 Good evening. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. My name is Andrew Schwartz. I'm our Senior Vice President for External Relations. And I'm standing in for my boss, John Hamry, who really helped us frame this session, which is going to be really excellent tonight. I want to thank our partners, Texas Christian University, TCU, and thank all of our guest panelists for being here. Without I'd like to turn it to my good friend, Bob Schieffer. Thank you very much. And on behalf of TCU and the Schieffer School of Journalism, we're going to talk about, and this seems a little bit loud to me, doesn't it? We're going to talk a little bit about today, about the Arab Spring. And we have a great panel, Nancy Yousaf, McClancy News Services, Pentagon correspondent, first member of her family to be born in America. She is of Egyptian heritage. And so she knows a whole lot about this part of the world. And she also knows a little bit about Afghanistan and Iraq, where she spent a lot of time in recent years. John Alterman from here at CSIS, one of our outstanding scholars, also a former State Department official, DHD, taught at Harvard, made all the stops that one needs to make to become an expert in the Middle East. And David Ignatius, who just knows everything about everything. I was just saying about David. Boston Post used to be the foreign editor there. Had a lot of key positions there. And then, of course, now we all know him twice a week. He writes his column on the op-ed page. Well, let's just start. Nancy, you're just back from over there. Let's just go around the horn in the Middle East right now. What's happening there? Why don't we start with Libya? What's the latest news there? Well, Libya is where I spent the most time. I was there for three months up until last month covering the rebel side. So Benghazi and as far west as they got. We got as far as Benjamin with them. And frankly, Libya right now is in a bit of a stalemate. Because on one hand, you've got these rebels who didn't really anticipate the fight that they now find themselves in. They saw what happened in Egypt and Tunisia and said, as one Libyan put it to me, we saw these Egyptians all mad up and barked. We thought, really, we thought he was pretty good compared to Gaddafi. So we better rise up. So they did and thought it would take a few days. And now they find themselves in a protracted conflict. Many of these guys don't know how to fight. They've never had a weapon, and Gaddafi purposely didn't keep his major military installations in that area because it's sort of home of rebellion for Libya. And on the other side, you've got Gaddafi forces. Some of them mercenaries. Some of them forced to fight. Some of them loyal to Gaddafi. And neither side has been really able to overtake the other. And so you've got both sides sort of standing back and regrouping in some cases and fighting when they can. You'll see that battle most often in Masrata, which is Libya's third biggest city. And meanwhile, you've got an international community that's wrestling with its role in all this. And whether it's handled it the right way, I think as much as the rebels didn't expect it would go this long, the same could be said for NATO and certainly for the United States. So we're stuck in a sense. I think my impression after I left there is I think people think this will end militarily. And ultimately, I don't think that's the case. I think this will end financially. I think it'll take Gaddafi running out of money to bring this to a true end, given those military issues at hand for both sides. Where is Gaddafi? Do we know? He was playing chess last we saw in a release video to show that everything was fine. He's bunkered down somewhere in Tripoli. He's refused to leave Libya. And that's about the extent of it. I mean, there was 12 major military compounds in Tripoli, so he has a lot of places to choose from. It seems NATO's hit most of them. So we've heard he's hidden with relatives, that he's moving from place to place. But he assures members of the Jim Hurio, which is what he calls his state, that all is well. And he's large and in charge. David, how long are we going to be there? And what are our options now? What do you see happening? Well, when we say we, we mean NATO, supplemented by parts of the Arab League, it's a coalition that you'd have to say has not been as effective in use of military force as many people expected. And so one lesson some draw is that if the United States holds back, as we have been doing from the military action since the first week, coalition won't function effectively, I'd agree with Nancy that this seems to be heading toward a stalemate. There are worse things in the world than a stalemate. And if you ended up with a de facto ceasefire as in Lebanon after the worst fighting of the Civil War, as we know, nations come back together sometimes after delay. In the last week, I've had the opportunity to meet several times with a person who claims to be, and I think is, an emissary in contact with the chief of Libyan intelligence, Abdelal Sanusi, who is trying to interest US officials in a dialogue that would produce some sort of discussion about a transition and in which elements of the Gaddafi regime, but not Gaddafi, would join with elements of the Transitional National Council, the rebel group in Benghazi that we in effect have recognized, with the idea of putting together a coalition government that could pull us together before you get to the stage of much worse violence. And I think that's an interesting option. My sense is that the State Department has an appropriate skepticism for now about any of what I must say I've been I gather a number of emissaries claiming to speak for this one or that one. But as Nancy said, the White House, if you push the White House about this from the beginning, what they said was, in the end, this regime will implode because it will run out of money. It's a machine that runs on the money that it uses to bribe the tribes, bribe the mercenaries. That's how it operates. Unfortunately, my information is that he's got more money in the country than people initially thought. The estimates that I've heard run as high as $10 billion in liquid money that he can get a hold of more or less close to Tripoli. So if that's the case, the TNC, the rebels, may run out of money before he does. Well, what is the Congress going to allow us to continue there? I mean, is there going to have to be a vote under the War Powers Act? Where do you see all this? You know, Bob, I'm not the best person. I haven't been covering the congressional side as well as I should have. The administration thinks that it can duck it. And interestingly, the liberal wing of the administration is the part that most strongly wants to avoid a War Powers vote. So that the principle can be established that in the case of humanitarian interventions, which is what, if Samantha Power were sitting here, she'd say this is, that you don't have to go to Congress for War Powers authority so that when the next Rwanda happens or the next Darfur, we can do something to intervene militarily without calling it a war. That's part of one of the weird aspects of this debate. But I honestly couldn't tell you what the strategy is. Do you think we move too fast on Libya? Do we get into something here before we understood what it was? I mean, I keep hearing this, that you use the word implode. I've heard people say that as far as US security and what matters out in that part of the world, that Libya implodes. Egypt, for example, explodes. You think on balance and on reflection now that we were wise to come involved there as quickly as we could? There was a window when we had to make a decision. We had a Fisher-Cutbate decision that would have been, I think, a Fisher-Cutbate decision for the world. And our decision was to go in. I think we did not do as much as we should have and have not done as much as we need to to figure out how this ends. The post-conflict environment in Libya is terribly important. And Libya ends up being at the interstices of a large group of different interests. On the US military side, you're right between AFRICOM, CENTCOM, and UCOM. It is between the United States and NATO. It is between civilian and military control because we don't have troops on the ground. And I think one of the problems that we are having is nobody wants to lift up their head and say, this is what has to be done for the post-conflict environment for fear that everybody will say, OK, you do that and you pay for it. The consequence of that is that all the things we know about the importance of the post-conflict environment that we had forgotten before Iraq, we seem to be forgetting again. And it's a weird situation because we do have Iraq and Afghanistan so clearly in our mind. But because it does fit into this scene between the US and NATO, because of our budget situation, because of the politics, it feels to me like this is falling precisely into a crack. And I'm very worried that if there were a sudden shift that nobody is in a position to do much, in many ways, the worst thing that could happen were if an errant were targeted bomb took out Mo Marga d'Affy tonight. We are not ready, and nobody is ready, to begin to have any positive impact on the post-Gaddafi environment, and with things spiraling out of control, you could have a whole set of terrorist threats coming out of there. You could have much more of a genocidal situation than anybody ever predicted for Benghazi when we got in the first place. I mean, this could really spin off badly, and nobody is positioned to do anything to influence it in another direction. Could I add to that in terms of how we got in? Because the feeling on the ground was that there were a lot of wrong assumptions made going in. There was an assumption that if Gaddafi lost his air power, that the rebels would be able to end this, and then that didn't happen. And then there was the assumption that if major defections happened, that that would lead to the collapse of the regime. The defections happened, but the regime still stood. And I think it was that underlying presumption that it would be easy and that the threat was imminent in terms of the attack on Benghazi that sort of started this. And it was interesting because when we would hear that Gaddafi, if he lost his air power, that would be the end of it, you could see Gaddafi's regime trying to avoid or stop the world community from getting involved and actually limiting its use of its air power for that reason. We were in, gosh, I can't remember what city anymore. We were in Brega, which is an oil town, and there was an airstrike, and it was within a few hundred yards of us. I mean, I'm around the military to know that they could have very easily struck us, and it was clear that they were purposely avoiding us to sort of create the threat of an air power without actually using it for the purpose of keeping the world community out. So I think there's this assumption going forward that if you just got rid of this, if you just stopped the air power, that the dominoes would fall quickly, and that hasn't happened. Anybody else want to say anything about Libya? I just kind of want to move across the region here. You know, I'm struck by the lack of enthusiasm of this administration for doing much more. I think there is some agitation in Europe, certainly, from some, I suppose John McCain would like to see us play a larger military role. I see no enthusiasm for that at the White House, none. In Libya, in Libya, in Libya. I just wanted to add one little thing if I could. From my time there, I think the question going forward, we have, as a nation, asked ourselves, but certainly something that struck me was I oscillated between two extremes. There were times I felt like maybe we had done the wrong thing because we gave these rebels a false hope that the international community was coming, that their revolution was gonna take forth, and that change was on its way. And in fact, it may be the very genocide that we fear that could happen. And on the other extreme, there were moments where I was really happy that the world community got involved because I think Libya, more than any other country in a way, offers the most hope for a true revolution. You know, in Egypt and in Tunisia, the dictatorships, the dictators are gone, but not the dictatorships. Where in Libya, if Gaddafi falls, everything has to be rebuilt. Everything does, because everything hinges on him. And so, Libya offers this interesting dilemma, really, about whether what we've done is actually gonna lead to real reform or really create the worst kind of stalemate in the sense that it will prolong the Libyan and the rebels and the civilians living in Eastern Libya prolong their suffering. So, why is Syria different from Libya? Why, if we found it necessary to put together this coalition and so forth, to try to take down Gaddafi, why do we do everything from outside the borders in Syria, John? Part of it is because the neighbors have had a strikingly different attitude and certainly had a very, very different attitude at the beginning. Certainly in the initial days, all of Syria's neighbors preferred to keep a weak Assad rather than push him out. They feared that a collapsing Syria would explode through the region. There is such a deep hatred, especially among the Gulf Arabs, toward Mohamed Gaddafi for all the antics he's polled for trying to assassinate now King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia in 2003. There have been a long series of offenses which led the Gulf Arabs to say, take him out. And I think that when you looked at the decision, it was a key determinant that the administration kept talking about, we have Arab support to do this. There simply isn't Arab support to push Bashar al-Assad out from power. I think there's increasing discomfort with him, but there's also a sense that many Arab leaders have that a cornered Bashar al-Assad is dangerous, let's not quarter him too much, let's not press him too much. And because the neighbors have such a different attitude, I think it changes not only what we do, but it changes what we can do. Well, what is the Israeli view toward Assad? I think the Israeli view had been initially, it's better to have a weak Bashar al-Assad who is easy to intimidate, we know how to push his buttons, we don't have to teach him what we can do. So we'll just keep him in his box because if you either have suddenly extremists taking over the state, or you have the state falling apart and people can't control what radical groups do, all those things are worse than somebody who when push comes to shove, you fly the jets low over the palace, they break the windows with the sonic booms and he stops misbehaving. As far as the Israelis are concerned, that works pretty well. And when they need to intimidate Assad, they know how to intimidate Assad. I think that the Israelis are becoming a little more on the fence as to what's really in their long-term interest, how sustainable is this, what's the consequence of a long-term thing going on? I think one of the mistakes, if we look more broadly in the region that we're consistently making, is we got really spoiled by the speed of Tunisia and Egypt. And I think a lot of these changes, to the extent they lead to changes, are going to take place over multiple years. They're gonna be multiple rounds. And I think what we're looking at, not only in Syria, but especially in Syria, is something that will take years to play itself out, not weeks, not days. David, what's your take on that and what John just said? Well, I thought John gave a good summary of the situation. Syria is one of the Arab countries, but I sometimes think they all, or in this category, a country that breaks your heart. It's a country that has such richness of culture, such so many intellectually gifted people. And in the time that I've been visiting, covering it, going back to 1980, 81, it's had just a terribly corrupt dictatorial regime sitting on this wonderful country. Bashar al-Assad has said to many visitors, members of Congress, members of American Jewish groups, journalists like me, that he understands that his country desperately needs reform, that the bath party is exhausted, corrupt, broken, that he knows what he needs to do, and by golly, he's gonna do it. And so, then he goes on the record and says exactly what his father would have said. And it's a very frustrating process with him. And I think that people in the U.S. pretty much have given up on his ability and maybe his serious desire to change the country. That said, I think we all, after Iraq, are rightly nervous about processes that just kick out the pegs, that support the complex set of things that maintain order in a country. And Syria is a country where the tension between Sunnis and Alawis is palpable. It's been true, again, since I first went there. You've had an Alawite minority since, I think, 1972, somebody would correct me on this, governing. And so the chance for real ethnic violence is substantial. I think about Syria, as I think about Libya, that these are countries where creative diplomats from the Arab world, from the United States, from Europe, should think carefully, and from Russia, I should underline, should think carefully about how you would create an inclusive process of transition that keeps bloodshed at a minimum as you go into this period of democratic change. I think that's the, truly, that's the challenge of right now, is to think about that question. And I wish there was more being done in this country about it, but this could blow wide apart with really large loss of life, and it's important to think about that. Well, there's already been a large loss of life. Well, in Syria, it's been, you know, I mean, not compared to what it could be. I mean, yes, but I mean, if it really got going, it would be thousands, tens of thousands. Nancy, let's talk about Egypt. What exactly is the state of Egypt right now? Well, the military's in charge of the country and they really don't want to be. They don't want to take on the economic problems that come with the responsibility of the country and there's an effort by the military commanders to hold elections as soon as possible so that they can begin the process of handing over the sort of political and economic responsibility back to civilian leadership. I use that term loosely because the truth is Egypt's always been run by the military, but now it's, you know, Minister Tintawi who's actually in charge, so there's no one sort of force to deal with the responsibility or the reaction of the people. And we're starting to see early signs of efforts at forming political parties in anticipation of that election, but we're also starting to see frustrations with people who had thought that this would lead to major reforms and aren't quite seen it yet and remnants of the old regime, if you will, and the police state and all that comes with it. On top of that, food prices are up in Egypt and have been since the revolution and I was just in Egypt two weeks ago and the frustration over that is quite palpable. So all of those sort of pieces are moving at the same time and the result is a real sense of uncertainty about the way ahead, but so far no hope of the major reforms that we had hoped for, but rather a military that's gonna try to do tweaks and do just enough to pacify people's concerns but not enough to lose any of the influence, both economic and political that they have over the country. John, how stable is Egypt right now? Depends what you're trying to do. I mean, as Nancy suggested that people are really worried about the security situation, in some places the security situation is a real problem. The economy is uncertain and likely to get worse before it gets better, but as Nancy rightly said, the military not only remains in control, but the military has 94% approval ratings. It's really breathtaking. I think the military, their goal is to sort of snip around the edges to not make any fundamental change. The military, I think in their heart of hearts, would sort of like to return to 1990, a less free market economy. The military is out of power, has its perks, has its way to do patronage internally, so they're not interested in a bold new world, really. And what continues to surprise me is that all these months after the protests started in Cairo Square, we haven't seen really new political groupings, political organizations coming up. The Muslim Brotherhood had a national organization and has a national organization starting to splinter, but at least you have a sense that here's a bunch of people with a field operation and they have some sense of how you organize and how you set up a command chain, but the old parties haven't really gotten new wind in their sails. The new parties haven't figured out how to be a party. The national democratic party, which used to be the ruling party, remains completely on the ropes. There's nothing that's coming together and we're looking at the potential of elections in three months and there's really nothing to work from and we don't even know what the rules of these new elections will be. And that I think is surprising, quite frankly, that after this time of incredible optimism and movement that it hasn't really gelled into something else. The Egyptians don't know where they wanna go. It makes it hard to help the Egyptians because they don't know what they want. And I think the Egyptians sort of need to take a collective breath but they're still not sure where they're going. I think that creates a sense of instability and certainly has devastated foreign direct investment and domestic investment in Egypt, which makes the economic problems even worse. The impulse at the time of the election, should they take place in the fall, will be toward strengthening the social safety net, which is about more government employees, higher salaries and more subsidies, which is exactly what people in Washington would say is the worst thing you can do for Egypt's future. What are the things as these elections approach that we ought to be worried about? Well, we should be worried about the insecurity in the streets and whether that will fuel a politics of people calling for order. I think we should be concerned about intolerant Muslim political trends. I don't wanna say that that's where the Muslim Brotherhood is going because it's just been, I haven't been there in a couple months. Certainly in the immediate period after the Tahir Revolution, the Muslim Brotherhood, people who were willing to speak to journalists like me, said all the right things, talk about the Turkish model, talk about how our threat to democracy has been overstated, et cetera, et cetera. I think one thing that I certainly didn't anticipate was the sudden visibility and power of the Salafist movement, even more radical theologically than the Muslim Brotherhood, not armed, but a sort of passionately retro movement. And you see a lot of people in the streets in power. Just the only other thing I'd say, because this is what we all go back to and what I think the Arab world goes back to is the spirit of those weeks in Takriir Square that made the revolution. I got there at the tail end, but I've never seen anything like it. I'm sure Nancy would say the same thing. When revolution is in the air, when you have a million plus people spontaneously in this self-organizing mass, making history and being peaceful, being disciplined, it was a transforming process for Egyptians and for, I think the whole Arab world was just absolutely transfixed watching it. And people said, we want this. We want this spirit. We wanna take control of our lives and our countries in the same way. Sadly, that doesn't last forever. And it was fundamentally a negative, it was a negative desire. We wanna get rid of Hasmubara and his son. There never was a positive goal that had broad support in Egypt, be it democracy or anything else. I think basically what people wanted is better results. But nobody agreed on how to get those better results. And one of the interesting things with some of these kids who are active on Facebook, Malcolm and even others, was this sense that we can do politics differently or we're gonna post everything. You know, we're gonna have a meeting or we're gonna post the notes on our Facebook page or we're gonna do everything by consensus. And what we've seen is that doesn't work. You can't have everybody inside the tent. But how else do you do it? And I think it's been surprising that all these months later, we haven't seen more of a coalescing around either different ideological trends, different strategies toward governance. Instead, it's everybody's all over the place. You know, one of the things, well, there were several places where they did not wanna see Mubarak and his son thrown out. And Saudi Arabia would be one. And a couple of other countries out there. I'd just like to go around the horn here. And how has this changed our relationship with Saudi Arabia and with some of these other countries out there? I think the feeling in the Gulf is we took a long time out of line and we threw them under the bus and they're angry about it. The feeling in the Gulf is that Egypt is the center of gravity for the Arab world. And now Egypt is a smoking hole and nobody knows what's gonna happen. And they don't wanna get involved until they have a better sense what's gonna happen. So the Saudis have said we'll give $4 billion, but the Emiratis I think are holding off and others are holding off. I think it's part of a broader trend which I've seen over the last nine months. That people think this administration fundamentally doesn't get the way the world works. That they keep chasing enemies like Iran, making ourselves look weaker. We keep getting bested in places like Lebanon and with Palestinians, with Hamas, and Iraq and all sorts of places. We keep losing. And this administration keeps losing. They don't understand that you have to project strength and you have to stand by your friends and you have to preserve the status quo. And the enthusiasm for Taqreer in Tunisia and everything else is a sign in their mind of the immaturity and naivete of the administration. And their response is that we can't rely on the United States in the same way in addition to the US relationship which they certainly can't abandon because they're not really an alternative. They want a sort of plaster on top of that. Well, we'll expand the GCC. We'll talk about this, we'll do that. We'll try to reach out to the Chinese and others. And what you see is, I mean sort of the, trying to have a belt and suspenders at the same time that they keep layering strategies. Sometimes they're contradictory but they simply don't have the confidence in the judgment of the United States. Especially interesting, A, because they had so little confidence in the judgment of the Bush administration and B, because they had so much hope for Barack Obama. And a lot of that has turned to bitter, bitter disappointment. You know, I wanted to get to this idea of Egypt that's inability to sort of coalesce around sort of some political parties. Because when you're on, in the ground, you feel they're trying. There's certainly an effort, but it just, it collapses in a way. And I think the one thing that's helped me in terms of thinking about what's happening in the region and the birth of the Arab Spring is I always equate it to 1968 in this country. You know, it was a whole generation of people and I see it within my own family. People who thought that their parents had sort of failed them, that they had got along with the government far too long and didn't rise up enough. And they decided that they could do things better now. And so that's about as far as the thought process went. And that doesn't, and so they go to the streets and they have this revolution and they say, we've done it. And it's just now that the ideas have started about what are we talking about post-Mubarak? In a way, you can almost still feel the shock in Egypt that he's gone. You know, you talk to the Egyptians and they're like, we really did it. Who would have thought? You can still feel the surprise about what happened and yet the real-world reality of all of it, you can feel it. It's still sinking in with people in small ways. They don't go out the way they used to. People are frayed in the streets now. They see it in the plummeting tourism. I mean, you can go to the pyramids now and they're virtually empty. And they see it when they see these young parties starting up of young people all competing for the voice of Egyptians and nothing quite capturing it. It was interesting, David mentioned the Salafis earlier and the rise of them, which has been shocking. The only thing that gives me hope is in Libya, you got the sense that these sort of extreme secularists, if you want a religious extremists of whatever persuasion on the other, that neither one can survive anymore in this new post-war period. They're both having to kind of find a new middle so that they can survive in this new political climate. And so my hope is that that'll mitigate some of the threats that we see in Salafis and for some people in the Muslim Brotherhood as well. The Salafis consistently pull in the low single digits. That's right. So I mean, it's not a hidden wave that I think is going to happen. I think it's just the shock of them rising up as quickly as they did. For me, it wasn't shocking because in Egypt, she knew that there was a percolating Salafis movement. But I think just seeing them all of a sudden have a voice was almost giant. Let me just go back to the view of the Saudis and how it's changed toward America. Does that make a difference to America? How do we deal with that? Well, Saudi Arabia has been the cornerstone of our strategic policy in the Middle East since 1945. And you think of all of the hoops we've jumped through to try to protect our Saudi ally. And now our Saudi ally's kind of walking the other way and thinking, gee, maybe we'd be better off with the Chinese. I think that change is coming to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf too. We forget about it and the Saudis are kind of the new. Is there like to take it over from the United States as the status quo power and they're kind of huffing and puffing. But they're on the lip of a generational change. King Abdullah is old. The brothers who would immediately succeed him are also old. So you hear a lot of talk that what's ahead is something different in Saudi Arabia. Some kind of prime ministerial role for somebody who may not be in the line of succession. Other changes in governance in Saudi Arabia. I find young Saudis are as internet savvy as focused on Twitter and the latest feeds as any other friends in the Arab world. I think this movement of Saudi women to start driving. I'd love to know what Nancy thinks about that, but I think that's pretty interesting. And that's the kind of thing that's hard to put back in the box once, you know, once people say, you know what, I'm gonna drive it. My husband's gonna, he's going with me. And we're, you know, go ahead and arrest us. You know, that catches on. Although we've had it before in Saudi women we're allowed to drive, I think in the 70s, up until the early 70s. So it's, Saudi Arabia, as you know, moves at its own pace and that pace is often very slow. And there's a certain strategic incoherence to the way Saudi Arabia moves. So that nobody feels like they've really lost irrevocably. The nature of Saudi change is it's two steps forward, one steps back, three steps sideways. That's the way the place moves. And in some ways, it's the way people see the Senate as the saucer on which everything cools. That's the way the Saudi government sees its job. And I think the role of the king in Saudi Arabia in particular is not to be a player on the field, not to make the mistake the Shah made in Iran that he had the king has ideas and he tries to take everybody and he finds out that there's nobody following. And instead, the job of the king is kind of like being a crooked referee. You wanna throw a call every once in a while and you know, there's a team you'd really prefer but you're not playing. And everybody continues to look to you to authority. And if you lose that in Saudi Arabia, if the king forgets the fact that he's not a player on the field and the king forgets the fact that everybody needs to compete and everybody needs to think they can win, then the king loses. You know, I think we'd be remiss in talking about US-Saudi relations without mentioning Bahrain. And the United States is relative silence on what's happening in Bahrain and the Saudi role and all that. I mean, we've seen now the Bahrain needs destroying Shia shrines and that's been met with absolute silence by the United States and they continued arrests and in some cases abusive of the Shia population there. And the United States has really been reticent to get involved with that. One would argue primarily because of Saudi Arabia. I mean, we'll hear talk about the fifth fleet being headquartered there, but that Saudi pressure, the Saudi relationship with the Bahrain is certainly coming in the right thing. The other thing is that the strategic goal is trying to get the Bahrain needs to have some reconciliation dialogue and the more we seem to be criticizing one side in favor of the other, we don't contribute to that dialogue. So, I mean, that's the way I see it. That what the administration thinks it's doing if it's trying to contribute to a national dialogue that will begin to heal these differences in Bahrain, you can argue either way whether in fact you can have a successful dialogue and whether the Sunni minority would actually agree to that. But as far as I understand, the assessment of the U.S. government is you can have that dialogue and if the goal is to having the dialogue, it's not useful to keep poking a stick in the eye of one of the parties. I absolutely agree, but I spent some time in Bahrain and I don't think the Bahraini see it that way. They see the destruction of their shrines and the silence by the U.S. As an outrage, really, and it's cost us a lot of, I think, credibility in the streets of Bahrain and a feeling that we're placating, if you will. What's the most dangerous place across that part of the world right now? Yemen is tough, tough, but I'd say Syria is central. You know, I can't choose between all my children, right? I love all my children equally. What's the place we ought to most be worried about right now? I'd come back. I think Syria is strategically really important. I think if Assad goes in Syria, the consequences for Iran are very substantial. I think Iranians would look at this and would be emboldened by it. I think the consequences for Lebanon and for- Wait, if Assad goes, the Iranians would be emboldened? Iranian, the green movement in Iran, seeing a citizen movement topple Iran's only real ally in the Arab world, it could have huge consequences. I think it would create a crisis in Lebanon that would be a very complicated one because Hezbollah would be isolated. It would have to make a choice about whether, without its supply line, how would it operate? There's a new prime minister in Lebanon who I think is actually an interesting figure, Najib Makati, who is trying to figure out how to play this hand. So that would be my nominee for the most dangerous and also the most interesting politically. John, what would you- I think you have two axes. One is the number of deaths. I think the other is importance to the United States and they're different axes. So I think in some cases you could have, in Libya you could have tremendous number of deaths but I think Libya is fundamentally tactical for the United States. Egypt, I think, much less possibility of a high civilian toll. But where Egypt comes out is tremendously important for the United States because as I said, the sense that Egypt is the center of gravity for the entire Arab world. I think Syria is probably somewhere in the middle on both. I think Syria is gonna be much more drawn out than other places. I think that, we talked about neighbors earlier, I think the Jordanians, if Jordan were to go, Jordan would be a tremendous problem for a lot of people because Jordan is so important to the Saudis and the Israelis and the United States. I think that gives them more security. I think we have to look at those two very different axes and they're not the same at all. But Jordan's been the most proactive, wouldn't you say, of all the Arab countries that sort of letting general choice for the ministers. I mean, Jordan has tried to sort of be proactive in their response to the people in a way that we didn't see in Egypt or Libya. I mean, everybody sort of dug their heels in, but King Abdullah has tried to sort of stay ahead of it, whether he's able to or not. I think Abdullah and Muhammad VI of Morocco have both tried to use their sort of kingly powers to say, okay, let me try to propose some ideas. Let's see the advantage that the kings have that presidents don't, because presidents do have three players on the field. Whether in either Morocco or Jordan over a 10-year timeframe, is that gonna be adequate? Are you really gonna have genuine change? Because in many cases, in both Jordan and Morocco, we've heard a lot of these same promises a lot of times before and we haven't seen them. So, I mean, as I said, I think we got spoiled by Egypt and Tunisia and we keep looking at the paper every day and say, okay, what happened today? And a lot of these things, in terms of where's the loyalty of the military, I think those things take years to unfold and I think we have years ahead of us. Does anybody have any questions in the audience? We have about 10 minutes. There's one right there. And I say we have about 10 minutes. So, good short questions, right to the point. Very short question. My name's Sayed Erika from Ankud's Daily Newspaper. My question to Mr. David Ignatius. You said that you're struck by the lack of enthusiasm for doing more in Libya. What could the administration do more in Libya to change the situation? Could you repeat, he said, what could the administration do more than you? What should the administration do more than you? What should we do more of in Libya? More of the administration. The next quick question is, how does this Arab Spring impact Palestinian aspirations for a state? Thank you. Briefly answer the first question, then we'll all probably want to talk a little bit about the Palestinians. The issue with Libya is whether the US should provide greater military assistance to the NATO coalition. There's been a request for, I think they're called A-10 warthogs. Is that what they're called, John? There's some plane that NATO would like us to be flying, and I just don't think that the White House wants to step up the level of its military commitment. There's a second issue, which is whether the US should play a more active role in seeking to organize some process of discussion that could lead to a transitional government that would succeed Gaddafi. Gaddafi would leave and this transition would come in. And I know that the administration is pondering that issue, but I don't think it yet is confident that it really has a message from the Gaddafi inner circle that's reliable. On the Palestinians, we've all been wondering what will happen when this spark of the Arab Spring catches with the Palestinians, mass nonviolent demonstrations by Palestinians in the West Bank, in Israel itself, among Israeli Arabs, would be a very difficult new problem for the Israelis to deal with. For the moment, all the attention on the Palestinian side seems to be focused on the UN in September and the declaration of a state when I stopped there because I'd love to hear what Nancy and John think about that. On the Libya, I think the most, I think you're right, military, it'd make a huge difference if there was more, at the US once again resumed the lead militarily, which of course relinquished just a few weeks into the operation. I think the most important thing they could do that would be politically palpable here is to get more involved in military terms, the phase five, the post-Gaddafi period, in terms of working with training these TNC members because they're dentists and orthodontists and people who've never governed before in their lives and they find themselves, as John pointed out, very suddenly in charge of this country. And I think having an active phase five program going, it doesn't have to be public, but really working with these guys and preparing them for governing the whole country, for transitioning in some places, reconciliation, some would argue, in the West with frankly some pro-Gaddafi forces that are still there reconciling the friction, that's the unspoken friction between the West and the East. I think those are all things that they can do politically without getting the military involved because they don't seem to have the appetite to do it. It's something of a loss to understand what the military goals are. And therefore I can understand what we do more militarily. I think that ultimately, as you suggest, the important outcome is the political outcome. And I think how you get the political outcome depends partly on the diplomacy now and partly on what you do for the 30 days after there's no longer more Margaddafi in control. And I think we haven't thought nearly enough individually and collectively with our allies to figure out how that gets handled and how we influence it in a positive way. In terms of what effect the Arab Spring has on the Palestinians, as David rightly points out, there is this huge attention toward the UN vote in September. I think the other key driver of uncertainty is how's the Arab Spring turning out in other places? If it seems to turn out really well, that obviously starts inspiring people to say, that's what we need more of here. If it turns out really poorly, people say the last thing we need is more of that here. And I think that that's why Egypt ends up being important. I think that's ultimately where Tunisia's real weight in the region comes in, is if Tunisia really figures out how to have a real different constitution. And if whatever happens in Tunisia is really different from the last transition from Burkiba to Ben Ali, and I commend to you the New York Times article when Ben Ali came in 22 years ago about what a reformer he was and he was opening up and he was getting rid of all the authoritarian restrictions of Burkiba and everything else, it didn't play out that way. But if the Tunisians can figure out a way or if the Egyptians can figure out a way, I think that has a tremendous impact on the region. If either or both of those really start going south, I think you have still a process of change, but it's a very different process and a very different impact on the Palestinians than it otherwise would be. Let's try to squeeze in a couple more right here. You, sir. Front row? Oh, okay. Thank you very much. This is great, but I want to turn the question to how the media has covered the entire story. I mean, one of the things that I noted seems to me that if the question that hasn't been covered in the media is how is it that we are friends to these dictators who are detested by their people because we've cultivated them for a long time and I would have thought this would be an opportunity for the media to be talking to the American people. How did we get into bed with these guys who their people hate and is it good for us? And I've seen it also a lot in sub-Saharan Africa. So my question is how is it that that story doesn't get told? Well, I'm not sure I'd agree since I'm part of the media here that I would agree with the premise of your question. I mean, hasn't that been a big part of the discussion and hadn't it been part of the discussion for a long, long time? I mean, maybe I'm wrong about that, but that would be my answer. You know, there's a very practical problem going on with that, there aren't enough of us. You know, I mean, I jumped from Bahrain to Egypt to Libya and every day I didn't know what country I was gonna end up in because there was a new revel, I mean, there's just practically not enough of us to cover all these uprisings and all with the understanding and the nuance of the, so you found yourself hopping and sometimes with not enough, you know, so focused on the immediate sort of the violence but not enough time to spend on the real nation building ever that ultimately becomes so critical and that's just a function of our shrinking institution and this up against this more complex story. I can tell you militarily in Libya was the, I've been in Iraq, Afghanistan, this is militarily the hardest story I've ever covered in my life because it's a lot like Bosnia. There are no front, there's, you know, at least in Iraq there were some semblance of a safe place you could go to, that doesn't exist in Libya. You would go to front lines and they would collapse around you in a matter of minutes and what constituted a front line and what constituted rebel Gaddafi forces in urban areas would use sniper fire against their people and in more open areas, we saw the air campaign and then huge artillery and sometimes we journalists would find ourselves the last people left on the front line. Well, that's not good, you know. So it was very hard to cover as a military story which is, you know, as I think about these things because warfare has changed, you've got the state acting using sort of insurgency tactics and this nascent insurgency using insurgent tactics and there were days I thought, you know, we're either gonna get hurt by sniper fire from Gaddafi's forces or rebel shooting himself and taking me out with them on the rebel side because they just didn't know what they were doing. It was incredibly challenging militarily. I found it, I mean, I've never stood at a front line and be like, huh, I'm the last one here, you know. I mean, I just, I've never had that happen and watching these rebels try to figure out how to fight, it made it very hard as a journalist to figure out who was up, who was down and on top of that, as John pointed out, there is no military strategy. I mean, even in Masrata, it's the third biggest city, we've seen major violence there. I don't understand tactically how winning Masrata gets you closer to Tripoli. I understand it's in the West and it's a psychological win but I don't understand how taking that city then advances you to Tripoli because you've got two, you've got cities around it that are secure under Gaddafi forces. So I think militarily it's the hardest story I've ever encountered. Another question, right there. Oh, thanks. I would agree with the chair in his comment and I think it raises the reverse question. Why was the media so uncritically supportive of the revolution in Egypt? Why does it criticize itself only for not supporting the revolutions enough being behind the curve and the same about its criticism of the United States government? Why has there been an almost nonstop narrative of criticism of the American government who are having friends who are not perfect as if anyone in the region is perfect? And particularly to David Ignatius as well as to the chair, it seems to me that there is a real problem of the media's lack of perspective and common sense in this revolution. I think you were very honest in acknowledging that things have turned out not as nice in Egypt as you expected. Why did journalists get so swept up in the revolution? Why did they identify with it so much as to lose their critical sense? Why was there an almost nonstop smear of people who raised concern about the Muslim Brotherhood calling them agents of Mubarak's fear mongering? And now we have to look back and ask is there really a problem there that we should have been paying attention to? Why did people lose their critical common sense? I'm not sure once again that the media was taking sides here. It seems to me like we were pointing the cameras at people who were marching out into the square. I think we were reflecting what we saw which is basically what we do and I think is the most important part of what we do. I mean, we laid it out there so people could see but obviously people were finding about this, finding out about this in many different ways besides just the conventional media. I mean, a lot of this news spread through the social media. So I'm not sure we did all that bad a job. I think basically we did what we were supposed to do. We covered this story and we've been debating since back in the Nixon administration why we're on one side or the other. And I must say, I think the arguments on both sides have been pretty well covered over the years. David, would you like to? Well, let me respond. I think it's a reasonable question. I think that there was a kind of romance to the Tahrir Square events that we picked up and we picked it up on the streets and then amplified it around the world. I'd have to say that in a sense, our job in that situation is just to hold a microphone. I mean, what's transforming isn't what I write. It's you're seeing the pictures and feeling the intensity of what's going on. I always feel it's important to underline that, that the position that we take matters less than the power of the events themselves. And when you have people day after day out there risking their lives demanding freedom, we respond as human beings, whether we're Americans or Arabs. I mean, there just was a human response to that. I think the question you ask about whether we let ourselves get talked into the idea that the Muslim Brotherhood was a benign organization whose threat had been wildly overstated in the past by Mubarak in an attempt to cling to power. I think that's a reasonable question. I made some effort to look into that, but I have to be honest, it was quick. I certainly noted the issue, but I think that deserves a lot more scrutiny now. I think the friends of our job, we're not the friends of anybody except our readers and viewers, but I mean, our job is to get to the bottom of what are their intentions? Who are these people? Where do they wanna go? What do they think about Israel and peace with Israel? So I think the question is a reasonable one. Okay, one more question back there. Hi, isn't it possible that if the administration came out really strongly and criticized human rights violations of Palestinians by Israel and criticized human rights violations that are going on in Bahrain, that that would shorten the lifespan of the regime in Iran, which is always saying that we're hypocritical when we talk about human rights. It's just our interests. We're disguising. Wouldn't that be a good way to attack Iran and shorten the lifespan of that regime to show that actually this country has a sincere commitment to human rights, that it's not just a bargaining chip? Would like to. Well, I guess if we could get that message into Iran, it might have some of an impact. I honestly think it's harder to affect the domestic politics of Iran than we would like it to be the case, right? I mean, Iranians are worried about what? They're worried about the price of bread. They're worried about jobs. They're worried about the price of gas. They're worried about where they can travel. I mean, Iranians have a whole bunch of, how they can dress, what's happening to the women in their family. They have a whole bunch of concerns. And while the trope of the regime is death to America, I'm not sure that we loom as large in ordinary Iranians' lives as the sort of, if we just talked about human rights, we could weaken the regime. I think that the key issues that will shape stability in Iran are two. One is the economy, which is heavily tied to oil prices. Every time the price of oil goes up a dollar, it's $600 million in their pocket, and oil prices are up. That's one issue. And the second is elite cohesion. And I think particularly whether you have the clerical establishment continuing to support the government of Iran. And that is getting to be a more interesting story. I think those are the two key issues. I think where the US is, human rights, I think those are kind of marginal issues, and they might be able to play a role at some point when things get in play. But I think the two things to look at are two things, one of which we have very little control over, the other which we have almost no control over, which is energy prices, and this elite cohesion problem. Well, folks, I'm sorry about our time's run out. Thank you very much. That's CSI, I think. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. They were really quiet. No cost. Okay, man. How are you? How are you? Thank you very much.