 Good morning, everyone, and welcome. My name is Bill Burns. I'm the president of the Carnegie Endowment. If you wanted to understand the roots and the consequences of today's tumult in the Middle East, you've come to the right place. We're all extremely fortunate to have with us today two of the very best journalists and two of the very sharpest analysts of the region that I know. And we're especially pleased to help launch Kim Gaddis' new book, Black Wave, an exceptional guide to an exceptionally complex part of the world. Born and raised in Beirut, Kim spent nearly two decades as a Middle East and State Department correspondent for the Financial Times and the BBC. No stranger to political instability or long flights. Kim has reported from nearly every country in the region and crisscrossed the world with secretaries of state, Rice, Clinton, and Kerry. Kim's previous book, The New York Times Bestseller, The Secretary, explored the Middle East through the lens of US diplomacy and power. In the Black Wave, she provides an inverse angle, providing a range of perspectives from the region about where and how things went wrong in this land of unintended consequences. It offers a fascinating story and artfully interwoven narratives, taking a thoughtful look at the history of Saudi Iranian rivalry and all of the fallout that has been left in its wake. Only someone of Kim's extraordinary gifts, experience, and expertise could paint a picture as vivid, as nuanced, or as gripping as what she has produced in Black Wave. It's a captivating read that somehow manages to be both intimate in its storytelling and expansive in its scope, spanning beach towns in Lebanon, seminaries in Iran, protest camps in Tahir Square, and the battlefields of Aleppo. Like Kim, David Ignatius has also reported extensively from the far reaches of the Middle East and from the deepest corridors of power. Few people have as perceptive and authoritative a sense of American foreign policy and its key players. His eloquent and insightful columns drive and shape public debate, and they also keep policymakers honest and wider discussion about policy grounded in reality, which sometimes seems like a novel thought in this era. If you haven't already purchased a copy or three of Kim's book, you'll have the opportunity to do so and to get it signed after today's program. Those thanks again for coming today, and please join me in a very warm welcome for Kim Gaddis and David Ignatius. Thank you, Bill. So, ladies and gentlemen, I'm delighted to be able to host this conversation with Kim, who is a colleague who I've known for many years, whose journalism I've respected at the BBC and the Financial Times. She has a magical name for me because, as I told her, I think when I first met you, in 1982, during the Israeli siege of Beirut, the only telex machine that was working in West Beirut or at least at the Commodore Hotel where the journalists were, had the telex address got us. And I've always thought, wow, that was power. Kim, you... It propelled me to Washington, I guess. You have had such an outstanding career that you could say that you achieved escape velocity from the world of Lebanon and the Middle East and covering all those enormously difficult issues. But with this book, you've really jumped in with a journalist's eye for detail and also an historian's sense of deeper roots and context. And I'd like to ask you to begin by telling us why you decided to do this. Where did the idea for this book come from? David, thank you so much for agreeing to this conversation. You were one of my inspirations as a journalist in Beirut when I first met you. I was in awe of this Washington Post columnist journalist that I was able to interview in Beirut. And here I am sitting next to you on the stage, Carnegie. Thank you to everyone at Carnegie for having me. So I wanted to just start by saying that. The book started to percolate in my head in 2014 when ISIS was on the rise taking over large swathes of land in Iraq and Syria. And what was particularly striking about that episode was the wanton destruction of culture, of artifacts, of museums, the burning of libraries. This sort of desire to burn the past so that they could control the future. And this cultural desertification that's somewhere I recognized in not as an extreme form, but that I had seen before in a country like Saudi Arabia where museums were allowed, where representation is not allowed, where cinemas were forbidden, where there was no music. And it started to get me thinking about what was it in this puritanical thinking that had traveled this far? And a lot of people were making comparisons that are not perfect, but were making comparisons between the puritanical, literalist expression of Islam in the kingdom and what ISIS was doing. Of course, ISIS also targets Saudi Arabia and its rhetoric, but there was something there that I recognized. And then later that year, my sister, I was in Beirut, my sister went to visit South Lebanon with a friend of hers who had grown up in South Lebanon near the town of Nabati, which is today a stronghold of Hezbollah, the Shia militant group. And she told me that her friend was very dismayed when she took my sister because she suddenly realized there wasn't much to do. She wanted to show off her town and she was actually, there are no cafes, there's really no cultural life beyond what Hezbollah offers. And that got me thinking about, well, we're all so focused, or many of us are focused on criticizing the Saudis for what they may have produced as offspring. But there has been previous episodes of cultural desertification. And that happened with the rise of groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon in the 80s, an export of the Islamic revolution of Iran. And it happened in Iran publicly, certainly. And so I started wondering, were these connected? Was this a competition? How did this all start? And why this assault on culture? And how did it change us over those decades? And that brought me to the year 1979 where I found that it was the starting point of this rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran on various fronts, geopolitical but also religious and cultural. The power of this book, I think, begins with your identification of 1979 as the fulcrum, on which so much of subsequent history is balanced. We have memories or certainly we've read often enough about what happened in Iran in 1979 with the revolution and then the seizure of the American embassy. But we know less about what was going on in the kingdom by design because they didn't want people to know. So maybe a starting point in trying to understand how Saudi Arabia reacted to the extremism and idealism of the Iranian revolution is to tell us about what happened in Mecca in late 1979. Well, to back up just a little bit, the initial reaction of the Saudi kingdom was to welcome the Iranian revolution. And I knew that of course the Saudis and the Iranians, the Saudi king and the Iranian Shah were friendly rivals before 1979, before the Iranian revolution. They were twin pillars in US policy to contain communism and the Soviet Union. And that is something that is often forgotten even by experts. We forget that there was this cooperation that they were not always enemies. It's only been 40 years. But what really surprised me was to find a headline in Arabic as we were digging in the archives of newspapers as Saudi Tushid, the Taur al-Iraniyah. The Saudis praised the Iranian revolution because they saw, they were probably upset or sad for their friend the Shah whom they supported till the very end. They were still putting out statements that they supported the Shah until early January. And of course Khomeini returned in February. They were worried about a communist takeover of Iran, initially, because Khomeini was in fact surrounded and the revolution was mostly propelled forward at the time by the more secular, more leftist, more modernist thinkers around Khomeini. So initially the Saudis were like, well, you know, this guy looks like us. He's about conservative religion. He's puritanical. He wants to bring Sharia to Iran. We can deal with that. And Prince Abdullah later, King Abdullah, also put out a statement saying that they were very pleased that the terms of cooperation between the two countries could be on the basis of religion, Islam, and the Quran. They hadn't read some of Khomeini's other writings and then they realized that they were in for a big surprise. But what happened in the kingdom was the siege of the Holy Mosque of Mecca in November of that year when Saudi Zalatz who there's no evidence that they were inspired by what happened in Iran, but I think the Iranian revolution was rippling out to Sunni countries. People were inspired all the way in Egypt and in Pakistan by what someone like Khomeini had achieved. And so what you have in Saudi Arabia is a two week siege of the Mosque of Mecca by Saudi Zalatz, some of whom had been groomed by the leading clerics of the establishment in Saudi Arabia, including the man who would later become the Mufti of Saudi Arabia, Abdul Aziz bin Baz. And they lay siege to the Holy Mosque because their calls are for a much more conservative application of the religious law, even more conservative than the kingdom already is. They oppose the presence of Westerners in the country on holy soil in the peninsula. And the kingdom finds itself undermined in its leadership role of the Muslim world and its custodianship of the two holy sites of Mecca, of Saudi Arabia. And questions are raised around the Arab world, including coming from Egypt, and I've heard about this failure. The reaction is instead of the Saudis deciding that they should temper the orders of such Zalatz, of course the siege ends with a lot of deaths and most of the protagonists are killed or put to death, but their ideas are taken on by the clerics and the Saudi royal family because they want to protect their throne. They don't want to face more threats from people like that and from the clerics who find this to be the opportunity for them to push their agenda even more forward in the kingdom for even more conservative application of Islamic law. This character that you mentioned, Abdul Aziz bin Baz, figures through many parts of your narrative, I have a personal recollection of the first time I visited the kingdom of Saudi Arabia was in early 1981 and the kind of aftermath still echoed. We went to an Islamic summit in Taif in the mountains fairly near Mecca and you could just see how hard the kingdom was working to seem fiercely Islamic. The third key element of your 1979 is our history narrative is Afghanistan and I want you to talk about both what was happening in Afghanistan with the Soviet invasion and then the Saudi role as they've got all these extreme hobby Salafist radicals and spying this opportunity in Afghanistan to kind of deal with this. So talk about that piece of. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan happens on Christmas Eve of 1979. And of course, I use 79 as the starting point of the narrative because it is such a key turning point but of course nothing happens in a vacuum. 79 didn't just all of a sudden happen. All these events have trends that precede them. And so the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is the culmination of several years of guerrilla warfare in the country and Soviet involvement and coups, et cetera. And then on Christmas Eve, there is the landing of hundreds of troops and it's identified very quickly by the Saudis and the Pakistanis and the Americans as a flashpoint where to push back against Soviet influence. And for the Saudis, it becomes this place where they can show that they are the real defenders of the faith. They may have failed in Mecca but they can make up for it in Afghanistan by helping to fund and promote the idea of jihad against the godless communists. So it becomes the sort of the cause to labor inside Saudi Arabia where young people are encouraged to go there, people donate their telephones to donate for this effort. And more importantly, young men from around the Arab and Muslim world from Egypt or Pakistan or Iraq, well, probably not Iraq but Syria, travel to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets. And these are young men who are still marginal elements in their societies as people who espouse a more extremist or violent understanding of Islam. They're marginal in their country but they all congregate in Afghanistan and they meet on the battlefield and they're drunk on power and on the idea that you can use the weapon to fight the enemy and you can use the word to bring down your tyrant as the Iranian revolution did in Tehran. We know famously that among the enthusiasts for getting all these extreme anti-Soviet fighters was the CIA and that America ended up betting the movement of the Mujahideen fighters that then morphs later into al-Qaeda. We're here in the home of one of the people I respect most in the State Department from that period and I just wanna ask you whether, as you did your research, you encountered misgivings, concerns, not just on the part of US officials, but among people in the region, looking back we can see things begin to slip away towards what's been decades of increasing violence and extremism. Did people see that at the time and say wait a minute, stopping the Soviets is not worth the cost of what we're creating? It's very hard to understand precisely the consequences of the actions you're taking as a regional power or a superpower I think in the moment and that's why it takes a while to understand the trend lines and to understand why 79 was so crucial as a turning point that was not just a geopolitical turning point because it turned Iran and Saudi Arabia into rivals but because it also unleashed this sea change across the region in terms of how people understand and experience their culture and their religion because the Saudis and the Iranians used all tools at their disposal to rally people to their camp and that included religion and culture but at the time that was the good war, the war against the Soviets was the good war and so everyone was a happy participant including Ziyal Haq who thought this was his chance to consolidate his position at home as a dictator who was initially not very loved and not necessarily backed by anyone forcefully but he became essential to the battle in Afghanistan against the Soviets but even though it was a good war there were some people who were very concerned about the types of Mujahideen groups that were getting the full support of the Saudis and one of these people was Jamal Khashoggi Jamal Khashoggi was a reporter at the time he was in Peshawar, there's a section in the book that tells the story of how Peshawar becomes this petri dish of hatred in the 80s and Jamal Khashoggi is there as a journalist and he's very concerned about the fact that the groups that are getting the most funding and the most support are those groups that espouse the most radical thinking and a lot of people agreed at the time and looking back now you can see where some of these mistakes were made they were not necessarily representative of what the majority of Afghans who opposed Soviet occupation would have wanted but they were the chosen ones by the Saudis they got preferential treatment, they got more funding they got more support from the Saudi clerics including Bin Baz. Just again, a footnote for me after my colleague Jamal's murder I was trying to draw an account of his life that I talked to a friend of his named Barney Barnett Rubin, our leading American expert on Afghanistan and Barney remembered meeting Jamal he'd gone to the kingdom I think it was 1981 but Jamal was just back from a trip to Afghanistan where he'd dressed up in moushidine clothes and was wearing RPG rockets and this and that and anyway he was pretty out there and he meets Barney Rubin for the first time and he begins denouncing then Governor Riyadh Prince Salman, now King Salman for supporting these Salafist extremists and Barney remembers like he'd never met me before Jamal was always very candid telling us American but your point that he was critical and worried and a rare person who was willing to say so and there was talk of supporting different kind of leadership for the moushidine one of them was named Ghani and he had a more Sufi leaning in his approach to Islam he was more representative he was much more popular inside Afghanistan than the ones who ended up being chosen but clerics like Abdul Aziz Bin Baz put a foot down as I understood from Saudi friends and said we're not having that that's not who we want I wanna ask you about one more fascinating moment in 1979 that still haunts many people and is one of the what if moments when we think of this narrative and that is the disappearance and then we later learn the death of a charismatic Lebanese cleric named Musa Sader just tell us briefly that story cause I'll bet many people don't know it and it's fascinating. It is an incredible story it is a what if moment it actually takes place just before 1979 in 1978 Musa Sader was a very popular charismatic Shia cleric from Iran who had come to Lebanon his forefathers were originally from Lebanon but had emigrated to Iran back in the 17th century around then or before but Musa Sader had come back to Lebanon to lead the Shia community give them a voice because they were the downtrodden of the country and he was an advocate for more rights more representation more equality for the Shia community in Lebanon he was very secular actually in his outlook as well he was not a man who thought that religion should rule in politics and he preached in churches and gave lectures at Christian universities just as much as he went to mosques or supported the rights of Shias in the country he was beloved across Lebanon by a lot of people and he was seen as a leader who could rise also potentially perhaps in a country like Iran as the Shia came under fire and was in trouble and the uprising there the revolution was accelerating there was some contact between the Shia and Musa Sader and Musa Sader warned the Shia about Khomeini and his thinking and there's this line that is really incredible that I relay in my book that was in a different book The Fall of Heaven where Musa Sader warns the Shia that Khomeini's writing is the juice of a sick mind he realized that there was real danger there for tyrannical theocracy if this man should ever get a hold on power Musa Sader travels to Libya in August of 78 and disappears there with his companions never to be seen again and we later learn that close acolyte of Khomeini Ayatollah Behishti and Yasser Arafa chairman of the PLO and we can get to that aspect of the story and if you want David we're in connivance with Muammar Khaddafi to make Musa Sader disappear because somebody like Behishti understood the threat that someone like Musa Sader posed for Khomeini either because he could find a compromise either because Musa Sader could find a compromise with the Shia to try to appease the anger on the street and put forward a new form of government there was some talk maybe even that he could become prime minister of Iran under the Shia and that would bring moderate religion to power or perhaps Khomeini and his acolyte thought that Musa Sader could rise in the post-Sahar period and challenge Khomeini's role because he wanted more than he said he wanted and so Musa Sader disappears in Libya in 1978 never to be seen again and at the same time almost within two days another what if Saddam Hussein, vice president of Iraq calls the Shah and says you know this guy Khomeini sitting in Najaf he's becoming a bit of a nuisance you know rabble raser he's also causing trouble within Iraq now my own Shia community is starting to listen to him you know what if we just get rid of him and the Shah says no the Shah doesn't want to go that route they probably would have been other consequences had he said yes turn Aitullah Khomeini into a martyr but those two moments where Musa Sader dies and Khomeini lives is really one of those incredible what ifs moment in history so in your book the whirlwind begins to spin faster and faster the intensity of the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran increases Saddam becomes the paramount ruler of Iraq in 1979 that's another little moment but soon we're into the Iran-Iraq war Saudi Arabia in effect is helping to finance Iraq's stand against the the Shia revolution and meanwhile the Saudis are allowing these very extreme clerics to operate both at home and increasingly in Pakistan and Afghanistan so just say a few words about that accelerating process and again the question I have when I look back is did anybody see how dangerous this was in trying to stop it I don't think so I don't think so because the question that I asked a lot of people on my reporting did you realize at the time that this is where things were going including in Saudi Arabia Hamad bin Salman likes to say that the crown prince of Saudi Arabia likes to say that before 1979 Saudi Arabia was much more tolerant much more progressive much more open you know he's right to some extent particularly if you're speaking about the province of Hejaz which is on the Red Sea which is home to Mecca and Medina which has always been a gateway for pilgrims from around the world to the holy sites who then settle sometimes in in the province so this sort of coming and going of humanity and of cultures makes the Hejaz much more much more cosmopolitan and the clerics like Abdul Aziz bin Baz had wanted to have a Sahwa an awakening to impose the thinking from the interior of the country on provinces like Hejaz in a much more forceful way and they had not succeeded until then until 1979 when you know it was the door was open to them because the kings the rulers of Saudi Arabia wanted to protect their throne and needed the clerics on their side so they gave them that latitude and so Saudi Arabia changed in in ways that were not as dramatic as Iran where all of a sudden alcohol was banned and music was banned everything turned from white to black if you will and so Saudi Arabia was much slower process and I asked a lot of people who lived through that period did you did you see it happen did you try to stop it did you understand what was going on and they said no because it's you know it's the syndrome of the boiling frog the temperature rises very slowly and before you know it it's it's too late you know they thought it was temporary they thought it would end they thought this couldn't you know this would not hold for long same in Lebanon with the rise of Hezbollah you know a lot of people who supported a resistance movement against Israeli occupation of the south didn't necessarily like Hezbollah's vision for society they thought this is an aberration and once you know the civil war is over and once the Israelis withdraw Hezbollah will cease to exist it will no longer be there but Hezbollah stayed and remains a very powerful political force in in the country so I think that when you're in the thick of it it's hard to really understand the trend lines it's hard to understand what you need to do to stop it in Egypt the rise of intolerance in the 90s when intellectuals thought that just if they wrote more opeds more articles if they raised their voices their pen would protect them but it didn't it didn't and you know that retreat and the transformation of Egyptian society is also tremendous which is why I think that or I hope that you know my book helps piece together all those pieces of the puzzle to sort of understand exactly how it started and why we got to where we are today and where are the key turning points and perhaps that also helps us in the region but also for policymakers to find the moments that were key that some of them that can be undone or where the roadmap is to try to retrace some of our steps that's one reason that reviewers have been so positive about this book and if you've looked at the New York Times Wall Street Journal a lot of places you've seen glowing reviews is that you've offered a theory of the case you've offered an account of how this broken Middle East were living with you know how the modern destruction began and I think that's the power of the book and I'd urge people to read it with that with that in mind when I ask you because we have only less than ten minutes left to go before we turn it to the audience for your questions to talk a little bit about the future of the black wave as you characterize this this history uh... and I'm gonna focus on the two countries that are the central protagonists Saudi Arabia and Iran so first Saudi Arabia you mentioned MBS in Saudi Arabia and I can remember uh... a dinner with him in Riyadh probably in two thousand seventeen before it was as obvious as it became the next arrested everybody that's called but he was really and he said the basic narrative that you described that Saudi Arabia was not friendly to extreme versions of Wahhabism until nineteen seventy nine and its reaction internally to the Iranian revolution where we began to change and then turned to me and said that era is over and his aides all what side you know you're all how I still say that and I said to MBS well that's the one thing you should say I mean that's for goodness sakes don't try to make that off the record so he said okay so uh... you'll find it you know uh... but that's that's his that was his claim that the this era that you're describing uh... ever more regressive attempts to devils bargain with the will of mother religious leaders that era is over so he began to moving to abolish the religious place them he began to change some cultural norms what we learned with the murder of Khashoggi is that he was if a modernizer modernizing autocrat wasn't all that different from Saddam Hussein also was a modernizer I'd be very interested in your thoughts about where Saudi Arabia is in terms of the cultural changes that he's tried to encourage do you think they're popular do you think there's going to be a backlash do you think young Saudis are so enthusiastic about these changes that they have real momentum and you draw any hope from that not from MBS the person but from this phenomena of cultural change I do think that the black wave is receding generally uh... in the region I do think that young people don't want to be hostage anymore to the ghosts of nineteen seventy nine you know black wave the title came from uh... use of Shaheen the movie director in Egypt who said that had been a black wave coming from uh... the Saudi from Saudi Arabia and from the Gulf generally to you know cover women in black with abaya and the niqab in Egypt similarly you know we had the rise of the and the spread of the Iranian style shia chador in places like like Lebanon I think it's too easy for uh... Muhammad bin Salman to say that uh... you know they reacted to Iran and that before nineteen seventy nine you know everything was was fine in in the kingdom it it wasn't there were there was progress it was the slow march towards more opening up there was more education for girls there was television there were women on television without the bail there were small a small number of cinemas in country in in cities like like Jeddah but it was a conservative kingdom and the clerics like Abel Aziz bin Baz could call uh... Prince Naif minister of interior before nineteen seventy nine and say you know you need to ban uh... western women from walking around with a cross showing that you need to ban foosball you need to ban this and this and that and they responded the royals responded to these calls before nineteen seventy nine their efforts to uh... encourage so uh... pakistan to uh... islamize it's it's constitution and it's laws started before nineteen seventy nine so so it was already trying to export it's way of thinking when it comes to religion before nineteen seventy nine so it's too easy to just blame iran but it's true that there was a reaction in the Sunni world to what had happened inside the country inside iran and that's something that isn't looked at often enough when you read about iranian revolution you read about it mostly in terms of iran and how it rippled out to shia communities but you don't look often at how it rippled out to the sunni world and how it inspired some people including in egypt the assassins of president sadat uh... we're hoping that they too could bring about an islamic revolution in the country and succeed the same way that khamenei had had succeeded so it's important to look at that dynamic and that's why i think it's important to look generally at the saudi iran rivalry and how they interact and how they feed off each other uh... but when it comes to muhammad bin salman and the reforms that are taking place in the country in many ways i think they are great this is a young population that is thirsty for culture for uh... advancement for technology for music for theater for everything but not everyone and i think that in the words of uh... one of my saudi friends what happened in nineteen seventy nine is that suddenly everything was declared and we were brainwashed into accepting only you know one very specific one very uh... intolerant uh... version of islam known as what happens and including in the hijaz province where people really bristled at this imposition uh... and now suddenly we're being told that everything we heard over the last forty years was wrong music is not haram is not forbidden theater is not haram it's not forbidden they have there's an identity crisis going on there uh... people are excited but people are also troubled and i do think it's possible there will be uh... a backlash because it you can only keep the lid on those who oppose such movement for so long you know you can't keep the lid on for too long so i don't know how the crown prince uh... navigates that the only other criticism i would have also is that when it comes to the culture and those advances in the country you know opening up of cinemas and ballets and bringing jazz music a lot of people in surgery say well we have our own culture why do we need you know uh... wrestlers from america why do we need DJs from america we have our own culture why are we importing all of this and in a way he's doing it precisely what the Shah was doing back in the day when he was sort of imposing western culture western values western systems and that did not that did not go well the last thing i will say is that it's fine to reform it is great to try to move your young population forward it is really terrible when women who have uh... campaigned for some of those rights like the right to drive end up in jail for having done that i think that's you know there is something there there is a reputational cost that is that is great not to you know not to mention uh... our colleague our friend jamal hashogshi let me ask you briefly finally about about iran if the black wave is receding some sunni world as you said uh... it seems to be receding was as well in iran striking how broadly based the protests in iran are seem to be spontaneous rage uh... after the killing of salamani led to this terrible disaster of shooting down the Ukrainian plane uh... young people in the streets you know chanting against the supreme leader the movement of women both in Saudi Arabia in iran is astonishing uh... woman must see uh... alina jad who has a character in the book also wind in my hair is the name of her movement telling women to take off their veils feel the wind in your hair be free it's powerful so i just want to ask you just to close with with your own thoughts about about where iran is going uh... terribly repressive regime still obviously what's your sense of whether changes ahead uh... in iran i think the iran is going through a period of continued protests now there doesn't seem to be a beginning and an end to each protest movement so you had two thousand nine and that was put down and then since two thousand seventeen you have recurrent moments of of protests two thousand seventeen two thousand eighteen thousand nineteen now again at the beginning of this year it's an ongoing thing but as some of my Carnegie colleagues who are much better experts uh... on iran than me will tell you uh... is that there is no s indication uh... that the regime is about to either fall or give up or reform so i think we're we're still going to deal with this current form of iranian government for for a while but again i don't want to sound like i'm you know like i don't want to give precise answers or like it's a cop out but i really think that sometimes we we don't know when the key turning point happens because in nineteen seventy eight no one identified that this was really the beginning of the end of of of the show when you know there was this one moment where the wrecked cinema was burned down into her on that really galvanized the opposition against the show and made it possible and then other elements come into place like musa sadar disappearing like saddam hussein uh... telling the show that's should we get rid of of of humainy or not and and the show says no all of these different elements make for the constellation the puzzle that makes a certain event happen and so a lot of people looked at the protests after the downing of the ukrainian plane uh... earlier this year after the killing of qasem sulaymani a hundred seventy people died and a lot of people wondered whether this was the wrecks cinema moment for iran and for this for this uh... leadership what i can't say is that young people across the region are protesting continue to protest and increasingly they're specifically protesting in countries like iraq and lebanon they're protesting iran's stranglehold on their country's politics and resources and i think that is a huge challenge for iran because iran doesn't just want to be a powerful country it has ambitions in other countries it tries to export revolution has militias in iraq it has militias in syria it has hezbollah in lebanon it's foothold on the Mediterranean i don't see that power waning for now but i think the challenge is going to continue and it's going to be increasingly strong unfortunately the iranians you know do not hesitate to use force to put those protests down whether it's in their own country or iraq or lebanon superb um... i'm going to turn to the audience uh... please uh... say identify yourselves briefly keep your questions short please make the questions yes sir and there's a mic runner who's going to come and give you a mic i'm uh... arshad muhammad i'm a reporter with Reuters i've traveled with kim many times covering the state department two short questions one uh... what are your documentary sources for that conversation between uh... saddam hussein and the shah of iran second can you talk a little bit about you talk about the conservatism the repression of women uh... uh... in both sub-urabia and uh... iran can you talk a little bit about what you the extent to which the religious conservatism that one is seen manifested in those societies and others has some resonance within the populations and where that came from but could you repeat the last bit of the second question it seems to me that the religious conservatism inside the area via in iran in turkey and other places has had a certain amount of resonance among parts of the populations explain to us if you can or will where you think that has come from that desire that sort of millenarian let's go back to an earlier more conservative vision of iran of the islam excuse me sort of uh... originates if you look at nineteen seventy nine and how white had resonance then uh... it was because there were uh... there was the rise of political islam in in in the sixties in the early seventies after the defeat of uh... the arab's in the arab's really uh... war of uh... nineteen sixty seven the six-day war where you know even gamal abd nasir ostensibly a secular leader uh... became you know more prone to talking about god and anwar sadat his successor uh... was very pious and started using religion uh... to in essence uh... appeal to the masses and uh... you know burnish his own credentials as as a leader but islam was not at the time uh... force to be to be reckoned with it was a private exercise you had uh... islamist parties you had the muslim brotherhood of course in egypt and in syria but it wasn't a political force yet and what propelled it forward were the trend lines that developed after nineteen seventy nine today i think that after forty years you know the appeal of religion uh... in in the middle east is waning to some extent you have increasing numbers i think a majority of young arabs and muslims who say that religion plays too big a role uh... in their life and they want to see a lesser all particularly in the politics and in the everyday uh... life you know it's not an oxymoron to say or it shouldn't be an oxymoron to say secular muslim a lot of the characters in my book uh... through whom i tell the story are devout they pray they fast they go to the mosque but they are very progressive in their outlook on life on culture on society and they believe in the separation of uh... church and state or or or mosque and state uh... if you will on your uh... other question about uh... uh... musas sadar you know this was reported in uh... kai bird's book uh... the good spy it was also in uh... uh... andrew scott cooper's book fall of heaven and this is based on their reporting so i'm this is my secondary secondary sources based on my reporting and some private conversations uh... in lebanon as well yes we have another question from the audience we answered all the questions yes sir and then i see it all the way back most almost every revolution starts with the leader uh... can you identify are there potential leaders for change in around in particular who are able to survive and that's the key uh... that's the key question within the country i i don't see i i i don't see any that are able to come forward but very often you don't see them until the last minute you know a lot of people didn't realize at the time homey would emerge as the ultimate leader of this movement particularly because a he was in exile in nasha forgotten you know in a in an alley he didn't have exposure to international media and and so on even though if you even though he was very popular with his followers but the secular modernist leftist and islamist modernist activists around them were really at the at the forefront and were thought that they were using him to rally the masses and get people from the mosques out into the street and it ended up that he was you know in essence using them and he often indicated that all he wanted was to retire under an apple tree in in calm which you know ended up not being true but another what if moment is when you know homey ends up going to to paris for those last three months of his exile uh... the media exposure he got there was uh... essential in galvanizing the opposition though the revolution and in giving him the platform to to lead this this movement to its fruition to its culmination with his return to afghanistan to to to tehran while doing that not only his acolytes uh... push aside people like musasadar but then within iran they're also ruthless and pushing aside other clerics were a potential uh... challenge to humane and now you see i mean within iran you know so many leaders of the green movement are still under house arrest uh... you know others are are other potential leaders are in exile but but you really never know until you're in the middle of it and you see these people uh... emerging you know who might be a leader at the crucial time so i had all the way in the back row i think this place you can stand it just a little bit of that sure hi my name is amy shank i'm from i i s s americas uh... i have a quick question about i'm kind of moving forward looking at the receding of the black wave uh... if you foresee any future collaboration or de-escalation efforts between saudi and iran given the current on state which security uh... issues are rising uh... not necessarily nuclear but uh... specific with jcp away in the context of the jcp away uh... but also miss out on cyber defense on between saudi arabia in iran moving forward if you foresee with this black wave receding any future collaboration or conversation between the two nations i think there are a lot of efforts for uh... de-escalation whenever there is a rise in intention you know after the attack against the oil facilities in uptake in uh... in soji arabia in september of last year uh... there was a move towards indirect talks between the saudi's and iranians through the iraqis and the pakistanis so no one really wants a a full-out war and the saudi's are worried that although president trump says he's their ally he doesn't necessarily put his money where where his mouth is so there was a lot of uh... heat a lot of rhetoric after that attack in september but there was not a lot of uh... fire if you will there was not a lot of tangible reassurance for the saudi's there was no action eventually the americans they'd send more troops to the region but the saudi's feel a little bit worried i would say which is why they are they're looking for ways to to de-escalate and the same uh... calls for de-escalation also uh... happened after a qasim suleymani uh... was uh... was killed because the saudi's again didn't want to go to full-on war i think it's important to remember that the saudi's and the iranians have often found their way to detente and rapprochement in the past so it's not impossible going forward uh... you know in the nineties there was you know flourishing relationship between khatami and the king of sojuravia they were exchanged visits there were security cooperation agreements uh... what i think makes it difficult now is that uh... Muhammad bin salman is not necessarily in a compromising mood and he also doesn't trust the iranians he doesn't trust that the taunt is used by the iranians for uh... positive outcomes he feels and i think he's probably right that this that the iranians use those moments of the taunt to solidify uh... their their position uh... while they're you know giving all the nice talks and the nice the nice smiles they solidify their position on the ground uh... in the region and and uh... you know how much the man feels that this the studies have been had several times by the iranians like that argues the foundation will use peace two questions related one iraq had been known as the guardian of the gate the guardian of the eastern gate uh... very much change circumstances now are the so he's making any serious efforts to try to uh... reduce iranian influence in iraq which would be a very tough thing to do and the other thing are the Saudis looking at certain kinds of cooperation with israel in the context of their of their contest so to speak of their difficulties with iran the Saudis have tried to make inroads in iraq to counter iranian influence there but the the Saudis are not very good at managing allies and managing uh... friends they don't have proxy militias the way the iranians do so i think it's much harder you know if you remember they invited muqtada sardar uh... and they's you know he went to riyadh and that was one effort to try to undermine the iranian role uh... in in iraq but i i just don't think they're they're very good at it they don't manage the chessboard in the same way that the iranians do whatever you think of the iranian policies and the consequences and the devastation that you know takes place in countries like syria because of iranian actions they're very good at managing the chessboard and they're very good at keeping uh... their allies close and to and very good at running uh... their network of proxy militias on the second question there are and i think david you probably know more about this uh... you know what's happening behind the scenes between you know potential talks informally between Saudis and Israelis uh... you know the Emiratis were were in the room when president trump announced his uh... his Middle East peace plan if i'm not mistaken the Israelis were were there there were some talks also in december i think the uh... the Gulf countries are mostly concerned especially Saudi Arabia are mostly concerned about iran today and they see israel as an unspoken ally in that in that camp so they're also therefore are very keen to stay on trumps uh... good side and because they they want to continue to have the administration put pressure on iran uh... and so that's also why you'll see them only giving you know statements rejecting the Middle East peace plan that president trump would forward but they're not actually going to do uh... anything about it because they want to stay in president trumps good graces so we have time for one more quick question this gentleman here and do keep it uh... quick as i promised will will wind up in the next minute or so john bnader american task force for lebanon can how do you see the iranian Saudi relationship playing out in lebanon i think the Saudis have it looks to me like they've given up on on lebanon that's another place where i think they're played they played their cards very badly i think they throw a lot of money around they have a checkbook diplomacy approach that doesn't pay off and then they get very frustrated uh... when their allies don't do what is expected uh... of them the difference between iran and sojurabia is that you know groups like hasballah or groups like the militias in iraq really answer to the supreme leader they answer to central command in iran you know Saudi allies aren't run like that they don't answer to the king necessarily they may cash a check and they feel some loyalty uh... but they they don't answer to to you know to that hierarchy uh... in the same way and i think that the episode where saad hariri was force to be invited to uh... to the kingdom in november of two thousand seventeen was very damaging uh... to sojurabia standing in the country and hasballah capitalized uh... on that and i think that unfortunately for for for lebanon it means that uh... you know there's going to be continued uh... unrest in in in the country we're seeing now the protests in lebanon that continue even though we have uh... in you a new cabinet but it does look like at the moment uh... iran and its allies and its friends and its friends and that they don't include on the hasballah but also uh... the president uh... michelle on uh... have the upper hand and it's a little bit unclear to me uh... what the saudi's next movies in in lebanon so with apologies to to uh... others who may have questions uh... i wanna bring this to a close invite everyone to uh... purchase copy of kim's superb book uh... and she's going to be signing books that thirty percent off you can buy one as a gift for a friend uh... and uh... also ask everybody to join me in thanking kim for such a good