 I'm John Torcheri, the co-director of the International Policy Center, and I'm pleased to introduce the director of the International Institute, Colleen Jones-Lewaugh. We thank the International Institute for bringing together this event and also the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies, which with the International Policy Center is co-sponsoring. So I'll turn it over to Pauline, who will introduce our panel. Thanks, John. Welcome, everyone. Thank you for being here. And welcome to the International Institute's round table on ISIS, understanding ISIS, evolution, ideology, and implications. This event, of course, would not be possible without the co-sponsorship of the International Policy Center. So thank you very much, John. And thank you to all the staff that also made it possible. Thank you to the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies for their co-sponsorship. Thank you to Thaero, the program administrator at FDC. Thank you to Margo Lakin, our communication structure for the International Institute. And thank you to Beth, which works for also the program specialist at Semenis for helping us put this all together. And during our very appropriate time, one of the things we're trying to do with these International Policy Round Tables is to take sort of ongoing international practices for events and very quickly put together a panel of experts, mostly from our own faculty and experts around the University of Michigan campus or within the state of Michigan, as you know, it's one of our panelists from Michigan State University and we're very grateful to have you here. ISIS has gained increasing media attention and alarm leaders around the world since June 2014 when it seized control of large swaths of territory in northern Syria and Washington, Iraq and declared the establishment of this modern state. But this Islamist extremist group, also known as ISIL or the Islamic State, has been growing in strength and popularity for several years and some would argue the roots of its grievances are centuries old. This International Institute Round Table brings together four experts to shed light on different aspects of ISIS, its ideology, its origins, its popular support and the impact it has or is having on the international system. Our four panelists I will introduce in the order in which they are going to speak today. First, Professor Juan Cole, who is the Director of the Center for Religion and Evacuation Studies and a Professor of History here at the University of Michigan. Second, Professor Mark Tessler, Professor of Political Science and formerly the Vice Provost for International Affairs at the University of Michigan. Professor Muhammad Khalil, Professor of Religious Studies at Michigan State University and the Director of the News and Studies Program. And finally, James Morrill, Professor of Political Science here at the University of Michigan. Before we begin I want to ask you to please hold your questions until the end and please feel free to write them down in no cards, it will be passed around the audience. You can address your questions to specific members of the panel or to the panel as a whole. I will read the questions from this podium and then ask the panelists to respond to those questions. We hope this will answer the questions and allow for as much discussion and participation from the audience as possible. So without further ado, I will hand it over to Professor Juan Cole. Thank you, Pauline. Thanks to the International Institute and the Ford Scroll for having this event. I am going to start off by talking about Sunni grievances and I call it ISIL ISIS, arose by any other name. And what I would like to suggest is that the collapse of the state that we have seen in Syria and Iraq is primarily an economic phenomenon and the conflicts that we are seeing in the region are primarily economic in nature. They have to do with this transition from broadly speaking socialist states, one's on somewhat the Soviet model, very large public sectors. In Iraq there wasn't so much private industry until the 80s. And as these countries have moved from a socialist state to a neoliberal capitalist one, apparently you can do it right or do it wrong. So Argentina did it wrong, collapsed. Turkey, not so bad. Russia seems to be having trouble. So Syria and Iraq are situations where there must be some intervening variable between these political ideologies that accounts for why it can be done successfully or unsuccessfully. But in any case, I can't tell you what those are. I do know that as they moved from socialist states to neoliberal ones, they did it with corruption and insider trading because in systems where the state controls the economy, if you privatize, then state actors are the ones that are privatizing and they know where the good deals are. And if they're unconstrained in pursuing those deals, then they call up their cronies and say, you know, have I got a steel mill for you? It's going on the block. You can have it for a cell. And in Syria and Iraq, this transition was exacerbated also by the ways in which the societies are composed of religious and ethnic groups. And I think those religious and ethnic divisions now have come to the fore in a big way, but they're not essential. You go back to the 1950s and read the newspapers in Syria and Iraq. I was talking about Sunnis and Shiites. They're worried a lot about communists. And there's something called the Ba'ath Party, which is, you know, an Arab nationalist and socialist and anti-imperialist. But even in the U.S. diplomatic documents, if you read them for those era, the real question is, are these, there's going to be a China situation and the president's going to go on a communist. But because of the transition to neoliberalism and the way that it was done in a very corrupt way and the creation of crony capitalists associated with the regime, it starts to matter which ethnic group the cronies are from because somebody's getting a lot of the goodies here and somebody's oxes being gored and they're being denied services and access to the state. And then people start to mobilize their political, their ethnic identities and religious identities. So in Syria, the revolt against the Ba'ath regime began really with farmers protesting, not having enough water. The state wasn't arranging the irrigation properly as it used to. And there was a long-term drought in these regions which has fed into the state collapse which may well be a result of climate change. It's not that we've had droughts before, but this is a very severe and long-lasting one and the region is very arid and could be changing. So the farmers can't make it and then they go to the cities to look for jobs as day laborers and construction workers. And then the 2008-2009 collapse came along globally and there just wasn't much construction work to be had. So if you look in Syria, the original protests down in Da'a were water protests by farmers in the depot town where the farmers' markets were and then around this sort of Homsenhamma, the center of Syria, it was in the slums where the workers didn't have jobs and they had come to find a livelihood having failed as farmers because of the longer crisis. So the crisis of global capitalism and the crisis of climate both intersected there in Syria and similar things happened in Iraq. And of course Iraq was complicated also by the U.S. invasion of 2003 which is the damn fullest thing this country's ever done and in which the Bush administration overthrew the Ba'ath government which was as I said a socialist government and despite some Sunni Shiite tensions of some severity in the 90s there were a lot of Shiite Ba'athists and so the party had some buy-in across the country but when the Americans came in and sometimes they were pushed into it rather than plotting at it essentially they brought a Shiite elite to power. And that Shiite elite wasn't just any old Shiite elite it was the religious Shiite parties the ones that were dedicated to making a Shiite religious state some of them on the Iran model and these were the people that Paul Bremer the American vice-chair in Iraq appointed to the interim governing council people whose parties had been formed by Ayatollah Khomeini and Iran in the old days when they were in exile in Iraq and when the Shiites came to power in a big way they excluded the Sunnis and their political ideologies were antithetical to the Sunnis the Sunnis of Iraq were mostly fairly secular minded and this thing of an alliance of convenience with a radical fundamentalist group like ISIL is not representative of where the Sunni Arab community has been in Iraq in the past half century they've been mostly would have been reading more or less say quote the Egyptian fundamentalist and however they were put in a situation where they rejected the Shiite and American written constitution they all three Sunni majority provinces rejected that constitution in 2005 they're a minority in a unicameral parliament which means they're going to lose every vote from here to eternity to a coalition of Shiites and Kurds so they're a permanent electoral minority they're pushed to the margins and then when the Arab Spring came along in 2011 and after there was a Sunni Arab Spring so youth in Fallujah and Mosul came out in the city squares and protested and and they wanted political openness of a sort that the hardline Shiite Prime Minister Nouriel Maliki was not offering them and the Iraqi government which as I said was in the hands of Shiite fundamentalists deployed helicopter gunships against these peaceful protestors and crushed the protest movement in the past three years in the Sunni Arab areas well if the message is you've been made unemployed because the Americans and the Shiites together abolished the state factories and other state enterprises that had provided employment in places like Mosul and unlike what you may have been taught in economics 101 in America there's no magic hand that will create an entrepreneur class out of nothing in a place like Iraq if you overthrow the government so there was just widespread unemployment once they got rid of those state enterprises in the Sunni Arab areas in particular and they often even brought their Shiite friends and relatives to fill the jobs that the Sunnis had been fired from and Paul Bremmer has admitted that it was one of the great mistakes that he made to go along with the Shiite plan to fire the Sunnis from their jobs on the grounds that the Sunnis had been a Bothys so it was something called debothification and they likened them to Nazis but they weren't Nazis and anyway the Nazis went on in Germany in the 1950s in their same jobs the Nazi high school teachers almost none of them were fired and in fact if you look at the high political elite of Germany in the 1950s full of former Nazis so the Shiite-Iraqi line that they were just doing what was done in occupation Germany is not true and it was very unwise what they did and they just pushed the Sunnis to the margins these were the capable people in Iraq they were the equivalent of West Point graduates and Harvard Law and high politicians and the people who managed things and they were all told you're now unemployed if you behave yourself you might be able to get a job you might be able to do the Shiites and so they went into rebellion and there are Bothys cells that went into rebellion secular ones leftist ones and there are tribal ones there are neighborhoods and there are fundamentalist ones some of them hooked up at some points with Altaida and what happened really in June of this year was that having tried everything having been locked out of politics having been not given services and so forth the remnants of the Bothys they lead the secular Arab Nationalist Socialist elite and some Sufi orders these are mystical orders in Sunni Islam in Mosul made a deal with the devil ISIL came to them and said we can rescue you from the Shiites and they left and Mosul and other cities conducted an urban uprising against the Iraqi army it wasn't that 5,000 ISIL fighters came down and conquered Mosul they hooked up with Mosul it was more like a a blind date and what happened really was more like Tahrir Square and Cairo where the Mubarak government was overthrown by people in the street and they were told that it talked about masses coming at them throwing stones at them well if you've got a city of 2 million people rising up against 70,000 soldiers it's not clear who takes that one and these soldiers were mostly Shiites from the south and they were darned if they were going to die way up north in Mosul for the Al-Maliki corrupt government especially since their officers ran away so this conflict which as I said seems to me mainly to have been regional and economic has now been reworked into fundamentalist far-right Shiites versus fundamentalist far-right Sunnis and in that form the problem is insoluble because what's now happened is that the Obama administration has allied with the Shiites and the Kurds to conquer back the Sunni Arab areas of Iraq and the optics of that are not going to look good and that's like allying with the Irish government to conquer England it's it would look like Catholics conquering Protestants so I predict dark days ahead well thank you very much so what I have to present is some public opinion data I've been part of a couple of international teams that have been doing surveys in the Middle East and Iraq is one of the countries so I have some data from a couple of early surveys from 2004 and 2006 and a couple of later surveys from 2011 and 2013 I'm just going to kind of give you a feel for them these are kind of descriptive just quick pictures I'm not going into a lot of detail but I think they're actually pretty consistent with the framework that Juan laid out and I'm happy to talk about methodology if there's interest in it it's probably not really necessary you can read up here the main points these are nationally representative samples they were done by a very qualified firm and I'll be happy to talk more about them so for one of the first slides this has to do with sectarianism and we this is part of an interview schedule that has actually quite a large number of questions about sectarian identity this is just one of them it's one that's a good predictor of some of the other questions and the question is simply are you more concerned about taking care of and defending your own sectarian community or are you thinking of yourself primarily as an Iraqi and your goal is to participate in forging an Iraqi national identity what stands out in this picture is that for all of the groups less for the Kurds the Kurds are somewhat divided and if you know something about Iraq that's not surprising but there isn't kind of consistent with what Juan Cole was saying there is not a lot of support for my community first we don't see a lot of expressions of sectarianism that comes through in some of the other items in the survey as well and secondarily while that's true in general it's it's even increased the intensity of that is increased if we compare 2004 and 2006 the distributions are skewed even more toward the national identity and away from the my community dimension and although the Kurds remain somewhat divided even they are skewed to some extent in that direction now to be interesting there are some analyses that we've done to kind of figure out what are some of the determinants of that what predicts if someone is going to be more toward one pole or to the other pole a question that's interesting is to what extent it might be among other things a product of a kind of resistance to the American occupation which is broadly unpopular but it also has to do with something that Juan Cole was saying that sectarian identities were not at the forefront of thinking of large numbers of people and the data seemed to support that second we asked them although this is not really terribly pertinent for today's discussion we asked them about how they thought about the American forces there and as you can see again there is strong skewing in terms of opposition even among even among Shia and that number gets even more pronounced if we look at 2006 and it's supposed to 2004 there is not a very favorable oppression of what the US is doing there Kurds are that's less true of the Kurds although they move in the direction of opposition as well even though they remain divided but this will give you a little bit of a feel for what the populations were thinking during the early years of the American invasion and occupation and particularly the absence of strong sectarian sentiments so switching moving to the present I'm just going through this pretty quickly moving to the, not to the present but to 2011 and 2013 two surveys that were done and you have the dates up there we asked a couple of different questions one question was about how you feel about the government the question is you can read how would you evaluate the performance of the government in carrying out its basic duties and responsibilities and that slide has to do with political Islam and you'll see some patterns the pattern here is that the Sunni are skewed very clearly toward a negative view of the government it's really not very surprising if we know something about Iraq and really it's consistent with what what I'm called to say surprising that goes down a little bit in 2013 from 2011 I'm not sure if that's just a certain amount of sampling variation or if there was a slight decline but even so the Sunnis are very much skewed toward the depot of unfavorable attitude toward the government the Shia are skewed in the opposite direction and that increases between 2011 and 2013 as we would probably expect knowing what was going on in the country and the ascendance of a Sunni dominated dominated regime that see although there is more division than one might have expected they're not overwhelmingly of the opinion that the government is doing a good or a very good job but certainly compared to the other sectarian communities they are very much in that direction and the Kurds are somewhat divided and remain somewhat divided but they move toward a more negative position over the course of the two year period between 2011 and 2013 finally the last slide and then I'll just try to summarize some of the takeaways from this the last slide asks people what they think about the role of Islam in political life in this battery this is part of something called the Arab Barometer we did this battery in 12 different Arab countries there are actually quite a large number of questions about Islam's political role in the role of the Sharia and a whole series of questions I picked out one question that's pretty representative of what we'll find on most of the other questions there is a little bit of variation from question to question and here we see again clear sectarian differences with in 2011 and the earliest of the surveys we have it's the Sunni that overwhelmingly say religious leaders should not influence public government decisions that express a more separate religion and politics kind of a more secular point of view and the other two communities are essentially divided I might say also that that division the Sunnis the Sunnis of Iraq are the outlier here in terms of what we're finding in the Arab Barometer in general there is pretty much of a division of opinion about whether Islam should or should not play an important role in political life and that division is reflected in the other communities it's very much what we found in most of the other countries with some cross country variation but the Sunnis stand out as much more secular in their orientation if we shift to 2013 kind of referencing the alliance of convenience I guess that's what we call it that what Nicole was talking about we see that it is the Sunni who are more supportive although still divided more supportive of Islam playing a political role want Islam to be part of the government process that's the political formula they endorse more frequently than the other groups and both of the other two communities have shifted more toward a more secular perspective so what emerges from this is that sectarianism is not very pronounced in the early years the various questions we ask to try to get a sense of how important it is to be a Shia as opposed to or a Sunni as opposed to an Iraqi sectarianism clear differences between the communities emerged during the later period the predispositions either with respect to evaluation of the government or with respect to the role that Islam should play in political affairs differentiate the communities with the Sunnis on one end, the Shia on another and the Kurds kind of in the middle so if we want to talk more about some of these findings in the UNA I'll be happy to do so but this is to go on the ground. Okay well good afternoon it's always nice to be back at my alma mater and like to thank Professor Pauline Long for organizing this panel now as someone who studies Islamic thought I'm interested to know how radical Muslim groups attempt to justify the killing of civilians and in the brief time that I have we will examine the discourse of two radical groups Al Qaeda or Al Qaeda and ISIS or the Islamic State ISIL Daesh etc now at the outset I should stress that although the Iraq branch of Al Qaeda was the precursor to ISIS ISIS and Al Qaeda central are two distinct organizations Al Qaeda has essentially disowned ISIS and ISIS has attempted to establish a state apparatus but the differences run deeper consider for instance ISIS's publicized execution of James Foley and others ISIS seems to be using publicized executions as a vehicle for enticing potential recruits as for Al Qaeda although its terrorist attacks were certainly intended to attract attention the organization has generally avoided publicizing executions but whereas Al Qaeda has tended to publicize its discourse by releasing various recordings of its leaders and publishing and posting numerous statements ISIS thus far has given us relatively little material to work with that makes analyzing their logic relatively difficult nevertheless despite the profound differences between Al Qaeda and ISIS we have good reason to assume that both follow ostensibly similar lines of thinking when it comes to their legal justifications for the killing of civilians so what I'd like to do now is look at how Usama bin Laden attempted to justify the 9-11 attacks within an Islamic legal framework and then draw comparisons to the only widely broadcast speech by the current leader of ISIS who goes by the alias Abu Bakr al-Bardadi first bin Laden in 1998 bin Laden and four other individuals issued a joint fatwa or legal opinion calling on Muslims to fight and kill Americans bin Laden and company present this call to arms as a defensive jihad a defensive struggle against an oppressive force bin Laden's three specific grievances are one, the US military occupation of Saudi Arabia two, US support for Israel and three, the US imposed sanctions on Iraq that allowed for the death of numerous innocent children three years and a few al-Qaeda attacks terrorist attacks later 9-11 occurred approximately 40 days after the attacks al-Jazeera interviewed bin Laden here is a portion of that exchange defending the legitimacy of the 9-11 attacks Ussama bin Laden says the killing of innocent civilians as America and some intellectuals claim is really very strange talk who said that our children and civilians are not innocent and that shedding their blood is justified that it is lesser in degree when we kill their innocence the entire world from east to west screams at us and America rallies its allies agents and the sons of its agents who said that our blood is not blood but theirs is the reporter then asks so what you are saying is that this is a type of reciprocal treatment they kill our innocence so we kill their innocence bin Laden so we kill their innocence and I say it is permissible in law and intellectually because those who spoke on this matter spoke from a juridical perspective here he's referring to Muslim terrorists Muslim scholars of Islamic law who condemned the 9-11 attacks the reporter asks what is their position bin Laden that it is not permissible they spoke of evidence that the messenger of God forbade the killing of women and children this is true reporter this is exactly what I'm asking about bin Laden however this prohibition of the killing of children and innocence is not absolute it is not absolute he goes on to say the men that God helped on 9-11 did not intend to kill babies they intended to destroy the strongest military power in the world to attack the Pentagon which the house is more than 64,000 employees a military center that houses the strength and the military intelligence reporter how about the twin towers bin Laden the towers are an economic power and not a children's school those that were there are men that supported the biggest economic power in the world they have to review their books we will do as they do if they kill our women and our innocent people we will kill their women and their innocent people until they stop so to recap bin Laden's somewhat contradictory claims are as follows one innocent civilians were not targeted on 9-11 who was targeted men he doesn't mention women men that supported the biggest economic power in the world two protection of civilians is not absolute their deaths are collateral damage and then three he goes on to say it's retaliation they kill our innocent so we kill their innocence just a little over two weeks later in an interview with Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir bin Laden asserts that American civilians forfeit their protected or non-combatant status because they pay taxes and elect their president and the congress elsewhere bin Laden maintains that his method of fighting the United States is a matter of necessity or darura in other words he's saying it is necessary to kill American civilians because that is there is no other way for Muslims to defend themselves against such a powerful foe desperate times call for desperate measures now contrary to popular belief numerous Muslim jurists and leaders from California to Cairo to Qum to Kuala Lumpur condemned the 9-11 attacks in September of 2001 these include some of the most outspoken critics of the United States such as the ever controversial jurist Yusuf el-Kharadawi in fact if you study Georgetown University's 2009 list of the 500 most influential Muslims in the world and it's an imperfect list they I think they included an Arab Christian on the list and they ranked the top 50 I think and had the king of Morocco at number 3 no offense to Morocco but if you study the list and you look at these influential Muslims you would see that the vast majority rejected the 9-11 attacks and according to a major 2008 Gallup poll the same is true for Muslims in general bin Laden had argued that the 9-11 attacks were retaliatory according to most Muslim jurists however there are limits to retaliation bin Laden had asserted that the innocents killed on 9-11 were collateral casualties according to numerous jurists however the collateral casualties justification fails when combatants are not directly targeted bin Laden had argued that American civilians who aid and abet the US government forfeit their protected or non-combatant status according to numerous jurists however it takes more than voting and paying taxes for individuals to be deemed legitimate targets finally bin Laden had argued that his method of fighting the United States can be justified through the Islamic legal principle of necessity or dorura according to numerous jurists however he cannot be invoked to justify heinous acts and now we turn our attention to ISIS and of course everything I have to say about ISIS is tentative because what I say today might not hold true tomorrow my focus here will be Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's only widely broadcast speech a sermon given in Mosul last July unlike bin Laden al-Baghdadi declares himself to be a caliph for the head of a new Islamic state but like bin Laden al-Baghdadi presents his call to arms as a defensive jihad and one directed against much of the world he says raise your ambitions oh soldiers of the Islamic state for your brothers all over the world are waiting for your rescue and are anticipating your brigades it is enough for you to just look at the scenes that have reached you from Central Africa and from Burma before that what is hidden from us is far worse so by Allah we will take revenge by Allah we will take revenge the message here is that it is us versus the world pseudo-Muslims and non-Muslims here and elsewhere are out to get us so we have to be aggressive in order to defend ourselves al-Baghdadi goes on to rebuke critics who describe ISIS as a terrorist organization if ISIS acts as terrorism he asserts then terrorism is to refuse humiliation, subjugation and subordination it is to insist upon your rights and not give them up then in an attempt to rebuke the united states and others using sarcasm he states but terrorism does not include the killing of Muslims all this is not terrorism rather it is freedom, democracy peace, security and tolerance implicit here are some of the same specifications for killing that appear in bin Laden's discourse and of course we see an explicit call for retaliation as with 9-11 we find numerous Muslim jurists rejecting ISIS's method of fighting even if they share many of their grievances an obvious example of this rejection would be the open letter to al-Baghdadi which was signed by over 120 prominent Muslim jurists and leaders although it appears the vast majority of Muslims reject ISIS it is an organization that continues to attract new members who find the call for revenge compelling especially in the fragile Iraqi and Syrian contexts where you have many Sunnis who view various non-Sunni and even other Sunni factions with suspicion and contempt therefore as it stands now the most that Sunni jurists can hope to do is limit, not terminate but limit the ideological influence of ISIS to be sure the fight against ISIS will require more than Muslim jurists simply condemning them as professor Kohl has indicated there are of course many issues beyond the purview of Islamic law that must be addressed and redressed, thank you I'd like to talk about this in a rather different perspective to look at it from the point of view of U.S. foreign policy U.S. grand strategy and to what extent the concerns about ISIS is currently taking in Iraq and Syria fit into that so what I want to start with first is a little bit of talk about general principles here being a political scientist I like to talk about those things and here's an observation that the international system is both shaped by the domestic institutions of states and shapes them in turn so we have an interdependence of the two and in specific the principles and the norms that exist in the international system are in part created and enforced over time because they help national leaders address the issues that help them to maintain power domestically I'll give you a few examples of this a little bit at the same time domestic politics matters because it helps to create the incentives that leaders face in international politics that is they take actions in international politics in part to advance the interests of their people within their country whose interests they purport to advance and so the two of them are then interdependent that they're not easily separable and in particular the basis of the legitimacy of the state why the state exists whose interests it serves what it does influences what norms and principles can be created and sustained in international politics that is the character of international politics overall so here are the questions about why does the state exist and what is its purpose that helps to shape the aims of the state because that understands what citizens expect from their state and how their leaders then will try and meet those expectations in ways that will allow them to do that it also influences things because it affects the ability of the state to extract resources from the population that in turn give it power internationally or to put it another way international norms then in some sense advance the purpose of the state and this is one reason why they're contested in world politics generally is that they have real consequences both internationally and domestically so what I want to start with to think about US global strategy then is to talk about competing models of state legitimacy in the world today the first of those is the one that in some sense has created many of the principles that undergird the world which is the western model this is a belief in liberal democracy is the way to organize politics with free markets now there's a lot of variation across western states in how these principles get worked out but it's an idea that there's a marriage of of both free politics and free economics this has consequences for what the international order looks like it advocates for an open economic international order for example because it because you can then get the gains of international exchange through trade and finance and other ways that help advance economic interest in those free economies a second model is what we what I don't have a great word for it but I call it high performing autocracies these are authoritarian governments so they reject the idea of liberal democracy but that engage in the market economy internationally if you want the two primary examples of this in current world politics they would be China and Singapore that is they don't accept the international principles that go with liberal democracy such as various notions of human rights but they wish to engage in international interchange because they find that beneficial because it helps to advance the state a third model here we could think of as popular authoritarianism this is one of which the leader claims that they represent national interests and that they don't actually have to hold free and fair elections because if they did they would be elected anyways because they're sufficiently popular and this is predominantly a nationalistic version vision which is also typically very heavily statused in the sense that the state is heavily involved in the economy and influences who wins and loses if you want to think of the two primary models of this in current world politics they would be Russia and Venezuela and the fourth model is Islamist which is here the principle in some sense is the claim that the government exists to embody or for foster the ideal order which is based on Islam and this is where ISIS fits in because it's the only version of the Islamist state out there the Islamic Republic of Iran is another very different one but it's a very extreme example of this particular form okay now the thing is these different four visions of the state imply different types of international orders and they explain why certain issues continue to be contested in world politics today such as the opposition between human rights versus state sovereignty that we find between those in the west versus that second model the high performing autocracy and the third model the popular nationalist it's also questions about the openness of the global economy because those first two types of systems are quite happy to have an open global economy whereas the third and fourth generally are opposed to that then what makes ISIS particularly important in this model as a very extreme version of the Islamist model is it poses a transnational challenge to the order created by the US in the west now that seems very far away from us and at the moment it is but that's in an ideological sense how it fits in the larger picture here but of course the question is this is far away the other side of the world does this actually require a response by the United States in the west and here's where we get into the tough part of form policy which is the practical politics is that taking actions to enforce those different international arms involves lots of different flows of costs and benefits and many of the things that you would like to do to advance interests or values that we place a very strong weight on may simply be too costly to engage in and therefore form policy is involved in the marriage of the practical politics of what you can do in the world with advancing the principles that you think are important in ordering the world and so in that sense that although the west may advance a certain vision that does not mean that you should therefore go out and take all possible actions to advance that vision and in particular what are the practical considerations involved in any sort of large scale intervention against ISIS well first of these is that there's very little domestic support in the United States for any imposition of a large scale ground force again in the Middle East that to the extent that there is any support domestically the Obama administration does not appear to be in have the slightest interest in trying to rally that opinion and make such a case for that I think that's an accurate reflection and that matters because in a democracy if you don't have popular support for that for those positions in foreign policy you will not be able to persist in them over long periods of time secondly there the difficulties of actually intervening in the region which is the combination of of course the Syrian civil war and also the ongoing fighting in Iraq and the difficulties of the Turks who probably could play the largest role here and their ambivalence about what side to be involved in I particularly like this because this is an example that the old adage that the enemy my enemy is my friend is not true in all cases alright so what is to be done the key thing to realize is that in a fundamental level from the point of view of the West this is an ideological struggle the good news is that in the long run democracies are actually good in winning these contests if you think back to the cold war in some sense the western vision defeated the communist vision is propounded by the Soviet Union primarily on an ideological level and that eventually those who lived in the Soviet Union and satellite states came to believe that the communist system was not good and abandoned it now the second part of the good news here is that ISIS's ideology its extreme version of Islamism is likely to prove unpopular to most in the region so that those who welcome ISIS as Juan Cole accurately described earlier this year they're likely to feel less comfortable about this as the reality of what governance by ISIS looks like now the downside of this is that this takes decades however and the second hard part of it I didn't put on my slide is this is something that the West can influence only very very indirectly that the essential ideological solution the problem is for Muslims to come to figure out for themselves how to reconcile properties of good governance and the like with their religion and that's not one that the West can tell them how to do it it's one they have to discover for themselves alright so then what is the policy here well the other problem with waiting decades for this is that ISIS is in a position that they can do a great deal of damage in the short run and given their acquisition of a substantial amount of heavy equipment with the routing of large numbers of Iraqi army units this summer they've acquired a lot of heavy equipment so what we have is practically a strategy that says that what we want to do is level the battlefield that to engage in low cost military intervention that will enable the United States to reduce the imbalance in force between the two sides so that local forces can contest ISIS and that finally brings me to the last point which is actually where the problem in the US in what the Obama administration has done it's not the policy the policy makes a lot of sense in this setting it's the disconnect between the policy and the rhetoric and that President Obama would quite correctly when his address said that we seek to degrade ISIS but then went and added the other DE which was to destroy it and the point is the rhetoric is different from the policy there's no interest in the United States in pursuing a course of action that would actually destroy ISIS and the danger in the disconnect is I can already see the next release from ISIS in say a year quoting President Obama about how he intended to how the United States intended to destroy ISIS with a sort of a message of we're still here thank you thank you again to each of our four panelists I almost said a question but I didn't want to ask questions please write a question down in your card and we'll try to use them any other way we can right now I'm going to start with a few questions that were sent from our UM-Dearborn Canvas they were watching the election and I want to be sure that their questions are burned I'm going to go ahead and just give three of them to the panelists and we'll start with that and have you respond to their questions the first question is how does ISIS be received or framed or interpreted by this political group and parties in the region the second is does ISIS have a political or civilian or diplomatic so how do they try to engage with other countries official international or regional diplomatic or preventives the third is do we have any sense of how many former Iraqi military officers are serving in or supporting the ISIS campaign are they integrated into ISIS or affiliated more indirectly and finally the fourth question is are there signs of resistance to ISIS in the area they control if so what groups or individuals are resisting so in terms of the panelists if anyone wants to respond to one or more of those or not respond to all the final all of them any questions do you want to hear I think from here is good so I don't have an answer to a good answer to all those questions but we do know from our surveys in the Arab world that support for Islam playing a political role is decreasing pretty substantially and pretty significantly there's some variation from country to country but as a result of what's happened during the Arab Spring and subsequent events the rise to power of Islamist governments in a number of really key countries Tunisia and Egypt popular discontent with those governments fueled perhaps in part by some things that the old regime did but basically by the poor performance of the governments themselves and those governments falling from power and most recently we had an election in Tunisia where the quote unquote secularist one I think it's I think it's a pretty good it's pretty good to infer from this that support for Islamist government and by extension ISIS would be evaluated on a bunch of different levels not just in terms of their Islamic ideology and their Islamic assertions but I think it's fair to say that support for what they represent is way down but one other point I would make is that we do know that they've been pretty successful in attracting individuals from some of these countries to go to ISIS and join as fighters and although this is somewhat anecdotal we know the classes out of which those people are coming they're not people with Islamic education or coming out of Islamic movements they're essentially the dispossessed and the unemployed so there isn't a lot of evidence that the Islamic message and what ISIS represents in that sense is finding a broad support there is some support for resistance to especially since the US has started bombing to the extent that we don't have a good reputation in the area and people who are seen as resisting us get a certain amount of support just by virtue of that but in the context of the question that was asked is this a model or an experience that draws a lot of support on its face given its mission I would say we're pretty confident in saying the answer to that as well and I say that the Arabic press throughout the region views ISIL and so-called caliph Abu Bakr as crackpots I mean the atmosphere in the region is it's sort of as though you know the Ku Klux Klan had taken over an American state and the leader the Grand Wizard had declared himself the Holy Roman Emperor I mean this is not with all due respect to my colleague not at all like Iran it doesn't have the legitimacy that the Islamic State of Iran has managed to establish for itself and it's in a game you know that happens to have managed to take over some territory in places where the state collapsed and so even the movements of political Islam in the region whether it's the Nakhda or Renaissance Party in Tunisia which just lost the election in favor of secularists there or the Muslim Brotherhood even Hamas and Gaza they all condemn these guys as a bunch of crazies who are the phrase is used that they're putting Islam in a bad light people are actively embarrassed about them and I don't know of any major pre-existing political grouping in the region that approves of them or speaks well of them or is willing to ally with them openly al-Qaeda which has repudiated them so they're just viewed as as outlaws and not as having any legitimacy at all the region and a poll was done in Syria of how many Syrians thought that ISIL represented them and it was 2% you have to worry about the 2% but it's still I think that's typical I'll add just a few quick comments in some of these in terms of how they act inside territories they want to try and act like a state and therefore they do things like try to collect taxes try to generate government revenue try to carry out justice and the like in that sense they do try and act like a state their relations to the extent we've heard about them with other Syrian rebel groups that are opposed to the Assad regime are not very pleasant in fact a lot of their rise came about from wars over control and so the fourth question about resistance to ISIS inside the areas they've occupied you hear stories about this but there are stories and one has no idea how widespread these are and it's this is not one where one can easily run an opinion poll there are several questions regarding Turkey and Turkey's role as well as the role of the Kurds and the impasses and how the Kurds are going to just lead a sampling of those questions and hope that those of you who ask other questions that are similar in your sampling of your question and heard so two on the role of Turkey first for all of the panelists what do you think about the role of Turkey in the crisis in Syria and Iraq how does this sector support this binationalist group how do you evaluate Turkey as a role model democratic sector in the war against ISIS can we trust Turkey as a reliable partner in the fight against ISIS why can we not rely on Turkey as a reliable partner and now on the Kurds and the role of the Kurds what are the chances of the Kurds in an independent state as a result of Iraq and Syria's failure and given the fierce Kurdish resistance to ISIS's advances in Syria what are the prospects for an independent Kurdish state there's also a question to Professor Tessler in particular about Kurdish attitudes and why their attitudes relate only to the sectarian identity as opposed to their ethnic national identity if you could speak a little bit about the sampling of the Kurds in the Kurdish areas of Iraq would any of you have to continue with the questions of Turkey well I'll say I think part of Turkey's perspective is the United States reliable ally for them they have a problem that they live in the neighborhood and that they have much more at stake than outside powers do which I think is part of their difference about being involved is they're afraid that basically everyone else will want them to do the heavy lifting well and we know that a couple of things that are driving Turkish assessments in this and their willingness or unwillingness to ally with us is the priority they attach to opposing the Assad regime in Syria and in particular they're worried that the strengthened Kurdish forces will end up opposing will be a force for more autonomy or even potentially independence for Kurds inside so it's exactly what Juan said the enemy of the friend of my enemy is necessarily the enemy of what he said is right so with regard to Turkey the thing to remember is that the current justice development party of Turkey tried very hard to be friends with Bashar al-Assad this is not something a situation where you can read off from political ideology because the justice and development party you can't call it an Islamist party it's a party which has some Islamists in it but it's a party that made its way in Turkey by advocating for a kind of multiculturalism you know how in the American right there's this myth about a war on Christmas and that religious people are somehow marginalized in the United States today and so forth that myth actually is true in Turkey that is religious people were marginalized in Turkey and there was a war on the equivalent of Christmas and secularists were empowered there and the justice and development party was a vehicle for people to reassert themselves who were religious but it didn't have as its goal overturning the traditions of the 20th century Turkish secularism in the main maybe at the margins but it wasn't like the Muslim brotherhood in Egypt or like the Khomeinists in Iran who wanted Islamic law as interpreted by medieval jurists to be the law of the land and so forth so they were perfectly happy to cooperate with the secular Baath government in Syria and indeed they had big plans for a kind of Turkish economic imperium in the Middle East they vastly expanded their trade in the Arab world which was on top of the trade with Europe so they added about 25% to their trade by reaching out to places like Syria so when the Arab Spring broke out and the Syrian people rose up against the regime the Assad regime decided to deal with this by drawing up tanks and firing tank shells into the middle of civilian peaceful demonstrations and just killing people or they put snipers up on the roofs of buildings and fired into the middle of the demonstrations and they would kill like 8 per demonstration it was very clear that they had a kind of quota to try to scare people from coming back out in which they failed but as things ratcheted forward the fact that ISIS dominated the upper echelons of the government and many of the protesters were Sunni Arabs from the center of the country made it increasingly look like a sectarian struggle and the Justice and Development Party represents the Sunni sort of more committed Sunnis of Turkey so it was impossible for them to stand with al-Assad in this situation they would have alienated their own right wing the Justice and Development Party and so they decided that Assad had to go but Assad going is a big problem because the Baath regime is a guarantor of stability there what would happen if the two million Kurds in northeast Syria spin off and become independent that's a problem for Turkey which is afraid of its own Kurdish separatists and that the country could get divided by ethnic lines what happens if Al-Qaeda takes over Syria and the Justice and Development Party is what our analysts call moderate Islam so they're afraid of Al-Qaeda and of crackdown on Turkey and so forth so I think the analysis is exactly right they don't exactly know what to do about all this they want Assad to go and they want people like themselves secular minded open minded Muslims to come to power in Syria and they don't know how to make that happen and as the religious the rebels have taken on a more and more radical coloration the Turks have kind of held their nose and continued to support the rebels but I think that it's gone in a direction that really puzzles them what to do about it and the United States has gone to Turkey and said see here we expect you to be an ally in this push against ISIL and the Turks have said yes we'll do that but then there's no follow through and they're clearly worried still about the Kurds and alienating their own Sunnis and all of these considerations can paralyze them one other point about Turkey so as I was saying that there's something of a division in the Middle Eastern Muslim world about whether Islam should or should not play an important role in political life and whether an Islamic political formula is the right political formula that's shrinking it's shifting toward the people who want Islam out of politics people who are very devout and for whom religion is very important but leaving out of politics but if we ask the people who do want Islam if who do embrace an Islamist political formula well is there a country that kind of represents what you think might be a good model most will say Turkey very few will say Iran just as a kind of side note and I wasn't sure about the question about the Kurds that I was asked just asking you maybe a student or a person asked a question to come to you that will tell you what I wanted to ask you and what would you tell about whether the Kurds were referring to the Saqqaian or other international and sort of private parts out yeah I'm not sure if we ask the question that way but it's clear the Kurds have in terms of where they live and in terms of language they speak that they've got more of an identity on their own and even under Saddam I think that was true to some extent in terms of the sample they came up in appropriate proportions and a national representative sample does anyone have anything to say about the process of independent Kurdish state that came up a couple of times in a Kurdish state in northern Iraq right well the Kurds in northern Iraq are independent they're the Taiwan of the Middle East they're independent in every way that matters the Iraqi National Army can't step foot in Kurdistan when you fly to Erbil they stamp your passport Kurdistan there's no mention of Iraq they're doing oil deals without going through Baghdad they're a state but it's like Taiwan if you say that publicly it causes a war so we can't talk about it there's a one Iraq policy and so the when ISIL took over Mosul the Iraqi army ran away from the north the Kurds inherited Kyrkuk which they have wanted for a long time they have three of the old Iraqi provinces and they went to the fourth they now have it, de facto and Masoud Barzani the president of Kurdistan announced that they would have a referendum in six months on independence he was just going to go for it and use ISIL as the pretext to go for it but then ISIL made a move on Erbil and the Peshmerga didn't really do very well we were all surprised because they were supposed to be good fighters and it was clear that they needed the Americans to come in to save them and the Americans told them we could save you but we don't like this independence that's going to cause trouble for our NATO ally Turkey and it will cause trouble for Saudi Arabia because minus Kurdistan Iraq is a very Shiite country so we want you not to declare independence and the Americans have come in and bombed ISIL and pushed them back from Erbil and all that talk about Kurdistan independence has gone away so you know Iran doesn't want it to be independent Turkey doesn't want it, the United States doesn't want it Syria doesn't want it so on and so on and so forth it's very hard to do but they have it de facto I have three questions that are specifically for President Madal first how seriously should we consider the objective of establishing a world-wide deal date on the part of either ISIS or Afghanistan second how accurately is what should be here reporting the facts of what is occurring within worldwide Muslim communities I'm not sure anybody can answer that but give me a break third it may be that Islamic leaders have condemned ISIS yet why is it that ISIS is such a stronger ongoing voice in social media it's probably added in relation to combinations by Islamic leaders so why am I getting more across than those that are condemning them it's a great question and finally if the whole world sees ISIS as terrorists why do we need to use the word Islamist could you say that last question again if the whole world sees ISIS as terrorists why do we need to use the word Islamist so the world-wide caliphate yeah I mean I don't think that they will ever succeed they don't have enough support and I don't think they have the means to do that but certainly just the mere intention the mere desire to do this to establish this we already see what's going on with ISIS I mean it's the cost we're concerned obviously but I'm not sure I'm not sure I'm not sure it's the cost we're concerned obviously the media there are some issues there media portrayal of Islam obviously the issue of let me answer the last question about ISIS why do we refer to it as Islamist Islamist this is a term that we use to refer to individuals and groups that think of Islam as a political ideology and so they certainly would qualify as Islamist using that understanding but they would of course be radical Islamists Islamist does not mean terrorists so they would be radical Islamists and of course this terminology I'm not so happy I'm not so excited about some of these terms that we use even like the term jihadist I think that actually encourages people maybe Harabist would be a more appropriate term where you're saying that they're guilty of Haraba which is the most severely punishable crime in Islamic law as for ISIS's popularity now perhaps my colleagues will have some thing to say about this certainly they actually Professor Tesla already mentioned that we see people from the west who are attracted to ISIS who maybe they just converted or they don't have much background in Islam who are attracted to ISIS because of its message it's there's something there's certainly an attraction there but I'll defer to my colleagues to sort of take it from there I'll add a quick comment about you know the other thing to understand about their strategy because they recruit trans-nationally they don't have to be popular with the very many people to succeed you know there's about one and a half billion Muslims in the world if they recruit one out of a hundred thousand that's fifteen thousand recruits and so in one sense if you think about that as a recruiting strategy part of it is they're very happy to lay out a very extreme vision because it is in part a recruiting tool for a certain segment of the people and it doesn't have to respond or be seen as legitimate in the eyes of very many people to be able to sustain that sort of authoritarian power a little work I'm thinking about attraction from Arab countries and I'm thinking in particular of Tunisia which is actually surprisingly maybe the country that has the largest number of foreign fighters in Syria or Iraq with ISIS and while there's a lot more work to be done it appears, as I said before it appears that these people are coming out of the really disadvantaged sector of society where people don't have much hope of a good future are looking for something to identify with there have been some studies in terms of how some of them are recruited and how people who go there send text messages back and try to tell them it's an important cause so we know something about it and it isn't really about Islam, I think that's the main point I would want to make and that it's the resistance or it's the promise of a better life and maybe for some the idea of dying and having something better in the afterlife I don't know if that's completely absent but it's not that they're sending out these messages and everybody says oh well that's what Islam is and she was, now I know I'm off I mean it's really not about that yeah there's no support for a revived caliphate in the Muslim world the polling on this is very clear there hasn't been actually a caliphate since 1258 when the Mongols took the bag apparently it was considered bad luck in medieval Islam to shed the blood of the caliph so the Mongols had this problem of how to kill him they rolled him up in a Persian carpet and beat him with hammers that was the last real caliph he didn't end well since then there have just been empires and states and kings and more recently republics and Sunni Islam has managed to deal with this and I would argue that actually what's happened in the last 150 years is that in ways we haven't recognized Sunni Islam has been protestantized so they don't have strong religious hierarchies in Sunni Islam their olamar clerics are more like protestant pastors than anything else and each country organizes the juris consults and the religion in a way so there's a mufti of Egypt and mufti of Syria and so forth so it's very much like Lutheranism Swedish Lutheranism and German Lutheranism so that's the way Sunni Islam is now organized it's organized on a national basis and what ISIL represents is a tiny lunatic fringe that's fighting against this protestantization of Sunni Islam and saying no we should have a united states of Islam we should have a unified caliphate from the Ottoman period typically the medieval period and so forth but it's not a widespread aspiration and frankly the Ibrahim Samaray who has a two bit Ph.D. from the University of Baghdad is not going to be the one that will inspire this vision in any case so it's really very consensical the only reason ISIL we're sitting here talking about it is the Syrian state collapsed and then the Iraqi state decided to badly mistreat its Sunnis and shell them from the air with caliphate gunships and drive them into the arms of even the lunatic fringe I don't expect them to have any staying power I think the main people involved in this movement are likely to be dead they don't want them there Iran doesn't want them there Syria doesn't want them there Baghdad doesn't want them there the United States doesn't want them there the UK, France so after a while they won't be there do you want to ask anyone so I need to ask a few more questions again our sampling of lost questions that are being asked and then we'll allow the analysts to decide whether they want to answer the specific questions left so another question is about the role of other countries not just Turkey but other countries like Saudi Arabia in the growth and development of ISIS I don't want to remark on that specifically one person from India talked a little bit more about ISIS's interaction with the states and the region so many of them brought to support the actions of ISIS which are, who are sampling the worst crimes of the region that's a broad question and then there are questions about strategies that the US can use other than ground troops or bombings is it possible for the US to limit the funding that ISIS receives how does ISIS generate some of the drug use what legal political barriers are present so I'm going to give you their ability to generate money and then there's a question to do about whether they can limit their ability to recruit religious media and OIs hopefully we can touch on that a bit questions that you want to address specifically or the money from general remarks in the last few minutes I just say on the revenue front that I believe the US government has tried to do some things about this I mean there's revenue sources there are some donations I don't think that's a large part of it they captured a huge amount of money when they overran parts of Northwestern Iraq they also have captured oil wells and they smuggle oil out through other places and in fact that's I believe one of the main reasons why one of the recent targets of US airstrikes were some of those oil wells and refineries an attempt to try and reduce that ability to raise money through oil yeah they the wealth of ISIL has been vastly exaggerated by the press especially compared to other such movements so well six or seven years ago during the Iraq war New York Times estimated that $5 billion a year was being smuggled in Iraqi petroleum out of refineries and busra by Shiite militias like the Matti army these are groups by the way which are actively now fighting ISIL in Iraq so my guess is that the Shiite militias in Iraq are on the order of ten times more well funded than ISIL is raw petroleum is not useful to anybody if I brought you a bucket of crude oil Ron wouldn't give me anything for it if I brought you a bucket of gasoline and I sold it to you for I could let you have it for $1.50 a gallon say that's what ISIL is doing and the way you deprive them of that income is you take away control of the refineries and the trucking routes from them so Turkey had built 12 small refineries in Syria I think it was in Iraq the province which ISIL captured and so the US has been bombing those they won't be there after a while and ISIL also has a position near the Beijing refinery in Iraq and I think they're able to capture some of the gasoline trucks from it but denying them the oil the money from smuggling oil wouldn't be so hard or at least denying the most of it but aside from these these kinds of sources of income they also appear to get big money from far right wing billionaires in the Gulf who have made their money in the oil industry and who have a very narrow vision of what society should be and they're not able to assert themselves of Kuwait or the UAE and the way that they would like so they're imagining a dreamland of Salafi Syria and they send the money to ISIL and the US Treasury Department now has sanctioned three Kuwaiti businessmen who we think were involved in this but there are lots more and there's a lot of money sloshing around the Gulf and there are a lot of people with way too much time on their hands and I think the Treasury Department is going to have to take more measures in this regard Is that a good question or maybe just wrap up the final remarks That's fine I thought that from the audience there's a lot of them is there Okay Where is it Is there any recommendations for improving the situation getting out He wants an item It's the only way out except to wait Well I don't have a good answer to that question I think it's good that it's asked and that people reflect on it but I think one of the things that needs to happen that maybe we're sort of trying to make happen is that the people who are the people who are in the areas controlled by ISIS who are willing or who feel they have no choice but to hold their nose and make an alliance with them or support them need to have alternatives and that means a kind of political configuration and system of government in Baghdad in which Sunni as well as everybody else can find themselves That's not terribly original because we've been saying that and we're pushing for that and their force is on the other side pushing against Iran for example but I think I mean there's both the inside and the outside story to what extent can we Is there more we can do to prevent people from going there but limit their ability to recruit Yeah I'm working with some governments to try to do that but there are going to be limits to what extent can we change the political equations in Iraq so people are making different kinds of calculations that's easier to say than to do and even to spell out exactly what that would mean is kind of hard but I think we know that part of their success has been that some of the territory they've captured they've had support from the local population given the things that some of us have talked about how things look from the point of view of Sunnis in the areas where they've come in and successfully chased the Shia army out The only other thing I would say by way of a concluding comment is it'd be nice to kind of figure out a way to divorce and maybe this is not possible but to remove Islam from some of this discussion or to put it in a in a more restricted kind of context as opposed to coming back well is this what Islam is really about well yeah sort of but on the other hand there are Islamic clerics that condemn it in a way we shouldn't be having that conversation we should kind of recognize that it's really an aberration by self-appointed people you may or may not think they have some legitimate causes given the way the Sunnis have suffered at the hands of the Shia in recent years which is the opposite of the way the Shia suffered at the hands of Saddam in an earlier period but to kind of keep coming back and we haven't really done this but it's kind of is in the air when people in the US talk about it so we're getting all these different images of Islam and maybe they're all sort of legitimate in a certain way and this is one of the legitimate messages even though it's not the only one but it's an aberration I could not agree more thank you