someone who's just gonna be really difficult to deal with today, I was the obvious choice. Yeah, that's funny, that's exactly what she had said as well. Sharon Morris, I'm a Jennings Randolph fellow here at USIP and when I'm not here, I'm the director of conflict management and youth programs at Mercy Corps. George moves vice chair of the board here at USIP but recovering foreign service officer who served as assistant secretary of state for African affairs but more relevantly for this exercise, two tours at our mission to the UN in New York and one tour as head of our mission to the UN in Geneva. Lisa Howard, I'm a professor of government at Georgetown University and I've been working on issues of peacekeeping for more than 20 years now. Good morning, Dan Brumberg, special advisor here at the United States Institute of Peace and I also am co-director of democracy and government studies at Georgetown University. I'll be representing the supreme leader of Iran this morning here at the... Ken Pollock from Brookings. I will be Dan's evil twin playing Iran, 25 years working on Iran in the US government and out, written three books on Iran. Bill Taylor, vice president for Middle East and Africa at the Institute of Peace. Jim Jeffery, visiting fellow at the Washington Institute, former ambassador to Iraq and I'm half of the split personality on Iraq with Bill Taylor. There probably should be more of us. Good morning, I'm Mona Yucubian. I'm the senior advisor on the Middle East at the Stimson Center. My introduction to Syria was back in 1985 when I was a Fulbright student there and continue to engage on and off on it. I'm waiting for my colleague, Rob Nally, the commander of Jabba Tanustra whom I've actually already taken care of so we may not see him today. David Shanker, I'm the director of the program on Arab politics at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. We wrote a book about Jordan and served for a couple years in the Office of Secretary of Defense working on Jordan among other issues. Good morning for Osamaq Saad. I'm actually born and raised in the region, Lebanon and the Gulf, but I'm 12 year Washingtonian now. I came here and worked for Dennis Ross. I worked on Capitol Hill. I was lead Levant analyst for Eurasia Group and now I head the Lebanon Renaissance Foundation and I'm obviously playing Lebanon. I'm playing that with Ambassador Mara Conley who was also until recently US ambassador to Lebanon but she's running late. I'm Rob Mossbacker. I'm down in the private sector corner down here. I've spent most of my life in the energy business in the private sector. I spent three and a half years as head of OPIC and I focused on entrepreneurship and job creation throughout the world, but particularly in the MENA region. I'm Stephen Koltai. I was until recently the head of the global entrepreneurship program at the State Department and I'm now among other things at Brookings working on a book called World Peace Through Entrepreneurship. I'm Nelson Ford. I'm the president of LMI and former undersecretary of the Army and I'm here representing the defense contractors. Hi, I'm Mark Katz, professor at George Mason University. I'm also a former US Institute of Peace Fellow in Grand Tee and I've written a little bit about Russian foreign policy toward the Middle East. I'm Paul Saunders, the executive director of the Center for the National Interest. I've worked for the last 20 years on US-Russia relations, Russian foreign policy, Russian domestic politics. Thank you. Skipkinim, I served in the Foreign Service for 36 years, served in Syria when actually relations were very good between our two countries and also Ambassador in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. I served there as well. I'm currently professor, Kuwait professor of Gulf and Arabian Affairs at the Elliott School at George Washington. I'm Karen Elliott House. I've been going to Saudi Arabia since 1978 as diplomatic correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and after I retired from the journal in 2006, I've spent much of the last six years writing a book about Saudi Arabia, the culture, the society, politics. Judith Yaffe, it's soon to be formally of National Defense University and professor at George Washington University, which is where I'm going to. I've spent, I don't want to say how long, especially when I see Ken across the table, that long, focusing on war, intelligence, and I want to see what the other side is like, but I'm also an Iraq expert. I'm sort of misplaced, but that's okay. This is the Gulf. I'm Manan Omar. I'm the associate vice president for Middle East and Africa Center at the US Institute of Peace. Most of my career has been in the field, spending time in the Middle East and working on transitions and conflict and I'm happy to be representing Syrian civil society because if there's one thing I've learned is for sustainable peace, that you have to have civil society at the beginning, particularly women and minorities. I'm Peter Ackerman. I'm the founder of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, whose purpose is to study civil resistance or people power movements around the world. Good morning. I'm Wasm Mustafa. I was born in Damascus. I worked in the House and Senate as a staffer and part of the Coalition for Democratic Syria. I also work as executive director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force. We work on advocacy here but also on helping civilian governance in Syria. Good morning. My name is Henri Barkey. I'm a professor of international relations at Lehigh University. I've worked on Turkey, the Kurds and a variety of things, but the real reason I'm here is because I heard Murhaf was gonna play Assad and I wanted to see him. Hi, I'm Jeremy Shapiro. I'm a fellow at the Brookings Institution and until fairly recently, I was on the State Department's policy planning staff where I advised the Secretary on Syria, among other things. And the reason I'm here is because I wanted to see what it was like to be on a team with Henri. Good morning. I'm Esther Brimmer. I'm currently the Shapiro Professor of International Affairs at George Washington University. I've served three times in the State Department most recently as Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations from 2009 to 2013. Thanks. Good morning. Karina Pirelli, former director of the Electoral Assistance Division of the UN that organized a couple of interesting processes like Iraq 2004, 2005, former international commissioner in the 2005 referendum, former director of executive vice president of IFIS, survived three years in Afghanistan and now currently I'm a director of Silver Creek. Hi, I'm Colin Lynch, I'm a reporter and I cover the UN for foreign policy and write a bit about Syria and a lot of other issues. Good morning, I'm Cass Yost, my exposure to Syrian politics began in March of 1958 and where as a small boy, I watched Gamal Abdo-Lasser speak to a crowd in downtown Damascus. I stepped down from the National Intelligence Council this summer and am now at Georgetown University and the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy. PJ Crelly, I'm a professor and fellow at George Washington University's Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communication from 2009 and 2011, I was the assistant secretary of state and spokesman for the Department of State. But over 28 years, I was the explainer of national security policy for many people around the table and now for the next day and a half I had the opportunity to do something I've wanted to do for 28 years which is actually crafted then explained. Okay, by the way, just so you know, this group of people up here in our design of this discussion has gone by several names but the original name which Kristen and the team here at USIP came up with was the Council of the Wise. Which sounds a little bit like out of the Hobbit but we are lucky to have a wise group of people here. It's not to say they're wiser than all of you but they will play a slightly different role which is as we go through the scenario, we may hit impasses or points where there is disagreement here and I will be able to turn to them and say, okay, how do you think that'll get worked out so that we can get the train back on the tracks a little bit or resolve any disputes that can't be resolved in this room? And Steven, why don't you, or would you like to say something else in addition? Oh, okay. So I don't, yeah. Steve Larby. Yes, I think it's on. Steve Larby from Rand Corporation. It is, just hold it closer. Is this one on? Yeah, they're both on. Yeah. Steve Larby, I hold the chair in European security at the Rand Corporation and served on the National Security Council staff in the Carter administration. I've been working on Turkey for the last four or five years. I'm Daniel Kurtzer. I teach Middle East Policy Studies at Princeton as several people have said recovering foreign service officer served as ambassador in Israel and in Egypt. Kristen Lord, peace game co-conspirator and also the executive vice president of the US Institute of Peace. Mark Schneider, international crisis group and the real expert is Rob Malley who hopefully will be here soon. I have been involved in post-conflict reconstruction in a variety of countries and have served the USAID State Department as director of the Peace Corps and the Senator Ted Kennedy. Yeah, at one point in the Clinton administration Mark and I were responsible for making Haiti the economic boom town that it is today. I'm Paula Dobrianski. I'm a senior fellow at Harvard University's JFK Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Previously I was under secretary of state for global affairs and have had a career some 25 years in different government positions at the State Department and at the National Security Council. Okay, thank you very much. Now those of you who are sort of in the bleachers here we don't really have the time to introduce everybody but during the course of the discussion here periodically we'll turn to you and ask you to get involved. We'll do it both with the polling and maybe with some questions and some answers. Now this first session here has the objective of defining what peace might look like and when we say peace might look like you know we've been using the term here best possible peace. Now what that means depends a lot on whether you put the accent on best or on possible and we hope that in this room that some of you will do one and some of you will do the other that we won't get too far a foot focusing on ideal outcomes that are impossible nor will we sort of throw up our hands and say so little is possible that we must set our expectations unreasonably low because otherwise then there will be no motivation to go forward. So finding a balance between those two things is critical and the way we're gonna try to get to that is I'm gonna turn to Steve who do you wanna do it from here or from there? Okay, so I'm gonna turn to Steve who's going to recapitulate some of the high points from that paper that he mentioned and then I'm gonna turn to all of you and you can speak either in your roles or you can just speak as yourselves and let's talk about this for 45 minutes set some baseline, set some goals and then we'll take a break and dive into the scenario process but Steve go ahead. Thank you, thank you David and thank all of you for joining us this morning. I wanna promise you I'm not going to give you a lecture that lasts for the hour and 15 minutes that set aside for this piece of the program this morning. This is gonna be very much an interactive process of trying to define what our participants imagine the elements of this best possible piece might look like along the lines that David set out not an ideal piece, not a perfect piece a piece that takes into account all of the experiences that Syria has lived through during three years of violent conflict the destruction, the human suffering a piece that takes into account all of the challenges and the obstacles that need to be overcome before it's possible to arrive at even what we might consider this best possible piece and in my own mind I place the emphasis on possible rather than best in my conception of what this piece might look like and that's something that we'd like to do with all of your help. We'd like to invite those of you who are playing critical roles that will shape the trajectory of this thought experiment that we're involved in this morning on the basis of some clearly stated understandings of what you imagine the core elements of a best possible piece to look like. We're gonna get ourselves started in other words by laying down some baselines that reflect the starting points of our various participants our various role players in this game. In the paper that I wrote for this project I'm envisioning a best possible piece for Syria. I laid out one image of what that outcome might look like. Clearly it isn't the only possible outcome but it's one that we felt would help spark a different way of looking at the Syrian conflict which as David mentioned in his introduction focuses not on avoidance of conflict or on challenges and obstacles but on reaching this more positive outcome this best possible piece. I'm not gonna recapitulate in my comments the content of that paper. It's laid out in some detail in this deck that you've all been given. The paper's been on the web. I don't think it would be helpful for me to cover too much of the background that you already have in front of you and that I think we will be consulting over the course of the day and a half. But I did wanna highlight just before we jump in and we begin to turn to some of you around the table to establish your own baselines a couple of critical elements that the paper provides that I think are going to be very important in shaping our thinking about how this game unfolds because there are some rules and guidelines that always need to be in place for any kind of thought experiment to be successful. And there are two of them in particular that I tried to highlight in this document on envisioning a best possible piece. The first is to define a set of core constraints that the terms of a Syrian peace will need to address. What are the baseline constraints that will guide the decision making of virtually every actor as our role playing and scenario unfold? We tried to keep them very simple. We tried to avoid overcomplexifying them but that doesn't mean that these constraints are easy or will not require a great deal of creativity to respond to. The first is to, the first constraint is that all relevant actors in the Syrian conflict and by relevant actors we mean veto players. Those whose opposition to any specific outcome could scuttle its possibilities of success. All of the relevant veto players have to prefer peace to alternatives that can only be achieved through violence. That's the first core constraint and that leads to a second core constraint which is that to be plausible the terms of a peace have to meet the minimum requirements of all relevant actors, all the potential veto players, both internal and external. No one around this table is going to walk away feeling like they've gotten everything they want out of this experiment. Everyone will need to compromise but if any veto player feels that the outcome does not protect his or her core minimum interests, our sense is that the possibility of achieving a best possible peace will diminish. And the third core constraint is that a best possible peace has to be capable of containing or marginalizing potential spoilers. Which is another way of saying that in effect this best possible peace needs to be sustainable but it needs to be sustainable on the basis of the efforts of Syrian actors themselves and of the critical external veto players. So those are the three core constraints that we want everyone to have in mind as you think about how you organize your own engagement across the various segments of this game. The second core element, essential element that's needed for a thought experiment to work is to be able to offer up at least one plausible end state. One plausible outcome that defines the objectives toward which this process of bargaining and negotiation is moving. And we've done that by identifying what we regard as six core pillars of a plausible peace. We have a political pillar, a security pillar, a humanitarian pillar, an economic pillar, a state institutional pillar, which reflects the understanding that without some measure of state capacity, implementing agreements becomes almost impossible and a justice pillar. And within the paper, we've defined a set of conditions in each of those pillars that we think meet our three core constraints. And what we've then added are some of the challenges that will need to be overcome in order for those conditions to be achieved. So that is the basic formula that we've set out in this paper on envisioning the best possible peace. And again, within the paper, you find much more detail, specifics about what these conditions are like. I'm not sure it would be helpful for me just to reiterate them here. They're ambitious, they will, as I noted earlier, require compromise, require intense conversation and bargaining among our various actors in this peace game, but ultimately we feel that unless it is possible to arrive at either these conditions or some variant of them, achieving a best possible peace is going to end up being very elusive. And as we play through this exercise over the next day and a half, what we hope is that by testing the possibilities for how we might bridge the gaps between where we are now and what that end state looks like in a way that takes into account our core constraints, we may actually be uncovering options and strategies and ideas about how to move Syria from conflict to peace that may not be part of the discussion, may not be part of the policy conversation today and may in fact broaden the conversation in ways that have some practical effects. And I think if we've done that, then I would imagine that this game has actually been enormously successful. And so what I'd like to do now is to, with your, no? No, I was gonna ask our... No, I'll do that. You'll do that. Okay. What David would like to do now is to step in. Don't hesitate to step in as we go, though. Let me, I noticed that some of you were looking through the PowerPoint that we prepared and we're gonna begin each one of these sessions with the PowerPoint. Let me just show you what it is. We'll walk through it very quickly. I'm not gonna repeat it all, but I also just wanna get you in the groove of how we're gonna start these things up if we could put the PowerPoint up. So each session we're gonna begin with, this one is establishing a baseline. What would a lasting peace in Syria look like? There are four monitors, so if you're far from one of these, you can look at one of those. And just go to the first slide. As Steve said, we are looking at six pillars, political, economic, security, governance, justice and accountability, humanitarian relief and resettlement. I do wanna underscore that as we look at these things, these are the areas where progress typically has to be made to achieve a lasting peace. But we may not achieve a progress in all of these areas. It may not be achievable in all of these areas. And so we may have to come up with a best possible peace that does a lot in one of these areas and a much less in the others, right? And I'll just give you an example, which is an undesirable example, but you could end up with another authoritarian strongman regime that does nothing but really puts in place a really strong state, puts a lid on this thing. And if there are no other possibilities that actually stabilize, that might be the best possible peace. It's not, it doesn't feel good, but I think we need to keep our eyes open to that. Go to the next slide. So we talked about key elements of the political pillar, whether it's revised constitution, a shift in power, reformed electoral law, political decentralization or civilian armed forces control, there is some debate. And the paper we talk about the importance of having a strong legislative branch. I think there are a lot of people in the world who feel you get effective government and transitional situations with a stronger executive branch. That's something we wanna talk about and discuss here. Next. In the economic pillar, you've got a question of international support, ending sanctions, producing trade and investment, repair and reform. As somebody who spent a lot of time dealing with post-conflict economic intervention, I know that expectations are high, promises are high, follow-through is lower, and it is almost always Peter's out over time the farther away you get from the conflict. So when we're dealing with best possible piece, we have to deal with what the goals are and what's ideal, but we also, I think, need to be realistic about what's likely to happen over time and how that might affect might be. On the next one, in the security pillar, we've got securing weapons, reintegration of combatants, withdrawal, citizen protection, redeployment of a national police, but also, as you can see here, there are a lot of competing armed factions, and when we talk about veto players, there are some of these who aren't veto players in the sense of a political deal, but they may not go away, and if they don't go away, that's gonna complicate things for a long, long time. Next. In terms of the governance pillar, restoration of services, international resources, decentralization of controls so that you get the cities or at least some cities or some parts of the country to work well, and I think one of the issues that we'll have to deal with is, are we dealing with a whole of country solution? Is that the best possible piece, or is that not a possible piece, and are we gonna deal with fragmented solutions? Inclusive, transparent, and accountable, that's always desirable. Pretty sure none of those things will happen, but that's, you know, we wanna put it in there in terms of our goal and protection of state employees and infrastructure. Also important, as we continue forward on justice and accountability, the question is, will there be some kind of justice mechanism? Doesn't happen very frequently. South Africa is given as an example in the paper of a place where it happened to some extent, victim compensation and so forth. The reason it's brought up here is not because the ideal of justice, but because in its absence, it might prove to be inflammatory and thus take peace off the track. And then the next element here, humanitarian relief and resettlement, if you've got 2.2 million registered refugees, if you've got by sometime next year, half the country displaced, you've got 500,000 in Jordan, you've got significant contingents of these refugees in a number of states in the region. It creates both an enormous challenge, political pressure in multiple states and therefore a complication on many, many levels. And the next one, is that the final slide? Okay, so that's kind of the overview. We will go through these slides again very quickly at the beginning of each of these sections. And then what we'll do is we're gonna go and take your temperature very quickly with some polling questions. And typically we've got five, in this particular case we've got four, but I just wanna train you on the polling devices because I know that some of you are allergic to technology. PJ's very, he looked at this and said, this looks like the remote for my VCR. He's the only guy who's still got a VCR. And his VCR is still flashing 12 o'clock. And so we just wanna do a little training. So let me just train you on this, okay? This is a training question. When a couple of snowflakes fall on Washington, the city becomes a winter wonderland, a big pile of gray slush, hysterical and racked with panic, or all of the above and not necessarily in that order. Now what you do is you take the thing and you hit the button that corresponds to the answer that you wanna use. And if you change your mind, then you hit a different button. Whatever's your last one will be the answer. And as you go ahead, there will be a little clock that comes up, I think, and you see it's a countdown clock, and you get eight seconds to answer so that we can very quickly go through these questions at the beginning of each session. And we will see that 66% of you said it's all of the above and not in that order. That's incorrect because if you looked outside, it is not a winter wonderland. The correct answer is hysterical and racked with panic. Let's go to the next question here. When I heard about the pending storm, I was secretly hoping we would start late so I could sleep in. A, it's true, B is false. Why are we doing this to show you that you could do a true or false question as opposed to multiple choice question? And you get your eight seconds. As soon as I finished reading, just go ahead and pull. So we can keep it moving along here. And of course the answer is 77. Now that's a level of honesty that I think is critical to keeping a discussion like this on track. And only 24% of you lied. And so I would rather deal with the problems of Syria than Washington drivers in bad weather. This is another kind of question which is called a range question from strongly agree to strongly disagree. So you can figure that out, strongly agree. If you put C, you're on the fence on this critical issue. And then E is strongly disagree. And again, where we come out is 40% of you strongly agree that you'd rather deal with Syria than bad Washington drivers in bad weather. An amazing 15% of you couldn't make up your mind on this question. And this is weak. Let's go now to just the four questions that we've got. The four questions are a little more substantive. And let's start as simply as we can get is a lasting peace attainable in Syria. And by lasting, let's just say we mean a decade or more, let's not be overly optimistic in that even. And so two thirds of you say yes. One third of you say no. I've said I just returned from the region. And I would say that the view I think that I encountered on the trip was the reverse of that. About two thirds said no. And about one third said yes, if that. So we'll need to see how that reflects itself here. How likely is it that a peace agreement will be reached in the next two years? One is highly likely and E is highly likely and E is highly unlikely. And again, now see, I've moved you a little bit with my coaxing in that last question. And so now 70% of you are on the unlikely side of the spectrum on this. Pessimistic that a peace agreement can be reached in the next couple of years. All right, two more questions really quickly and then we'll get to you guys. A successful peace agreement is contingent on an international mediated peace talks. Agree or disagree? A, strongly agree, you need international peace talks to get to some kind of peace agreement here. Or E, strongly disagree or somewhere in the middle. And interestingly, you've got 73% of you, 72% of you saying that you think an international agreement is, or internationally mediated peace talks is critical to this. The final one of these four questions, what is the single biggest hurdle to attaining a Syrian peace agreement? A, weak central governance. B, fragmented opposition. C, sectarian divides. D, humanitarian crisis response. Or E, raise your hand after this question and say what item is not on this that you would put on this. In other words, if you think there is something other than that, please let us know. Yes, just one second. Fragmented opposition is 51%. Sectarian divides is 35%. What was the question? Outside influence is another possibility. Okay, are there other things that you think are single biggest hurdles to an agreement? Yeah, George. Too many armed actors who have no interest in peace. Okay, others that we want to go through? Mohar. The determination of the Assad regime to continue in power. I take it you are not speaking as the Assad regime and that. And that is the talk of it. All right, any others? All right, okay, sure, go ahead. But speak loud because, okay. So, he said some extremist opposition will prevent them from ever becoming part of the peace talks. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about what this peace that I think there's a sense in this room is likely to be elusive, even though the majority of you think it's possible, what it would look like? What are the essential elements of this peace? Now, Steve in his comments in his paper talked about the sort of the pillars of peace. But I want to sort of go a step further and say, what do you think a deal would look like? Or what do you think the end state would look like politically? What do you think the end state would look like in terms of security arrangement? Or how do we get there? What are the critical components that get us on the way to a peace? And as you think about that, let me just ask a quick question. And Steve, let me ask you the question first because you used the term which I think is critical to this whole thing. You talked about veto players. Who do you think the veto players are? I would distinguish between two sets of veto players, those internal to Syria and those external, regional and international actors, whose involvement has achieved a scale that gives them the influence to shape decision making that might define the contours of a peace. Okay, so. So, more concretely, Russia, Iran, the Assad regime itself, the Islamist arms group whose capacity to serve as spoilers can vastly complicate implementation of any agreements reached internationally. The United States potentially has the capacity to serve as a veto player, although I think its role and influence in that regard is limited. Perhaps his Bola, a limited number I think of veto players. I want to challenge one of those. And then I want to go around the room and see if anybody else has challenges, okay? In terms of the Islamist armed groups who may not have an incentive to go along with this thing. If they have no incentive to go along with the peace and they're a veto player, then should we all go home? In other words, does this become unachievable in that regard? One of the core constraints I defined is that an outcome needs to contain or marginalize spoilers. Right, but they contain or marginalize. So one of the possibilities is that you could take them from being a veto player to not being a veto player. Correct. Okay, Ted, do you want to? I think this is, if we're going to define what the struggle has become, I think it has become a existential sectarian civil war. And because it's existential, as far as many of the principal groups and actors are concerned, it's very unlikely we're going to achieve peace any time soon, even though we have to continue working on it. But a peace would have to have some of the worst aspects probably of what exists currently in Lebanon and Iraq. It would have to be decentralized, such as autonomous zones, et cetera, that you have in the Kurdish region and Iraq. There would have to be a sectarian sort of guarantee protection element to it, such as the Taif agreement seemed to incorporate it, minus maybe Hisballah being the only group allowed to carry arms. But the fact is each all sides believe they're likely to be slaughtered or exiled or something terrible if they don't come out on top. And I would agree with Ambassador Ted on this one. I mean, in terms of where everyone is, the different sides, the degree they're dug in, and that gets on to your question about extremism. I think both sides have, if you look at the conflict, both sides are going to extremes. It's not just the Sunni opposition that has extremists among its ranks. Also the Assad regime and the Associated Forces also now have, they're not just U.S. designated terrorist organizations or terrorist organizations outright. What I'm wondering though here is, are we really looking at, and maybe it's a constraint I'm not sure, is the way we think about this, are we looking at a peace in Syria that ends up with Syria in one piece, or will it be the partition of the country? And I would say at this point, the different sides are so far apart that probably a de facto partition is more likely to continue for the foreseeable future. What you were saying is that that's a, gotta be strong potential. Exactly. The question is, can Assad be convinced to step down by fellow Alawites? And can the Free Syrian Army and the regular army of Syria combine to go to war against the most extreme Islamist groups that will never accept peace, like ISIS and Japan to Nusrah? Okay. Andrew and Ted seem to agree a little bit on this. I'm gonna go around and either build on theirs or offer alternative views, Hans. And I'll go around and say, yeah. Well, the corollary to that analysis is that it's gonna be very hard to develop a negotiated peace. Geneva II is gonna be extremely difficult to be successful. Probably the fastest way to get peace in Syria is through Western military intervention. And everybody, Europe, the United States were fatigued. There's no stomach to do that. So the clearest path to peace in Syria is not gonna be followed, most likely. Does anybody here think that Western military intervention is a possibility in this? Okay, well, thank you. We're gonna stick around the table. At what scale? Pardon me? At what scale? Well, it's big enough scale to make a difference. Yeah, if you were talking about something akin to the surge in Iraq, absolutely not. But I think it's likely that there will be some sort of Western military intervention in the conflict. It may be extremely limited, but we came very close this past some. Okay, was that the point you wanted to make or do you wanna make a different point? Actually, I wanted to make it just a different point because it seems like when we talk about peace in Syria, we're bounded by the borders. And even if we, I think it's important to note that even if we achieve peace in Syria, it's likely that the war will continue elsewhere, especially in Lebanon and Iraq, which seem to be the two states that are most vulnerable towards some sort of either peace in Syria or further conflict. I mean, certainly Lebanon, but perhaps Iraq as well. I think that's an interesting thing. And it's something we may wanna come back to here with you guys as a counsel of the wise here because we're talking about peace in Syria. One way you can achieve peace in Syria is squeezing the balloon, right? So if there are certain elements that are problem elements, if they left Syria, you might get there. But we've seen in Colombia and some other places where you do that. And then you end up with a crisis off the track. So we need to deal with that. Jim? Thank you, David. In a way, this is my answer to your last question on the screen, E. The excellent papers prepared for this thing and the experience of many of us around the table have been in trying to deal with conflicts, albeit most of them not quite as bad as this one, since the late 80s, where there has been, at the global level, a sort of consensus to either support an international order, the First Gulf War, or to at least acquiesce in it, Libya, Kosovo. I'm not so sure that exists anymore. And thus that becomes the single biggest thing because the spoilers internally and in the region could be controlled if the major outside players, Russia, the United States, essentially the Sunni coalition in Iran could come to some kind of an agreement. But the ability to arrive at such an agreement, which is I think the first step in anything, it looks very, very grim right now because there is a difference of opinion on what the world should look like and this all flows down to Syria. There's an interesting historical dimension of this, right, because about 100 years ago you had Sykes Pico and the establishment of sort of an order in the region based on the imposition of foreign spheres of influence. Over time you went from traditional European spheres of influence to Cold War spheres of influence and the aftermath of Cold War, you went to the post-911 US sphere of influence. Now all of that is withdrawn from the region. Syria is interesting in this respect because it has at least a corner of the country where there is still a clear sphere of influence because you have the Russians with a port and an involvement and a desire to keep a bulwark between themselves and what they see as this sort of spreading caliphate that could reach to Chechnya. And so this is one part of the Middle East where there actually is still a remnant of the Sykes Pico kind of divvied up region. I really just wanna highlight or underscore two questions that have come to my mind. First is the difference between veto players and spoilers. And I think we need to continue to think about that distinction and about the question of to what extent can certain actors evolve in their thinking evolve in their perceptions of their interests and therefore move out of the realm of veto player and to what extent are certain actors and here I would put ISIS very much in that category simply not salvageable. And then I think we have to make a judgment about their degree of influence and whether their very presence is so significant even if it's an unlimited part of the country that they are an effective veto player. The second question really revolves around Andrew's point which I'm very sympathetic to the notion of a divided or partitioned Syria but then I would raise the question of whether a partitioned Syria and a peaceful Syria are essentially contradictory notions that the two are mutually exclusive. Okay, useful. I'm trying to keep up here as we go, Paul. Just a comment on the question of Western military intervention which also connects a little bit to Russia's role as a veto player. To my mind, Russia is much more of a veto player on external involvement in the conflict in Syria or external attempts to impose a solution in Syria. I think Russia is much less likely to try to be a veto player if there's a solution that the parties are coming to without massive pressure from the United States. Okay, Judith. Did you want to say something? Yeah. No, no, no. Say it from your own perspective. We're here, we're just trying to talk about what's the best possible piece to look like. Couple of things to keep in mind, I think we have to learn the lessons of history. And that is that if history is any example, what brought the Palestinians and the Israelis, at least in my understanding together in 1990, 1991, was weakness that both sides were too weak to win, needed some kind of a pausers to try to get some kind of settlement, some kind of unsum issues. And I think that that's what we have to work towards. Again, it's not a decision coming from strength or one part defeating the other. And the decision has to come from within. And we're not fighting or supporting end state of democracy. I think we've got to put that aside here. Here, I think the Saudis have it right. Democracy is not the short-term end state we need to think about, we need to think about stability and end to fighting. I think also that kinds of incentives to appeal to extremists, for some of the extremist fighting, I think as Monopolis, there aren't gonna be acceptable incentives. And that is very worrisome because we like to think we live in a world where anything has a price. Maybe sometimes it doesn't. Partition only sews the seeds of the next stage of the fighting. And I think we need to remember that Syria is not Iraq. And that populations in Syria, if I get this correctly, don't live in concentrated few areas, but there really is more of a scattering. So how you decide on protection for sectarian or ethnic groups has more to do with a national solution and not a divided mini-state solution. Foreign powers, accepting that Saudi is a foreign power, not speaking in that kind of a role, you can't let another foreign power win or determine. I'm not interested in Sykes-Picot as any kind of an agreement for anything. Countries that are fighting today are fighting according to what came out of that, and that's just a reality on the ground. Okay, we've got eight people here. I wanna get to some summing up, but I do wanna, just even as we're going here, we're hearing some things that are useful guideposts. I mean, we're saying that the best possible piece might not be a unitary Syria. The best possible piece may have to deal with these spoilers, not perhaps providing them with incentives, but providing them with disincentives, that the best possible piece is going to have to involve the neighboring countries in some way, et cetera, et cetera. And so I think the main point I wanna underscore here is that the notion of a traditional piece or an optimal piece seems to have been quickly set aside here, quickly taken off the table. I think that's constructive as we go forward, Mano. That's very much what I wanted to speak to is what exactly are we talking about when we use and even the phrase best possible piece and whose standards and what indicators, particularly if we're looking at the level or Western standards in terms of is it just getting Syria out of the headlines? Is it just stable enough versus what people on the ground might be looking for? Because we may come to a peace agreement but still have a lot of violence and a lot of insecurity that's tolerable from a Western perspective but not tolerable from a regional or country perspective. I think that also ties into a little bit of the military intervention because the viewpoint from the region is that the longer the sanctions, the longer the humanitarian crisis, the more that you actually destroy Syria and the very infrastructure of Syria and people look at Syria more in terms of Iraq of the 1990s, let's continue this, let's wink in it so that when you do have military intervention, theoretically it's easier to go in because you have a little resistance. So military intervention may not be realized anytime soon but the idea is there a plan later, a decade later or some type of intervention with a longer timeline? Well also, critically important question which we don't really address in this paper but we need to address as a group, whose best possible piece? Because clearly from the point of view of some Western powers, a crisis where 120,000 people have been killed over the course of a couple of years is tolerable. And first the people who are being killed and displaced it's not tolerable and so there are different levels of motivation to address it. Let me mix things up and start working from this end of the table down PJ. I think it's important just to, we say peace and we say Syria but in my mind there were four conflicts, not just one so which piece are we dealing with? You've got the Assad conflict with the Free Syrian Army, you've got Assad and the Free Syrian Army battling Islamist extremists, you've got the competition between Iran and Saudi Arabia and you've got the war between Hezbollah and Israel all manifesting themselves in Syria. I also think that I use the frame of Bosnia-Kas, use the frame of Cambodia but obviously I think we recognize this has to play out for some time before you have conditions to deal with any elements of this. But some sort of sequencing would involve containing the conflict within Syria to the extent possible including the humanitarian aspect, letting the war play out for a period of time before it ripens as one paper I've mentioned. But then there's the dynamic of can you over time develop an understanding from the outside players and the outside conflicts that then may help manifest the conditions inside of Syria and that's one thing to talk about at some point will be the dynamic of the U.S.-Iranian negotiation on nuclear issues which will play out over the next year or two and what impact at some point that might have on Syria. But I think that from a U.S. standpoint where the United States is going to resist taking, you know, having the interplay that was suggested in a couple of papers will want to deal with the nuclear issue first and then see if that builds confidence to where there can be cooperation on a broader issue. And then- Keep going, I just want to interrupt. The final thing would be the dialogue that has begun between the Gulf States and Iran how that evolves will have a significant impact in terms of what happens inside of Syria. Okay, those are important points. I just want to flag one thing because, you know, for example, in the next phase of this we're looking at a political process to begin with. But we may conclude, and I just want to make sure that our minds are open to this, that the political process won't work initially and that what you'll need to do is you'll need to deal with containment of some of the conflict and a rejiggering of some of the players and maybe the production of a little bit of entropy to get to a point where the political process might ultimately work. So just because we're going through it in that order and framing it in that way doesn't mean that we should allow ourselves to be boxed in, Kez. So historical analogies are always risky, but let me throw one on the table because I think it may have some useful elements. Cambodia, Khmer Rouge come to power in 1975. Final peace agreement comes in 1991, 16 years later. Over the course of those 16 years, 1.7 million Cambodians killed. From a U.S. point of view, neither the Khmer Rouge nor the invading Vietnamese were attractive partners. Final settlement comes about because the big powers get together and help to facilitate such a settlement, but at the time of the settlement, the Khmer Rouge are brought to the negotiating table. They are part of the final agreement and at the time of the final settlement, they hold roughly a quarter of the country. So, outside actors, are we looking in Syria at a situation where outside actors can be decisive? Worse guys at the table, are we saying that al-Nusra is not going to be at the table? Is that an operating assumption? Rightness, this was an agreement that took 16 years to achieve. Is Syria right for an agreement? Or are we looking at time having to pass before agreement is possible? Okay, great. And just as we wrap this up and as we go through this and people make their final comments, let's try to stay focused on what the best possible peace would look like. In other words, where's the best we can get to as opposed to enumerating the problems that we've got? Esther. Thank you. We were looking at four key points that we think we will have to come back to some form of security council resolution, which would actually document the engagement of the Russian Federation and the United States and the P5 and you cannot risk another failure at the security council. So this will have to have some package that will work with the P5. And interestingly, we'll probably have a large humanitarian component as part of the political component on the assumption that Jordan would join the security council in January if that arrangement works out. Secondly, that you would have to have a long-term political mission as well, which would include elections and other elements which would require long-term engagement from the international community. That you will also, but the challenge here is that you will probably encounter long-term donor fatigue as well. And in order to sustain what we're talking about, we have to recognize how long this is going to take and that you may not have the sustained support over time that will make it possible to sustain even the best possible arrangement. Okay, great. All right. Two points. One of the, this conflict is now at almost three years old, but we haven't really seen the impact on the neighboring countries yet. When you think about the number of refugees, which is enormous, and those refugee numbers increase even more, the strain on the neighboring countries will be so huge that they will need to engage in the solution. So far, they have been more spoilers than actually producers of a solution. And I don't think there can be a solution without the neighbors taking a very, very active part. And the moment you start seeing the stability of Jordan, certainly Iraq, Lebanon start to disintegrate in a serious way is when we will see all of the neighboring countries starting to rethink this. And just one last point in terms of decentralization. It isn't that these populations in Syria are lumped together maybe like Iraq. But the truth is the border between Iraq and Syria has disappeared. Decentralization is only good because at the moment nobody is going to look at Damascus as a source of authority. So let people decide on their own in local communities at what they're going to do. Syria is going to be a long-term process in terms of resolving it. So anyway, those are my two points. What you're saying is in the best possible piece, decentralization has to be a component of it because it won't work otherwise. Mark? I think from the Russian point of view, the best possible piece is one that avoids the coming to power of a Sunni jihadist regime. And that it should be possible to build an international coalition that also understands this. In other words, that Russia doesn't want this. Iran doesn't want this. America doesn't want this. Israel doesn't want this. And there are others. In other words, that maybe that doing so can isolate the Saudis in the so-called moderate Gulf states that perhaps an Iranian Gulf dialogue can get them to end this, or they can be isolated. That internally, what the best possible piece would look like would be the kind of piece that ended the Tajik Civil War in the 1990s. That basically the regime remains in power, but that it opens its doors to some of the opposition. In other words, that you bring in the opposition, give them some room for maneuver, and then that way the war ends. But that, from the Russian point of view, I think, would be ideal. And that it should be possible to get other people to understand that that would be in their interests as well. OK, Seras. Sure, on the issue of the best possible lasting piece in the region, I think the last time there was an exercise of trying to arrange or rearrange the region is World War I and then World War II. You brought up Sykes-Bicot. And part of why we are where we are today is that the realities of the region weren't fully taken into account. I mean, let me say the following. We do have states. We have institutions. We have parliaments. None of them today, especially in the Levant, and I speak specifically about Lebanon, tend to be representative or tend to be where the power actually lies. The power still lies with leaders of communities, communal leaders, and whatnot. And so as we think about what to do with Syria, I urge that we not think about recrafting the region in new Sykes-Bicot, which is actually something that the region is very sensitive to both at an official level but also at a popular level when you're talking about regional powers, international powers sitting around the table thinking about whether these entities are going to be crafted or not. But what I urge that we talk about is building a piece that is reflective of the communal realities of the region and the identity politics of the region. I mean, the region is not governed by the notion of citizenship nor representative government. And we could all sit around here and talk about that and talk about parliaments and election laws. But it is based on communal politics and identity politics. And that's got to be the centerpiece of any kind of lasting, peaceful solution that we craft. Excellent point. But let me reiterate. Let's not talk about what we don't want. Let's talk about what the piece looks like. Daniel. Yeah. And this is by way of creating perhaps something of a bridge to our next discussion on the political arena. I think it's inconceivable that a, and this may be, there may be some dissonance for us to have said, in terms of political realism, I think it's inconceivable to imagine a negotiated outcome in which there isn't a significant element within the current Alawite regime that supports it and comes out and separates itself from the hardliners. Of course, today's hardliners can be tomorrow's negotiators. But I think one of the things that we're going to need to look at are the conditions which would foster that kind of split, the capacity of the negotiators or interlocutors within the Alawite regime to negotiate. And I'm going to be listening very carefully from the Syrian representatives around the table to see as the game is played the conditions under which that sort of dynamic appears. OK. So a role for these other Alawite groups, perhaps not directly involving the Assad group, is part of this piece. Sharon. Yeah, I'd like to, I think, reinforce the point that both Firaz and Manal made. One of the things that seems to happen a lot when we talk about peace negotiations is we focus on the groups that currently exist. And we don't think about the groups that might emerge down the road. And when you look at a lot of these wars that have dragged on for a while, the militia leaders get further and further away from their constituents. And so I think it's extremely important to think about how do we make sure that we're pulling in these identity groups to the peace that we're trying to negotiate? How do we make sure that we're getting the people who might be spoilers in the future on a broader societal level? I'm thinking in particular about young people who are currently in the refugee camps and who are in Syria. So how do we get those kinds of groups represented at the table so that we're not looking at a new group of spoilers four months down the road when the current group of spoilers and elite groups come up with their own deal? OK. And to flip that around just in the context where we're talking. So what you're saying is that in the context of the best possible peace, we need to consider a way to use that and that in fact there may be solution to some of our problems if we recognize that there is some motion that's possible within those groups. Julianne? Depending on the geography of the actual agreement, and we've had a couple of ideas thrown around here this morning, we may find that the UN issues some call for a stabilization force, particularly in a situation where we don't feel like we can adequately address the needs of potential spoilers. But there are two problems with that. First, I mean it's hard to imagine how we put that together from an international perspective in light of what Hans and others have mentioned. I mean there are resources and obviously just the fatigue that exists out there among some of the countries that would be potential contributors. But also the receptivity on the ground to that idea could be very weak minus the particular group that's looking for protection. Okay, I see two more cards here that I'm gonna respond to and then I'm gonna go to you guys and I want you to tell me what you hear are the elements of this best possible peace. So think about that so that when I turned you the council of the wise doesn't look clueless. Okay, because that would spoil the whole effect here. Okay, come. Yeah, hi, just briefly, I mean one of the things that we're all focused on is Geneva II and the prospects for political transition. But one of the areas that we haven't focused on is quite as much as on the security situation on the ground, the humanitarian situation and I mean an area where I'd like to see a lot more sort of international focus both by the UN but also by countries is on an issue like the besieged area in issues on breaking through on humanitarian access. It's one of the only areas where you have every single regional player, you have the Iranians, you have the Saudis, the Americans and the Russians all sitting down at the table. I think that in a way that if you recall that kind of focused in the past that was on some of the UN operations under general mood, there was this sort of enormous international pressure to focus on some of the worst human rights abuses, some of the attacks and I'd like to see more of that like everyday focus, top UN people raising the alarm on issues of the besieged states, the besieged areas, who's responsible, what can we do? And as a way of sort of just starting that process which I think has more possibility of yielding some broader kind of international buy-in and also would look at this sort of initially look more at sort of how this is affecting people on the ground right now. Okay, you got a minute and then I'm gonna go to you guys and again, 30 seconds, a minute, let's keep it crisp because we are gonna be very rigorous about a couple of things here. One is sticking within the rules of our structure, the other is trying to be critical minded in our assessment of the places that we end up together and the final one and one that you may find most important of all is we're gonna stick to our schedule. So when there's a break, you're gonna have a break and when we come back from a break, you're gonna come back. We always stay on schedule and we're off. Very briefly, this is an amalgam of Firas and Munna and Judith and Henri, which is that the best piece is to maintain a united Syria, fragmentation is not inevitable and that is to engage the center. We've talked a lot about the polar sides, whether the Assad regime and for it it is existential or the Islamist extremists and Judith is absolutely right, you can't give them any incentives but we have to engage the center, which is the moderate opposition and also remnants of the regime, the bureaucracy, the civil bureaucracy within the regime and the two are the silent majority and they are the ones that would continue having a united Syria. After all, and Judith is absolutely right, a fragmented Syria, none of the fragments would be viable and that would lead certainly to future conflict. So a center, engaging a center to maintain a united Syria. Okay, so what does it look like to you, Paul? I'm gonna make an analogy though. I failed to mention in my introduction, I happen to also be the president's special envoy to Northern Ireland and it was during the time when we had the devolution of power in Northern Ireland. We did conclude, well, I wouldn't say conclude the piece but it was the beginning of peace. Three elements that I heard here. One, outside players, diplomacy certainly mattered as in the case of Northern Ireland. The British reached out to the US, to Ireland and to the players internally. I think that was absolutely critical. So outside players mattered. Second, on the issue of veto players and spoilers, spoilers were marginalized. Veto players, there was a very strong effort to try to convince them, to convince them and to bring them on board and to bring them into the process. Thirdly, something that I did not hear and said here and I don't know if there is such a person. In the case of Northern Ireland, actually it was Jerry Adams who in January of 2007 at the Ardash denounced violence and called upon Sinn Féin to embrace moving forward and to embrace a peace process. So is there an individual who emerges who actually can lead those within? And then just finally, peace was gradual and inclusive and also there were at different points creative solutions that were sought. It does seem to me that the comment made by Stephen originally about the constraints that those core interests do not necessarily remain the same throughout the process. And it does seem to me that what you need to do is think about how the external players and others can begin in a process that ultimately results in those core minimal interests shifting so that there's acceptance of an outcome. And here it does seem to me that we, no one's mentioned the chemical deal between the U.S. and Russia essentially that ultimately was accepted and was accepted over the objections really of the near regional players as well as by the internal actors into a significant degree. And the question is whether as our Russian commentator noted there is an end game that is acceptable to Russia and to the United States and that incorporates some of this concept of a transition government that would be acceptable because it would meet their interests. And in that regard, Colm's point about the humanitarian issue. That is that may be again an issue where you can see U.S. Russian agreement on getting some access to those besieged communities and in so doing perhaps change the dynamic. And one other point I would make is the comment from civil society. The best possible piece, a sustainable piece, if it doesn't in fact engage women and civil society in the end it is not likely to succeed. Chris. I think there were at least five or perhaps six unresolved dichotomies on the question that we're looking at. Number one, this question of decentralization and or partition, are they the same thing at the end of the day? Second, what do we do about the regime? There was some sense Mark Katz mentioned you keep the regime but it opens up as in Tajikistan is that what we're talking about? Where essentially you have a Assad-less regime that's a little bit more open to opposition. A third is the question of integrating or isolating what I think we'd all describe as radical elements but they are critical elements of opposition. What do you do with them? And I think PJ noted the multiplicity of conflicts here. One of them being it's not just Assad against everybody else but at some point it may be Assad's allies against certain factors within the opposition. A fourth is that there's no answer so far to the question of how you put the sectarian genie back in the bottle. This is a sectarian conflict now and what do you do in this best of all possible outcomes? Fifth, virtually no discussion except perhaps from Manal on the question of are we talking about an outcome that is on the road to democracy? Or does that matter? Or does stability count far more as we prepare that road? And finally, it took a long time but finally Mark Katz got to the point of what US and Russia might do. We tended to look at outside powers as potential spoilers but what is the possibility of still of a US-Russian agreement on how to proceed and does that in a sense create the umbrella to answer all these other dichotomies? Okay, oh, you wanna say something else? Okay, go ahead. Two points. First of all, it seemed to me that one issue was the issue of what could be achieved by key stakeholders and which one was really a spoiler and it seemed to me here you had the jihadists, it seemed to me were almost beyond the pale. In other words, you could get some agreement on some issues partial with various groups but you were not gonna get the jihadists to go along. So could you then organize something so that the jihadists could be neutralized? And that seems to me would at least set the basis for movement. Second, it seemed to me that Assad has to be part of the process simply because he is a key actor and he has important backers for whom it's very important that he stay in power. So it seemed to me that you're going to have to have him in the initial stages at the table but the end of the process would hopefully be something which would remove him from the scene. And thirdly, the US and Russia, I think actually on this issue, have a lot of interests that are in common and that was particularly true at the time of the chemical weapons issue because that changed in a way the dynamic that neither Russia nor the United States wanted to see chemical weapons fall into the hands of extremists and therefore I think that was a turning point which allowed us to move forward. Okay, Kristen, last word here. You're the last thing that stands between these people in a break. All right, very good. I just want to underscore some of the key themes that I heard from all of you this morning so far, the things that perhaps will be really instrumental to coming to whatever this best possible piece looks like. First of all, we did hear some concerns about fragmentation, about decentralization, but we also heard the prospect held out by Ted Katouf that this kind of decentralization or model of autonomous zones could potentially be part of a solution as well if we look to Iraq, if we look to Lebanon. We heard Andrew Axum talk about the potential for military intervention and certainly there's a question of will there but we also need to define what does that intervention look like and there could be more will if we define more clearly what that is. Is this a peacekeeping mission or is it a more targeted, limited intervention? That's worthy of some exploration. We heard some concerns about the war and a serious spilling over onto the borders but also some concern that a best possible piece in the future will have to keep that war if it spills over the borders from spilling back. So let's think about how we address that issue. We heard an excellent reminder from Sharon Morris that the constituencies for peace in Syria are dynamic and that is both a challenge as new spoilers might emerge but also it's an opportunity because we have the opportunity to build new constituencies for peace and finally I think we heard the very important intervention by Manel Omar that what is to build a stable peace, a geopolitically stable peace for the West is not the same thing as the kind of peace that's tolerable for people who have to live there on the ground for the foreseeable future. Okay, great. So we heard a couple of other things too. We heard that we have a great group of people with a lot of terrific ideas. We heard that there's a lot of energy and commitment to getting forward in this and to cracking some of these riddles and I think it's a very promising start. We are now going to move however from the we oughta, we coulda, this seems like the best idea phase of this thing into trying to sort of game through some of the critical issues and in so doing and through the interplay of the players start identifying a little bit more specifically what the fault lines are and how those fault lines might be resolved and I hope that we bring to it the same kind of energy and creativity working within those parameters. We're gonna take a 15 minute break now. Behind me over here are coffee and some refreshments and also the restrooms but I beg of you when you start to be brought back in we're gonna start sharp in 15 minutes. Thank you very much.