 Good afternoon. My name is Peter Bergen. Welcome to the New America Foundation. I'm the director of the National Security Studies Program and really excited to have a debate about the question whether Iraq can be termed a success with two of the most distinguished people imaginable taking opposite sides on this issue and both of whom happen to be fellows here at the New America Foundation showing that we are a foundation that doesn't value a particular party line. On my right, on your left is Doug Olivant who's had a distinguished career in the military. He was NSE director for Iraq under both presidents, George W. Bush and President Obama. He was senior coin advisor in RCEs in Afghanistan. He's got a PhD in political science or history. He will be arguing that Iraq is a success. On my left, on your right is Lieutenant Colonel Joel Rayburn who's also had a distinguished career in the US military, still active duty. His comments won't represent obviously his present affiliation as a senior fellow at the National Defense University or he's speaking on his own behalf not on behalf of DOD obviously. Joel is actually doing his PhD in history. His PhD focuses on the history of the British involvement in Iraq in the 1920s and that's at Texas A&M University. So both sides have agreed to make opening statements for about 12 minutes. So thank you very much for coming today. The question at hand is, is Iraq a success? This is a very different question from was the invasion of Iraq a success? Was the invasion of Iraq a good idea? Or was the US government successful in Iraq? I'm defending none of those propositions. And of course the phrasing of the question itself is generically suspect. To borrow Mao's famous quote when he asked what he thought of the French Revolution, it's too early to judge. So let me instead defend a more modest proposition. Does Iraq, the Iraqi people in regime, have a fighting chance of turning itself into a decent place now that the Americans have departed? And to this I think the answer is clearly yes. And the creation of a decent place in the Middle East has to definitely be considered a success. Now my guess is virtually all of you voted no to the question before we started today which makes my task fairly easy. I just have to convert one or two of you. But I can see the difficulty of the task. It's difficult for Americans to give Iraq a fair hearing and for three different reasons which I call the problems of 2003, 2006, and 2011. There is a large group of Americans who are understandably upset about the issues surrounding the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. And who at some level don't want to hear any good news about Iraq that might emerge in any way to vindicate Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, or Steve Campbell. There's a second group who experienced directly or vicariously the hellishness of Iraq's civil war that peaked in 2006 and who simply cannot picture an Iraq that's not incredibly violent. I'm sympathetic to this view but that's simply no longer the case. And finally, there's a third group that is so upset that President Obama did not manage for whatever reason to leave a force of US soldiers in Iraq that they almost want Iraq to fail to show him wrong. So despite these high barriers to an objective assessment of Iraq, let me lay out some stubborn facts to forward to spelling some myths. First, Iraq is a parliamentary democracy. Its elections in 2010 were widely judged to be free and fair. Now while there were some issues surrounding government formation that followed the elections, no one disputes that the parliamentarians did win their elections by the rules of the game. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki emerged as the winner of this long contest. Maliki is an extremely strong leader and for two reasons. First, institutionally, he's the prime minister of a parliamentary democracy. This is often lost in American observers who are used to a system of much stronger checks and balances. But parliamentary democracies don't generally work this way. The British prime minister, for example, has virtually no checks on his power. But second, Maliki works in a system with extremely immature institutions and a national unity government that puts his political opponents inside the government. So not only the institutions immature but because of this national unity government that was forced on him, he has his political opponents inside his government. By analogy, picture of two or three of our departments, let's say labor, commerce, and energy inside the Obama administration were manned by tea party candidates as their secretaries and took their directions from Carl Rowe. In both the real case in Iraq and this imaginary case in America, the executive has to get things done and make his government work is going to find ways to work around them. So first, it's a parliamentary democracy. Second, it's starting to write its economy. Iraq has huge unexplored, untapped reserves of what is called cheap oil or oil that is easily extracted by simple, easy techniques. Or put another way, the Iraqis don't have to do fracking. At 3.5 million barrels per day currently and reasonable expectations of pumping 3.7 million barrels per day by the end of the year, Iraq has the extractive capacity to generate cash flow to both care for its citizens and provide capital for other industries. World markets are figuring this out. Last month, Iraq's Asia cell telecom company put 25% of its shares on the Iraq stock exchange. They sold out in one day for 1.5 billion US dollars, roughly, giving the company an evaluation of around 6 billion. A competitor company, Zane, should offer similar shares by the summer, putting the market cap of just these two Iraqi firms at over 10 billion dollars. While Washington may continue to ring its hands over Iraq, the markets are sending a very different story. As the Iraqi money starts to generate better services, though with the inevitable lag of letting contracts and dealing with increased demand, we should expect the economy to start to self-generate. For example, once Iraq gets its power generation problem fixed, now that its demand has roughly peaked, we should expect light industry to emerge. A third reason we should expect Iraq to turn out OK is the incredible resilience of its people. Last year, according to the Iraq body count, 4,568 civilians died from violence in Iraq, plus just over 900 police officers. This in a country of 30 million, whose people are the target of an active al-Qaeda franchise. Just by point of comparison in the city of Chicago last year, there were only over 500 murders in a city of 2.7 million people, a very comparable per capita death rate. And yet the Iraqis get on with life on a daily basis. Attacks come, the family's mourned, but then life goes on. It's an extremely admirable trait as the Iraqis refuse to let terrorism define them. And most importantly, they have refrained to date from retaliating against the Sunni population from which the al-Qaeda terrorists take the refuge. A fourth reason is that while terrorism is not defining, it is being fought. The GOI is commanding terrorism as best it can. However, the tools it has at its disposal are blunt ones. Not unlike, as needs to be pointed out more often, the ones the U.S. Army used from 2003 to 2005 until Stanley McChrystal recrafted JSOC. Lamentably, it's difficult to see the Iraqis generating a JSOC-like capacity in the near future. So while we see demonstrations in Anbar about mass arrests, those mass arrests are almost certainly keeping the body count down. While I'm no more excited about mass arrests than the next guy, it's important to remember that you must do something in the fight against terrorism. We need to cut the Iraqis a break. Finally, the coming elections, scheduled national elections, scheduled for next spring, should help. The results of the 2010 election, with its photo finished between Maliki State of Law and Ali Alawi's Irakia, was perhaps the worst of all possible outcomes, as neither of these men was ever going to play Hillary to the others Obama. We should expect a much cleaner outcome in 2014, perhaps one that allows us to do away with national unity governments and create something that can actually function. Now, there are some claims that need to be preemptively dismissed. One, Iraq is not an Iranian pawn. Yes, there is Iranian money in Iraqi politics, just as there is Saudi, Qatari, Turkish, and perhaps even American money. And Iraqi politicians of all stripes do fly to Tehran to visit. But that's prudent politics. Iraq is dead set on a long-term strategic relationship with the United States, as it's continuing to build its military around the M-16 rifle, the M-198, howitzer, the M-1 tank, and the F-16 fighter, all American produced, continues to demonstrate. Iraq is dead set on fully implementing its strategic framework agreement with the United States. And in fact, the Iraqis often complain they do not find much enthusiasm on the American end for implementing the non-military clauses. Where are the Iraqi students, military and civilian? In fact, a democratic Iraq is the greatest long-term threat to Iran. Iraq is providing to the Iranians another model for how a Shia majority state could be run. Iran's claim to legitimacy, Tehran's, is that the Shia must live under clerical theocracy. Iraq shows daily that's simply not true. And it grows more true each day that Iraq's oil revenues expand and Iran's contract, tectonically shifting the balance of power between these neighboring states. If you want to undermine Iran, back Maliki. Second, Maliki is not out to destroy the Sunnis. No one seriously believes that the Charlie's charges against Hashemi and Asawi are groundless, though they may not be quite as portrayed either. But again, the mass arrests of Sunnis are much better explained as the best tool the GOI has in its fight against al-Qaeda in Iraq. Again, it's not perfect. I'm not endorsing it, but it's not random and faceless either. We need to remember a stubborn fact. The Sunnis of Iraq tried to overthrow the democratically elected government in 2005 to 2008 and lost. When you do this, try to overthrow a government in still a civil war and you lose, you very seldom then just get to fall back to your normally democratically allotted share of power. For someone who has lost a civil war, the Sunnis of Iraq have it pretty good. I would suggest that both the Serbs of Kosovo and for that matter, the South Carolinans of 1866 would be very glad to have the deal that Iraq's Sunnis do. Fourth, Maliki is no authoritarian. He operates forcefully, but is far more measured than any other leader in the region, most emphatically including the Barzani's of the KRG. His regime is clearly more decent than that of Syria, Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Kuwait, less authoritarian than the KRG and Turkey, leaving only Jordan as perhaps the only near pier among his neighbors, though Jordan is measurably less democratic and accountable. Grading on the curve for the region, Maliki's doing okay. In short, Maliki's no dictator. I'm not equating him with Mother Teresa either. He was the executive power during a civil war, which always demands some temporary and regrettable measures as American leaders from Abraham Lincoln to FDR have shown us in our own case. But the combination of a decent government in Baghdad, the resilience of the Iraqi people, and the oil wealth that will, frankly, allow the Iraqis to by their way out of a lot of problems should make us all relatively optimistic that Iraq will be a success. Not because of America's mismanaged occupation, but because of the Iraqis, and old and noble people will make it so. Let us stipulate some ugly facts up front. Iraq remains a weak state. Its political institutions are charitably immature. Were it not for oil, there'd be no real economy. There's a serious terrorism problem. Relationships with all the neighboring states are problematic. Sectarian divides remain tense. It's still very possible that Iraq could revert to its previous state of dysfunction or find a new variety into which to fall. The chaos in Baghdad is likely a precursor of the sort of political drama we can expect for some time to come. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm going to have to start over. I've mistakenly been reading from a piece by a Doug Olivant written in December of 2011. So let me set that aside. It seems to me, as Doug has pointed out, that most of the 10-year retrospectives of our Iraq experience tend to look at the situation that Doug had described in the piece I read to you and conclude that since Iraq in 2013 is a mess, the whole decade's involvement was not worth the cost. But this is to make the mistake of assuming that every development in Iraq in the last 10 years has been the inevitable result of the invasion itself, as though the authoritarian regime of Nuri Maliki, the deeply polarized political system, the crony capitalist economy, the government's drift into alignment with the Iranian regime, the tension always verging on conflict between Baghdad and Erbil, and the safe havens for al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups, both Sunni and Shia, have all flowed uninterruptedly from the decision to invade. In actuality, these are the consequences of a series of decisions between 2003 and the present. And if we're to evaluate the success or failure of the Iraq project, it has to be on the basis of these intervening decisions, at least as much as on the basis of the decision to invade. This is only natural and fitting in any protracted conflict. The aims and goals that obtain at the outset of such a conflict are rarely the ones that stand at its end. For example, at the end of the two world wars, none of the great powers would have said they were fighting for the sake of the sovereignty of Belgium or Poland. And I'd submit that it's similarly inappropriate to judge our Iraq experience based on how we feel about the 2003 invasion, as Doug has seconded. I believe there have been four major decision points in Iraq to consider, dividing the war into clear phases. And first was the invasion. Was that a success? Well, yes. Remorse over the removal of Saddam seems to me to be the result of a memory lapse. For those of you who can remember the world as it was before 2003, there's no doubt we in the Middle East are better off without him in power, destabilizing the region around him. And I hope we would not purposely wish him and his cronies back on the Iraqi people, even though they are resilient, as Doug points out. But the second decision point was probably more important than the invasion, the decision to collapse Saddam's state, not just his regime, by disbanding the Iraqi army and criminalizing the former officials who made the state run to the extent that it did run, to replace it with a deeply divisive political process and a new state dominated by Shia Islamist factions, and to stick for almost three years with the plan to build the capacity of that new state as the country sank into civil war. Was that a success and was it worth the cost? Well, no. The loss and blood and treasure for both us and the Iraqis was immense and what it brought was a sectarian state that became a party to a brutal conflict, a very stabilizing force rather than a stabilizing one. Fortunately, the third decision and ensuing phase of the war undid much of that damage through the military and political surge to put a stop to the sectarian war and reverse the process that had turned the state into a sectarian faction. This phase was a success beyond all expectation with playing a role in driving sectarian violence to near zero and creating an atmosphere in which Iraqis turned away from sectarian Islamism and embraced something much closer to secular nationalism. The culmination of this shift came in the January 2009 provincial elections when parties building themselves as nationalists dealt a crushing blow to the sectarian Islamist incumbents unseating those incumbents in 13 of the 14 provinces that held an election. And this brings us to the fourth decision point and phase, the decision to withdraw and to do it on a timetable that was not closely linked to political and security conditions in the country. Has this been a success? I'd submit the only way to judge that is to assess whether we've secured or are advancing our enduring interests in this important country in the middle of an important region. And I think there are five enduring interests in Iraq. First, that Iraq should not be a threat to us in its region. Second, that Iraq should not be a sanctuary for transnational terrorist groups. Third, that Iraq should not be under undue Iranian influence. Fourth, that its strategic resources, its oil and gas, should flow freely to the global economy. And fifth, and finally, that in support of these other objectives Iraq should be stable both in political and security terms, not just for Iraq's sake but for the sake of the entire region. So where do we stand with respect to these interests today? It's true the Iraqi state is not a direct threat to us and our allies the way Saddam state was but beyond the state Iraq has become an enduring base for transnational terrorist groups that were largely neutralized by 2009 but have since returned with the will and capacity to operate beyond Iraq attacking our interests and those of our allies. Foremost among these is al-Qaeda in Iraq which now appears in Syria as the Jabhat al-Nasra the most important of the insurgent groups fighting against the Assad regime. But Iraq is also a base for several extremist groups sponsored by the Iranian regime's Quds Force that before 2012 were quite active in conducting attacks against our troops and our diplomatic missions in Iraq. And now they're beginning to play a role beyond Iraq's borders. Those of you who follow Iraq will recognize Asad Bahlal Haqq, Kitab Hezbollah and the Promise Day Brigade. Published reports and YouTube postings tell us that these groups are now playing a role directly in the Syrian conflict alongside the Assad regime's troops fighting against Sunni insurgents there and some of them say they've been transported there by the Revolutionary Guards Corps from train camps inside Iran. You may say this doesn't mean the Iraqi government is complicit with this militant activity but you'd be wrong. Asad Bahlal Haqq which is the most lethal of these groups that I've mentioned is the prime example. This militant group has been embraced by Prime Minister Maliki and his party who have welcomed the group as it rebranded itself from a political party that claims credit, rebranded itself from being strictly a militant group into being a militant group plus a political party that claims credit for having militarily expelled us from the country. And this leads us to our third interest in Iraq that the country not be under undue Iranian influencer control. Unfortunately, Iran does exert a great deal of influence in Iraq today as we see in both small and large signs. One small sign is that Prime Minister Maliki has welcomed into his office as a senior advisor, Abu Metti Al-Mahandis, the top Iraqi deputy of General Qasem Soleimani who is commander of Iran's goods force. But a larger sign of Iran's undue influence is that the Iraqi government has adopted policies in harmony with those of the Iranian regime and hostile to our own on at least four major issues in the region. For example, the Bahrain crisis of 2011 on which Iraqi politicians denounced the U.S. position in Bahrain in our presence with the Fifth Fleet. Secondly, a war of words with the Erdogan government of our NATO ally Turkey. Third, in the international sanctions against the Iranian regime which the Iraqi government has on multiple occasions stated its intention to ignore. And lastly, in the Syrian Civil War where Prime Minister Maliki himself said the Assad should not fall and that there is no reason for him to fall. The Maliki government has turned a blind eye to Iranian overflights of military assistance to the Assad regime and just last week Maliki added a declaration that the toppling of the Assad regime would lead to a sectarian war inside Iraq. A statement that some people took as a threat rather than a warning. I don't mean to argue that Maliki and his government are controlled by the Iranian regime. The truth is actually worse. Not that their Iranian puppets are that they fundamentally perceive their interests more closely aligned with those of the Iranian and Syrian regimes than with our own. Maliki and his government, like so many people in the region, believe they are involved in a region-wide Sunni-Shia conflict in which they, the Iranian regime, the Syrian Alawite regime and Hezbollah are ranged against a coalition of the Sunni Arab states and Turkey among whom are some of our allies. It's in this context that we have to evaluate our fourth interest, the Iraq strategic resources, soil and gas. Well, they are flowing and there's every reason to think that if Iraq were to stabilize, its exports could increase dramatically over the coming decade. But what would we think of those increases if Iraq and Iran were to form an export block controlling the production of more than 7 million barrels per day? Would that represent, as Doug argues, a shift in the power balance in the region? Probably in ways that we would not see to our liking. But even if the Iraqi state were completely benign toward our interest, do we believe that Iraq is stable now or that it will grow more stable in the coming years? I'm deeply skeptical and here are some of the reasons. First, that the country is increasingly polarized on sectarian lines, as we've seen with the tens of thousands of Sunnis marching in the streets of Anbar and other provinces, chanting that the people want the fall of the regime in what looks virtually identical to that the constitutional order that the United States helped put into place has since 2009 been degraded by Maliki's dominance of the courts in the parliament with the checks and balances that were in the constitution, even in a parliamentary system, erased and the independent institutions that were meant to exercise oversight absorbed into Maliki's office, that the new Maliki dominated order has been secured by an army and intelligence apparatus under the direct control of the constitution, not of parliamentary institutions, that the private sector that might otherwise be a break on an overbearing state is instead little more than a crony capitalist extension of the dominant political parties that lives off corrupt government contracts, that Iraqis have transferred their own civil war directly into Syria where Iraqi Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds are all intervening on opposing sides, making it just a matter of time until the conflict comes home again. And in fact that the civil war at stake pointed out with 4,500 civilians killed by insurgents of terrorists last year and that's almost twice as many as were killed in Afghanistan. If Afghanistan is in a state of war then Iraq must be so as well. It was also more people killed in 2012 than were killed in 2011 in Iraq despite the fact that American troops are no longer there to draw fire which refutes the old theory that when US troops departed the violence would depart as well. But I really can't do better in the one eminent scholar of Iraq who observed not too long ago that the most serious risks to Iraq's internal instability come from the overlapping and interacting effects of renewed ethnic or sectarian conflict on the one hand and an irreversible breakdown of the current constitutional order on the other. Either of these conflicts could arise along any of the major fault lines in Iraq. Shia, Sunni, Arab, Kurd or Inter-Shia, further either of these contingencies could spark the other. I can't go over into Iraq and exacerbate internal tensions. I couldn't say it better myself than Doug Alamant said it in 2012. Now, Miriam Webster defines success which is the question here today as a favorable or desired outcome. The fourth phase of our experience in Iraq stands out among other similar cases in American history including Germany, Japan and South Korea for the way in which a favorable or desired outcome seemed not to be the reason. Do we believe that Germany, Japan and South Korea would be what they've been in the world and are today if six decades ago we had treated them the way we've treated Iraq in this fourth phase? But for the purposes of today's debate I'd ask the audience, does all that I've described and that has been described by that eminent scholar of Iraq Douglass Alamant sound like a favorable or desired outcome? I'd offer that when we consider the four major decision points in Iraq and ask to conclude that they did and then they didn't and then they did and then they didn't. Thank you, Joel. So I'm just going to ask a few questions to both of our debaters just to clarify some things and also move the conversation forward. I'm going to ask a very basic question. Is it possible to go out today in Baghdad and have a meal in a restaurant and basically sort of have an okay time or is that still something that isn't feasible? I think it depends on who you are. I think for the vast majority of Iraqis that is the case yes. As a foreigner could you go to a restaurant or is it possible to go out in the way that you can go out in Kabul say I remember when I was in Baghdad with you in 2008 it would have been inconceivable to pop out to a restaurant at that time. Right. What about today? I think it would be inconceivable today for say a U.S. diplomat to do that. It would be conceivable for some private citizen or a journalist who can travel under the radar in Baghdad to do that. But that's not really the point. The conflict has been displaced. The conflict and I think you'll also find that the Sunni base for the terrorist groups that used to operate inside Baghdad has been, were largely forced out of a good deal of Baghdad in the many genocide that the state carried out in 2005 and 2006. Doug? Baghdad is much, much safer today. As I tell my friends, there are really three ways to get hurt in Baghdad. If you follow three rules you're probably going to be safe. One, don't stand outside a Shia mosque on Friday or join a Shia religious procession. Those places get blown up. Two, don't stand around Iraqi policemen. I have a friend who uses Ministry of Interior officials for security and I shake my head. Why would you, you're standing next to the targets. You're not the target they are. And third, don't hang out with any moderate Sunni because they're also likely to get blown up. If you follow those three rules, your chances of getting hurt in contemporary Baghdad are fairly slim. And I would say that said, I would still dye my hair. And I would say the fact that you have to follow Doug's three rules indicate that the country is fundamentally not stable. Well, that brings us up. Go ahead. It indicates that they have an al-Qaeda problem who are interested in killing those three groups of people. And who's funding al-Qaeda? It ain't Iran. Which would be a symptom of an unstable state? Well, let's talk about al-Qaeda for a second. I mean, the fact that AQI is sort of back and able to produce large scale terrorist attacks in central Baghdad from time to time is arguably the most important part of the anti-Assad insurgency. And doesn't that tend to argue against the proposition that Iraq has been a success? Iraq is going through a transition point. The U.S. special, you know, U.S. JSOC left Iraq when the rest of the U.S. forces left Iraq. You know, JSOC kills bad guys. That's what they do. They're very good at it. They're very efficient. When that capability was removed, al-Qaeda in Iraq was given a chance to regenerate. The Iraqis are going to have to learn how to deal with that problem internally. The growth in violence is all from al-Qaeda in Iraq. I've conceded that their institutions are immature while their security institutions can do basic things like defend their borders and keep an event safe and more or less keep the streets safe. You know, as the United States itself found out, digging out a terrorist group that's embedded in your own people is extremely high degree of difficulty. Yeah, I would say one of the smartest things that I heard a general say during the Iraq war was that we can't kill our way out of this insurgency. The Iraqis can't kill their way out of the insurgency that they're facing now. So you have to do some killing but you have to do some reconciling. You have to do some political outreach to the moderate center in order to dry up the base for the extremists that you're fighting against. And I would say the Iraqis are failing on both cases. Without the JSOC there, they're not doing very well at killing the actual bad guys and they're not doing very well at reaching out to the moderate center in order to try to deny the extremists the base. Joel, you didn't entirely respond to, I thought, the comment by Doug, which is judged by, let's say, Saudi standards or Kuwaiti standards or Syrian standards or Iranian standards. Iraq is looking pretty good on a lot of levels. They're not looking very good in terms of our interests. That's the argument that I'm making. Regardless of how they look on some absolute scale of democracy in the Arab world, it's a matter of whether they're aligned with our interests, whether they're moving towards stability that's in concert with our interests. Well, I mean, presumably we are interested in more democratic states rather than less democratic states. Broadly speaking, that is an American interest. I think in the long term. Well, look, I'm not arguing that we don't have an interest in a more democratic Iraq. I'm arguing that there isn't a democratic Iraq. I'm arguing that Iraq is going less democratic as the months go by. Joel has really shown his hand here. Joel is interested in the United States setting up authoritarians who will get a people that don't agree with our policies to implement their state in a way that we agree with. In the short term, that works. In the longer term, as we're starting to find out all throughout the region, that's not such a bright idea. We really, again, we fundamentally believe as a people that if you let people self-determine that eventually, and we're not saying it's going to be pretty in the short term, but eventually they will come around to understand a democratic view of the world. Well, this is not at all what I'm saying. And in fact, I would say this is a matter of pot calling kettle black. I'm arguing that Maliki is Iraq's new Mubarak, that he's the new dictator, that he's consolidating a state, and that he's going to face a popular uprising in the same way that Mubarak did. Although I think that when that time comes that the state, the regime underneath him is not going to respond to the way that Mubarak's did, and that there will be a bloodbath. That's what I'm estimating. If the people don't like the state, they did let that be known in the spring of 2011, and dozens of them were killed by the security forces that Maliki sent out in the street. So we have a precedent there. Let me ask you a slightly different question. A pretty good indicator of the success or lack of thereof of a country that's gone through a lot of conflict is refugee returns, and I'll give you an example of a case which you both know which is Afghanistan, about 6 million refugees left as a result of the Soviet invasion of civil war, about 5 million have returned since the fall of the Taliban. But Iraq, it's pretty striking. You had 2 million refugees leave the country, forget about the internally displaced, almost none of them have come back. And why is that if the country is such a success, Doug? You are having large-term refugee flows to Iraq. Now, albeit a lot of that is because most of them were in Syria which is now turning out not to be not such a great place to seek sanctuary. But we are seeing large, but I want to say it's human right watch, just wrote on this a couple of months ago. What do we see? I mean, I'm seeing numbers of 10,000, 20,000. This is not millions of people. 10,000, 20,000 a month starts getting you there pretty quick. So your large-scale refugee returns is something that you assert. Yes. There have been hundreds of thousands that have come back, but the point is not that they've come back, it's where they've come back. They're not coming back to their homes. They're coming back to places where it's safe for their sect to go. The vast majority of them, Sinni's, who are not able to go back into Baghdad because Baghdad has been made in a hostile place for Iraqi Sinni's. Quick question for you, Joe. Quite a persuasive. The market is a pretty good indicator, just as perhaps refugees are returning. Well, how do you respond to Doug's observation about the market capitalization of some of these big telecom companies? It's kind of interesting. Doug mentioned AsiaCell and how AsiaCell's shares had sold out very quickly. I remember the days when AsiaCell was the main source of financing for al-Qaeda in Iraq in Mosul because they were a combination of extorted by al-Qaeda in Iraq and complicit and funneling taxes, virtual taxes to al-Qaeda in Iraq. So things are not always as they seem, and I'd want to peel back the layers of the onion on that one before I would conclude that it's a positive thing. Maybe, I didn't read those reports. Maybe AsiaCell was funding al-Qaeda. I would suggest not to the extent that USAID is funding the Taliban. If you want to do business in some places, you know, regrettably those funds are going to end up in the hands of bad guys. It's a matter of degree. Okay, we're going to throw it open to questions. We have a mic in the back. David, is it working? Yeah, General Kimmet. General Kimmet is here. Hi, thank you. Mark Kimmet. You brought probably one of the most significant issues to the fore, both of you. The notion of Sunni reconciliation. Doug, I pretty much agree with your argument, but I don't believe with your prescription of they lost, get over it is probably the right way going forward. I think it's important not only for their interests, but our interests to recognize that the Sunni Arab world is looking at what's happening in Iraq and they're taking sides. So, while the comment may have been a bit soft more, perhaps you can give us some better articulation of a better Sunni reconciliation or Sunni adoption policy that you might recommend. That said, I probably agree with everything else you said and voting on your side. Yeah, but you probably came in that way, so that doesn't matter. Look, I think as the case in Syria is about to show us, as the Alawites are about to learn in a very painful way, if you're a minority sect who uses violence to rule over country for a long period of time, it's going to be ugly in the aftermath. That said, I think it's clearly in Nuri Al-Maliki's interest to bring down the heat on this issue. And I think he would be a fool and no one's claimed him of being a fool were he not to find moderate Sunni groups that he can work with. I mean, if the leaders of these former Islamic parties that were linked with terrorist and surgeon groups have to be ostracized, fine. Find new leaders, legitimate leaders, you can't, you know, bake your own. But find legitimate leaders that are out there that you can work with and make it clear that via these leaders you welcome the Sunnis into your coalition. Any thoughts? Yeah, I just see him going in the opposite direction. He is trying to bake his own Sunni leaders. He's trying to pick who represents the Sunni community, which is to detach Sunni leaders from the Sunni from the Sunni base and he's getting burned every time he does that. This will reflect itself in provincial elections if they're held next month as they're meant to be held. Well, thank you very much to both.