 Miles and Dr. Miles I have a quote from him and he said the greatest lesson to be learned from the Iraq invasion from the historic blunder must be to never again underestimate the soft power of religious difference to trump the supposedly hard realities of guns and money. Isn't that an interesting quote? Don't underestimate the influence of religion and I think that is great because he is a scholar in religion as well as politics. He earned the MacArthur genius award which I just learned this morning is a five year award given and no one knows exactly what the criteria is but it is given to somebody who gets 100,000 dollars a year for five years to engage in research of their choice. So can you imagine the amount of trust that was put into this man and the amount of wisdom that they felt would be gained from his research I think what an honor. Dr. Miles also is a senior fellow in religion and international affairs with the Pacific Council which is a nonpartisan organization headquartered in LA. He has written two books one is entitled God a Biography for which he won a Pulitzer prize it's been interesting God a biography Pulitzer prize in 1996 and then the second one was Christ a crisis in the life of God. So don't those sound like interesting it sounds like you have a very witty sense of humor. He spent 10 years as a Jesuit Seminarian and two years studying at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem before completing his PhD in near eastern languages at Harvard. He'll be speaking to us today on the impact of the United States involvement in Iraq and hopefully giving us some some of his thoughts on how we can unwind some things in there and what would be the best resource for that and I don't know what you're going to talk about that as well but we will see please join me in giving Dr. Jack Miles a warm inside edge round of applause let's get him up to the stage Dr. Jack Miles. Thank you Jeannie for that that most generous and gracious introduction it really is a pleasure to to be with you here this morning I've only recently begun my own association with Orange County you might say I was I was hired to my surprise just last July to be professor of English and religious studies at the University of California Irvine my my time in Orange County though I've been living in this area since 1978 has been rather limited I have a few friends down here I see once in a while I recall though sitting at the table here this morning my very first visit I had been brought from a double day in New York where I was an editor to serve as executive editor of the University of California Press which is headquartered in Berkeley but at that time had a branch office at UCLA and the University of California Press publishes all kinds of writers all kinds of scholars but of course especially the faculty of the University of California itself from all the campuses so it fell to me as a part of my duties to drop in on the different campuses and I can measure the passage of time from 1978 to the present as I look out on this this central meadow here and remember what scrawny little saplings were out there in 1978 and how this this forest has has grown up in the meantime of course I haven't changed at all in the interim you know we were we were telling each other stories just now about how as individuals we have had occasion to be surprised by other cultures and and to learn and perhaps to correct our our behavior or to seize opportunities that we didn't know were there in these in these places and with these people whom we first confronted as strangers our country as a nation has been undergoing a similar experience in Iraq when I was named MacArthur Fellow we were just past 9 11 and had not yet invaded Iraq but we were already hearing a great deal about the global war on terror which struck me as a bit of a puzzle because terror exists all over the globe and in almost all manifestations of it the United States it has no thought ever of taking a hand to control it to direct it to suppress it whatever it is only one form of terror the kind that that struck in New York in Washington on September 11th 2001 that engages us but to speak of that kind of terror one has to speak about Islam and the and the varieties of Islam and what has been done to the Muslims of the world by those who have created al-Qaeda and and brought the destruction in several countries that that they have brought I knew only some about some of what one would wish to know in the way of religious knowledge and regional knowledge at that time but a little knowledge seemed to be more than I was hearing expressed in by those who were announcing American policy at the time so I took the MacArthur money and used it to buy my own time my own services for the Pacific Council on International Policy which Genie mentioned the Pacific Council is the West Coast branch of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York which is which is better known and it's uh it's membership is is made up of some office holders some former office holders our president is Warren Christopher former secretary of state and many people who are involved in in business or law in a way that requires them to think about the world beyond our borders I thought that it would be valuable if this group of people this Friday for example we will be hosting Senator Chuck Hagel at lunch as you know though he is a Republican his name has been mentioned as a possible running mate for Barack Obama should he win the Democratic nomination now this is this is someone who might help us think more about the cultural factors that I believe we ought to be thinking about in Iraq as as we move forward into whatever lies ahead beyond the next presidential election you know that the government of Iraq has served notice to the world and to the government of the United States in particular that the United Nations mandate for a multinational force in Iraq will expire on December 31st 2008 each year the prime minister of Iraq whoever it was at the time has requested a one-year renewal of the mandate that creates the legal basis for international military activity within the borders of Iraq they serve notice the prime minister having come under a good deal of pressure from the Iraqi legislature that the renewal for 2008 would be the last renewal and what is now pending is an agreement between the United States and Iraq of a character to be determined whatever activity our forces engage in after December 31st 2008 will be determined by this agreement President Bush takes the position that this agreement does not require the advice and consent of the Senate and if deliberations are taking place for the moment they are secret interestingly the Iraqi parliament of a majority of its members at least takes the view that prime minister Nouri al-Maliki also lacks the authority to make such an agreement with with the United States they too take the view that this is actually international treaty and requires a legislative ratification the alternate view held by the chief executives in both countries is that it's not a true international treaty and therefore they may make the commitment to each other on their own authority so we're clearly at a remarkable turning point we really don't know of what lies ahead and general David Petrius and Ambassador Ryan Crocker in their testimony just yesterday were quick to make that concession that they don't know what lies ahead and they don't want to give any indication of any possible withdrawal date for American forces at the time a year ago last January when President Bush announced the the newest phase in American strategy in Iraq the surge he stated his goal for this stage which was to create a climate of security that would permit reconciliation in Iraq reconciliation is an interesting word it prompts the question reconciliation of whom to whom and the answer is reconciliation of the Sunni Muslims to the Sunni Shia principally secondarily of the Sunni Arabs to the Kurds of northern Iraq well this is a rather remarkable assignment this this mission of reconciliation intra-muslim reconciliation for the United States to be giving itself we are we have a secular government and we are a majority Christian society it would seem that we're rather ill-caste to conduct negotiations among hostile Muslims and and certainly when the United States forces were sent to Iraq the president didn't say it's essential for American security for us to bring peace among the hostile Iraqis this is not a the kind of assignment that our population could easily understand and the sense that so many Americans now have that they don't understand what's happening in Iraq or what we're really trying to do is growing because this is what we have been told that we're trying to do there and this seems so hard for Americans to get their minds around who are the Sunni who are the Shia why do we care that they're hostile mutually hostile to each other my agenda in this matter is not to to push for a particular withdrawal date or a particular arrangement for for a withdrawal I certainly have thoughts on that matter it it doesn't seem even possible that the United States could leave in Iraq by the way it left Vietnam which is to say leaving all our material on the ground to do that would be to arm al-Qaeda for activity all around the globe so it's got to be a phased withdrawal of material as well as personnel and this will take a year at least and a great deal of money and all kinds of precautions as objects that have been now in Iraq exposed to the flora and fauna of Iraq contaminated vis-a-vis American agriculture and American sanitation standards are brought back into the country it will be a very slow very costly process and it can't be done without regional cooperation it turns out though that regional cooperation is as involved with religious difference as a piece within Iraq itself is Saudi Arabia and and Iran the two nations that flank the Persian Gulf through which all of the ships that will be evacuating all this material will have to pass are of different forms practice different forms of Islam Saudi Arabia the Sunni form and Iran the Shia form remaining on good terms with each of those countries and doing what we can to see to it that they remain on good terms with each other is essential not just to the shipment of oil from that region but also to the very actions of a military retreat now could this situation which seems so hard for us to get our minds around could it have been foreseen have we in a kind of innocent way been blindsided by something that that's surely no American no American government could ever have been expected to anticipate I think the answer to that is no I believe that with with a little effort a little attention even to what was published in American English language newspapers and magazines this could have been foreseen there is of course a deep ancient religious division separating Sunni and Shia Muslims it has to do with an early dispute about how this new faith would be governed should it be governed by a lineal descendants of Muhammad this is the Shia view or should the leader of the faith be chosen by a consensus among among the believers and among their their acknowledged local and spiritual leaders this is the the Sunni view and there has been certainly tension and resentment and hostility over the centuries between the two groups the Shia lost on the battlefield and and they became the minority party though within the Middle East itself they're close to parody they're close to 50-50 balance with the Sunni next next year at Irvine I will at the university here I will be will be teaching a survey course to undergraduates covering Judaism Christianity and and Islam and all textbooks will tell you that the Sunni constitute 85 to 90 percent of Muslims worldwide but they reach this proportion by the inclusion of the most populous Muslim nation in the world which is Indonesia and which is by the way a democracy and the second most popular Muslim country in the world which is India which is so huge that its large Muslim minority has to count as the second largest Muslim population in the world bigger than the Muslim population of Pakistan which would come in third and which also is a heavily Sunni nation so in the Middle East itself the two are are more nearly balanced and so the ancient quarrels which were resolved in battles that took place in Iraq itself are are more vividly remembered still what matters most is the most recent experience of Iraq and it is an experience of violence that took place under Saddam Hussein but to some extent in full view and even with a measure of cooperation from the United States so during the the 1980s while Iran and Iraq were at war Saddam Hussein conducted what and his Baath party remember Saddam Hussein was not our our enemy in Iraq he was just among our enemies no one rules a country of that size alone so all all of the discussion we heard in 2003 about will he give up his weapons of mass destruction was a bit misleading whatever weapons he had he didn't have a loan he had as the head of a ruling party and when he was dislodged and and finally captured and even put to death they who had made his rule possible and had benefited from it were not dislodged with him so in a sense the the the regime that we were attempting to change hasn't been changed yet the those who benefited under the old regime are still there they're still not reconciled to losing they're still fighting back there has been some progress in bringing about pacification but the the deepest irony is that the United States is now arming both sides in the war in Iraq which seems a strange way to bring about reconciliation between the two contending parties the the government that we have put in place is a majority Shia government and that government has of course had very warm and cozy relations with Iran it has signed economic agreements with Iran we've seen prime minister Nuri al-Maliki giving a most cordial welcome to President Ahmadinejad of Iran and its army has domestically has served the interests of the Shia population far more than of the Sunni population and has in its ranks Shia incurred overwhelmingly the Sunni who were in the resistance at the beginning of the war in this last 18 months to two years have recognized that they can't defeat the Shia proceeding as they were they helped that they were receiving from Saudi Arabia and from Saudi fighters the largest number of foreign fighters in Iraq was producing division in their own ranks and violence against their own people so unable to to beat the Shia using those tactics they have decided to copy the Shia and like the Shia the Sunni are now accepting money and training from the United States and they have produced a militia overwhelmingly Sunni in composition defending the Sunni against the Shia and the United States army is caught in the middle in danger if this if the current relative standoff should end of being fired on from both sides by soldiers whom they have armed and they have trained I recurred to my earlier position could this have been foreseen we did know it was in all our newspapers that the Sunni under Saddam Hussein had conducted a quasi genocidal attack against the Kurds after the first Gulf War the United States encouraged the Shia to in southern Iraq to rise up against the government of Saddam Hussein the government that of course we hadn't dislodged at that time because as as general Schwartzkoff said in his his autobiography if we had done that we'd be in Iraq still he said Iraq would prove to be a tar baby from which the United States could never extricate itself that was general Schwartzkoff's defense of the decision that the first president Bush made not to go on to Baghdad and attempt regime change after the the hot war phase of the first Gulf War ended the American government did encourage the Shia to rise up but then abandoned them and allowed Saddam Hussein to put down the rebellion by using the air power that he was still allowed to exercise in southern Iraq at that time why that because relatedly we had had recognized that is the first Bush administration at least recognized that if the Shia had been successful the winner really would be Iran and the winner of the present war is Iran more than any anyone else we have removed from the region the major the major balancing power against Iranian population wealth and military power and we have created in Iran a majority Shia state inclined on religious grounds to have a warm relations with Iran and cooler relations with Saudi Arabia Saudi Arabia has great wealth and it has advanced arms but it has a small population and would not be able to hold up in a sustained war with the country as large as as Iran so we've created a very very difficult situation for ourselves that we could have foreseen if we had been thinking a little bit more about religion and about the recent history of inter religious violence alongside a measure of inter ethnic violence within Iraq is there a way to to rescue victory or from from this very difficult situation to rescue victory from the jaws of defeat as the as the old saying goes is there some way if we even don't bother to call it victory is there some way to turn an unhappy situation into a happy one honestly I don't see one I think at the end of of this process however it ends we will find that we are poorer we are weaker and we've shed a great deal of American blood and a very great deal of Iraqi blood Iraq has lost on the average each month as many people as the United States lost on once on September 11th 2001 two million people of an Iraqi population of only 24 million are now living outside the borders of their country and another million are displaced within the country so I don't think that in retrospect it's very likely that we will see that we have found a happy outcome that we could rescue from this unhappy situation no one would be would be more pleased than I to be proven wrong about this and in in the time remaining maybe or as our time up we have we have some time remaining good and the time remaining I'd be happy to hear your comments on this I I'm I observe that this is a group that that follows public affairs very closely and and that's to your benefit into the country's benefit I always tell my my students to make friends with each other to make friends with each other and talk about what you hear in class you will learn much more effectively from your classmates than from your professor think back on your own education that's how you learned yes I heard a speaker on Saturday night who was talking about the underlying motives of the president as it relates to the invasion of Iraq and one of those is not to remove our stuff from Iraq but to develop a permanent base and presence in the Middle East and that's why we have made such an an inroad there can you comment on that United States has constructed I believe five very large very permanent looking bases and our embassy in Baghdad is enormous it is larger than the Vatican City and fortified far more massively than the Vatican City is fortified yes it looks that way but if that investment is stranded it won't be the first time in history that a very large investment has been stranded if if the incoming administration doesn't wish America to remain in Iraq and has the backing of a majority of the American people then we won't however much money we have spent the the question to which your question goes most immediately though is this pending agreement between the United States and Iraq it would be under the terms of that agreement that American troops would remain stationed in those bases on what has some have called the Korea strategy or the South Korea strategy we've we've stayed in South Korea now for decades our presence there hasn't been that unbearable or unwelcome to the South Korean population could something similar take place in Iraq so long as we stayed mostly on our bases and only came out in case of need seems a tricky kind of comparison because at the time that the after the the truce the armistice in in South Korea South the South itself was at peace so there was very little occasion for the Americans to engage in in further combat the occasions for further combat would be immediate in in Iraq that's why this agreement deserves so much more attention than I believe it has has received the expiration of the mandate and the renewal of the of the mandate for just one year on condition that it be the last came just before Christmas this year the the announcement was made I think by design at a time when no one was reading the newspaper or or following the news on on television President Cheney's recent visit to the Middle East I think had President Cheney oh excuse me you've heard you've heard the old joke yeah the you know let's not be too hard on on President Bush after he's got a tough job after all he's just a heartbeat away from the presidency anyway I believe that that's why that's why Cheney was recently there to try to hasten this process along and build support forward in the region but time will tell yes so if you if you so you've described a situation where there's this ongoing religious civil war kind of so if we separate out the American influence and just ask those people or thoughtful people on either side of what what do they expect to have happened or want to have happened do they think one side is going to win what what's their vision of their their own future of Iraq well so far as I know from my reading there are two competing divisions on either side yes there are those who are keeping their powder dry waiting for the time when they will have a free hand and and anxious to win definitively the whole thing the the Shia who are now in the ascendancy want to consolidate their power and will be happy to accept a help from Iran in doing that the Sunni are counting on funding at least from sympathetic Sunni Arabs in the region in in Jordan and above all in Saudi Arabia but on either side I believe there are people who are prepared for a tacit division of the country there has already been such an extensive mutual ethnic cleansing that the two populations are now far more concentrated regionally than they once were the question is that the the obstacle that would stand in the path of people who would want to this kind of stand down this kind of standoff if you want an acceptance of of the status quo and a stilling of the guns is control of Iraqi wealth if if Iraqi oil wealth is is concentrated in the as it is in the Shia regions and in the Kurdish regions then the Sunnis will be left out in the cold fiscally and even though there are only 20 percent of the population 20 percent of the population can make life unbearable for the remaining 80 percent so we'd have to anticipate that that there would be violence after after we leave the question is granting that and granting that we'd like to see the the country at least at peace can we can we bring that about by doing what we're now doing continuing to arm the two sides and continue to train them and doesn't seem that that will that will work that the two sides then are just waiting for us to go and our our national defense taken in the round is is being harmed it's time I think to start to stop talking so much about supporting the troops and start talking about defending the nation if our forces are spread too thin we may have to recognize that that this is a task that they cannot do and that the current policy of arming both sides will not enable them to do so this is a part of that recognizing ourselves to the fact that there isn't a good outcome all outcomes are going to be bad one one way or another is going to be chosen we're not going to be happy with it and that's not a very American kind of outcome you know we like we like to win we like happy endings yes hi can you can you speak a bit to the role of Saudi Arabia in this because I thought that at the beginning when Bush came into power that he was very close with the Saudis they had a special representative how could I mean couldn't the Saudis have influence I mean why didn't they if it's tilting the power so great well in fairness to to Saudi Arabia like every other country bordering Iraq it opposed the American invasion the rhetoric used at the time was that Saddam Hussein had attacked his neighbors actually Saddam with weapons of mass destruction actually Saddam Hussein and his forces had used chemical weapons against Iran and to a lesser degree against Kuwait if it had been stated that way people would have understood better why Turkey Syria Saudi Arabia Jordan and even Egypt Hosni Mubarak of Egypt said if America does this where there is one Osama bin Laden there will be 100 so they were opposed and despite all efforts on the American side to produce at least rhetoric at least verbal lip service from the Saudis to what we're doing they've never offered it they've never come through so whatever the closeness of the bush family to the Saudi royal family it hasn't produced any support in in in this case after the the Khomeini revolution in Iran in 1979 the Saudis were alarmed Ayatollah Khomeini had wanted to replace them in control of the holy places of Islam and and for a time the Khomeini people were exporting their form of Islam around the world at the moment Wahhabi Muslim extremism as exported by Saudi Arabia is far far more potent to force worldwide than than anything coming out of Iran yes so there's been rhetoric about us invading Iran and what would be the rationale and and as you say we're running out of forces could you just comment on this whole idea and what the rationale would be and what might happen well there is there is great concern in Israel that Iran is developing nuclear weapons joined to missile capacity to deliver those weapons as far away as Tel Aviv and Jerusalem if Iran were ever to do that of course it would kill as many Palestinians as as Israelis but that is one factor that that surely bears on this as regards Iraq the benefit of an attack on Iran leaving aside the the nuclear matter for the moment would be simply to weaken it and and to prevent the emergence of a full-blown Iraqi Iranian power axis a kind of Shia axis joining joining Baghdad and in Tehran it's difficult to see how the elimination of what Iran is now doing in Iraq would actually bring about peace in that country it it might eliminate whatever exacerbating elements come about by the presence of Iranian arms and Iranian influence militarily and diplomatically on the government that we have put in place but it certainly wouldn't reconcile the Sunnis to their fate it wouldn't bring about peace between the Kurds and the Sunnis it wouldn't solve problems between contending Shia groups in the south and also its potential to send oil now over a hundred dollars a barrel up to a hundred and fifty dollars a barrel because of the disruption of shipping through the straits of Hormuz and perhaps an Iranian attack on on Saudi oil facilities is pretty terrifying there's pretty clearly a deep division and within the military about the possibility of our doing this and it seems to me from what I can pick up that the side opposed to an invasion of Iran is now more powerful than the the side in favor of it will of course we don't want our government to take orders from our military we don't want to be a military state but their opinions do come for something in private deliberations okay we don't have too much time left yes first of all thank you for coming to UCI and welcome to Southern California thank you we're glad to have you here secondly would you comment please on what you see as the role of the Kurds in terms of we have heard comments about their potential role as power brokers in the balance of power but I would be interested in your perspective what's most important to recall about the Kurds just now is that there is a kind of quiet war underway between Turkey and Kurdish anti Turkish Kurdish terrorists operating from remote areas of Kurdistan Turkey was also opposed to the American invasion of of Iraq and Turkey is our most important ally in the region it is a member of NATO it's a secular state in a Muslim country and the government there at the moment which is like the Christian Democratic Party of Germany it is it is Muslim but it is not stripping all Turks of their civil rights by any means has actually brought about a measure of peace between Kurds and Turks within Turkey that is greater than we've ever seen before under the very extreme secular and extreme nationalist regime allowing a very large role to the Turkish army the Kurds suffered far more than they're suffering under the moderately Islamic government that's in place now I would think that the best American course would be to exert every effort to bring about peace between the Kurds and the Turks across the northern border of Iraq that way Kurdish oil Kurdish trade could flow north and south rather than north and west rather than south through the Arab regions because the the prospect of reconciliation between the Kurds and the Sunni Arabs who were Saddam Hussein's principal collaborators in his Arabization program you know with many Turks were displaced and and Sunni Arabs were brought in as settlers has left such legacy of bitterness and there's considerable fear among the Kurds that the surge and the creation of this movement called Sahwa or awakening among the among the Sunni Arabs will eventually lead to a resumption of Sunni Arab attacks on them the Kurds in general have used their their power is what you might call I think you were calling the swing vote in Iraq in favor of the preservation of of the Sunni rather the Shia regime in the green zone in Baghdad I wouldn't expect that really to to change at all I I expect the it to be two against one more or less Kurds and Shia against Sunni Arabs going forward I just wanted to before you talked on I just want to let you all know we're running a look our musicians are late so we're going to just keep going with the questions until our musicians arrive and if they don't arrive in time then we'll end after the question so we're going to keep going but I might have to cut you off abruptly if they come in okay so it's closing music that's great I loved coming in this morning so the sound of the piano by the way what a nice mood you create you know it's hard to get up early and come to hear a guy talk about Iraq but they get a nice breakfast and some music trust me this is easy so I don't know if this question is cultural and or religious or not so I'll try it anyway the word is oil the word is oil not going back to why we got into Iraq but moving forward where is the oil going now and I understand some it's being stolen it's being not utilized to to rebuild the nation and so forth where is it going now and what role does it have to play in the future I have called oil the love that dare not speak its name on the part of the of the current administration if you go back over President Bush's speeches on Iraq you will find almost no mention of oil and when the when the subject does come up it is spoken of in in euphemisms as if it really was a nasty topic such as a fair exploitation and development of the mineral resources of Iraq oil petroleum is a is a mineral I guess it's not a vegetable not an animal so I guess it's mineral but it that conceals rather than reveals the fact that this is a concern if you read the the Security Council resolutions licensing or authorizing would be the better word the operations of the multinational force in Iraq you'll you'll see that the those very resolutions get the the military matter done with fairly expeditiously and then they turn to the oil matter even before the first Security Council resolutions addressing this matter were passed the occupying powers had created something called the development fund for Iraq which was a kind of escrow fund into which oil revenues all oil revenues would be deposited and the development fund for Iraq was governed by five international parties including the secretary general of the of the United Nations the head of the World Bank the International Monetary Fund after the Iraqi government was created after the first elections it could send one member and and then the the head of an Arab development fund headquartered in the offices of OPEC headquarters of OPEC in Kuwait this group continues to nominally or legally to to govern the disposition of Iraqi oil revenue when it receives it but as you have just reminded us there's quite a bit of black market oil being diverted from normal sale to the profit of of the government and into other channels back channels so that the that just where the money is going is is unclear the resolution that creates the development fund for Iraq controlling the oil will expire on December 31st as well unless it it is renewed or replaced and what would replace it would be the long stalled oil legislation in Iraq if Iraq can pass this legislation then the existing international arrangement governing the oil could terminate but it the Iraqi legislators haven't wanted to pass the the legislation in the form in which it now exists because that form diverse so much more oil revenue to the foreign oil companies than the comparable agreements in Saudi Arabia in Kuwait it's a very favorable arrangement for oil companies and they think that that they want something they know they want something that will put more money in Iraqi pockets they also want provisions for the hiring of Iraqi workers Iraqi engineers and so forth rather than the importation of foreign talent so far no resolution of this has has come about but that matter is coming to a head and it's another matter as as I think you were hinting that it seems we're not talking about not by accident and there are those who would like somehow to come to bring this to a resolution when the public isn't looking okay our musicians are here so we can stop this grim topic and and have a nice time thank you thank you for your attention