 Welcome to the Lowy Institute, it's great to have you here. Thanks mate, it's a pleasure. The first thing I wanted to do was thank you personally for the contributions you made to the interpreter earlier this year on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War. I got the sense at the time when we communicated by email that was hard to do for you. Those pieces were hard to write. Tell me why. Oh, incredibly so. Well I mean, all I've spent between six and seven years in Iraq. And that wasn't rotating in and out. That was 11 months a year back to back. And then I thought I would sprinkle that with the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the Russian invasion of Georgia. And then my network's reward for all of that was to assign me to cover the Mexican cartel drug wars. So the 10th anniversary of the war, like other certain events, it flushed a lot of stuff up. And like any of our diggers, like any of the 2.4 million Americans who've served at least one combat tour, like the Iraqis themselves who are now growing up into adulthood who have witnessed all those, it's a lot to come to terms with. So writing that piece wasn't something I went looking for, but it turned out to be a very useful and cathartic exercise. In the end I actually owe you one. Not at all. No, we owe you. So do the readers. Now, the two articles that you wrote looked at the origins of the insurgency in Iraq. But I imagine you've maintained some of the contacts that you established in Iraq at the time. And I wonder when you talk to people, when you talk to those people now, what do they say about the direction of Iraq now? Where is it going? Well, it's going where it's always been, almost immediately after the invasion. It's an extension of Iran. And in fact, this is actually the most salient topic in my view of the entire Iraq war. The two great elements of it is one that through the al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, Abu al-Musad al-Zaqawi, we saw a revolution within al-Qaeda of its own definition of itself. So effectively, the work of this al-Qaeda in Iraq leader has given us a new generation of al-Qaeda across the planet who are far more brutal, who are far more menacing and far less merciful than anything that Osama bin Laden himself intended. As we saw throughout the war, Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Thawri, even Abu al-Musad al-Zaqawi's Islamic mentor, still in Jordanian prison, all urged him publicly to turn down the killings, particularly of Muslims, and he would just keep ramping it up each time. So there's that revolution with al-Qaeda as our gift to the Iraq war. But the real outtake of the Iraq war is that Iran was the winner. Now there's not a single US ambassador who served in Baghdad who disagrees with that. There's certainly not a general who disagrees with that. Because what we didn't realise at the time in 2003, as those first coalition tanks pushed north across the Kuwaiti border and started charging towards Baghdad, with every success as they went further and further north, greater and greater was the vacuum left behind them. At the same time, coming from the east, there was between 30,000 to 50,000 Iraqis who had taken refuge in Iran, fleeing Saddam's regime, but who had been incorporated into the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. So effectively, as we push through, say, a town like Qut in the south, you then see the Iranian intel traffic that says, right, we are now in control of the town, the Brits have arrived, but we've got a new governor, we've got a new chief of police, we've got a new... So there was an Iranian invasion as well, a soft invasion. And while we try to operate on the dime principle, diplomacy, intelligence, economics, they did too, but they did it far more effectively than us. So while the, say, Americans sponsored a television channel and newspaper or two and a couple of others, the Iranians did it on mass, dozens of radio stations. Every university in the south was flooded with Iranian mullah. Women suddenly had to start covering up. It was both Shia and Sunni who brought extremist Islam to an Iraqi nation that was largely secular until we invaded. So at the end of the day, I mean, sadly they're the greatest outtakes from Iraq. And what people tell me now is that obviously with events in Syria, the Sunni fear has always been that Iran's intention was to complete what they called the Shia line of influence or the Shia circle between Iran through Iraq to Syria and to Lebanon to the Mediterranean. And now it's not too hard to argue that they have effectively achieved that. And a lot of that is the legacy of the Iraq war. And let me take you back to the first point about a, it seems a more, a fiercer al-Qaeda that cuts against the general narrative that you hear and even from the US president himself who says that al-Qaeda is in decline as far less of a threat today than it was. So how do you reconcile those two things? Well, I'm yet to encounter an American president who ever actually knew what was really going on in the ground anyway in Iraq. But with the greatest respect to the president, I mean, he's right and he's wrong. Okay, what have we done to al-Qaeda? All right, it was the invasion of Afghanistan. We forced them to displace. They no longer had their training camps, but that dispersed them. But let's not forget, al-Qaeda was waiting for that. What people I find tend to neglect is that September 11 did not begin on September 11. It began on September 9. Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, knowing obviously what they were going to do in New York, realised that the first thing Americans do would come and invade Afghanistan. They knew that if for America to do that, they would have to look for anti-Taliban allies. And the only man left standing at that point, the only warlord, was Ahmad Shah Massoud. So two days before the 9-11 attacks, al-Qaeda assassinated Ahmad Shah Massoud so that America wouldn't have that man to immediately turn to. Al-Qaeda knew it was going to disperse. It's a covert organisation that's compartmentalised and is built for loss. Their ability to regenerate at all levels. I mean, they've lost their leader himself. They've lost senior strategists, mid-ranking commanders, untold foot soldiers, and yet we still live with al-Qaeda. Now, could they do another 9-11? It's entirely possible. Do they have the same sanctuary that they once had that helped lead to 9-11? No. But look at North Africa. Look at the so-called Arab Spring. I mean, that is such a fallacy. I mean, with all these revolutions we're seeing through the Arab world and in North Africa, the greatest beneficiaries, again, have been the religious extremists. So it's not the same al-Qaeda it was when President George W. Bush commenced the so-called wars on terror. They don't pose the most immediate threat to America that perhaps they once did, but to think that they're gone is, again, is a falsehood. And just finally, Mick, given you're here today for the New Voices conference, I want to ask you what your advice is to young people who are thinking about embarking on a career in journalism, particularly who have maybe slightly romantic ideals about being a foreign correspondent. Oh, absolutely. Well, my simple advice would be, would be, don't do it. I mean, look, let's be frank, you know, economically the world is going through our enormous transition. And the media world in particular is both at the tip of that change, but it's also been crushed and rolled over by it. The way I look at it is, you know, it's like we're trying to invest in horse and buggies while Henry Ford is rolling out modern teas. There's been a technological revolution with Twitter and the internet and all this was, and the instantaneous nature now of news and reporting and citizen journalism and all these things. But those people can't do what you did. No, no, they can't. No, they can't. And there's a valuable role for citizen journalism. But equally, they retain perhaps even greater than foreign needs for professional journalists. But it's a never shrinking world day. Newspapers and print, as we know, is struggling for its very existence. And yet so far, no one yet has figured out how to properly commercialise the internet. So we are in one of the greatest crises in journalism, certainly in my two decades, I think, in several generations. I'm confident we'll find our way through all of this, and I'd like to believe we'll be better and stronger. But the journalism of the future, I think, will not resemble anything that we're currently familiar with now. Mick Williams, thanks for your time. Digger, pleasure. Good on you. Great.