 Good afternoon. Welcome to the New America Foundation. I'm Peter Bergen, the Director of the International Security Program here. It's really a great pleasure to welcome a great friend of the New America Foundation and a friend of mine, Colonel Joel Rayburn, who has written this wonderful new book, Iraq After America, Strongman's Secretarians and Resistance. Of course, when Joel started writing this book, no one cared about Iraq. I think. Well, I'm overdoing you. And suddenly, you know, Iraq is very much back in the headlines, and this book comes at a very important moment. Basically, this book supplies the reasoning and the history about how we got to where we are today. Colonel Rayburn is a long-term U.S. Army Intelligence Officer. He served with General Petraeus in Iraq as part of his very small Commander's Advisory Group. He is completing his PhD at Texas A&M University. His PhD is also related to this subject. It's the British experience in Iraq, which I guess basically wasn't that great. And he's now at National Defense University as a research fellow. And so Joel is going to talk about some of the big themes of his book for 20 minutes or so, and then we're going to throw it open to Q&A. I just wanted to mention, you know, Joel is an active duty Army Officer, and so obviously he's not going to talk about U.S. military strategy today and not going to comment on, you know, operations going forward. Thank you, Joel. Thank you all for being here. And just to stress, what I'm going to say is entirely, the views are entirely my own, and they don't necessarily represent those at National Defense University or the Department of Defense. What I'd like to do is just tell you a little bit about what I was attempting to do with this book and then maybe describe the major arguments within it, and then I'd be very interested in your thoughts and questions. I began to, I set out to write this book because it seemed to me that the vast majority of the literature on the last decade in Iraq, the post-Siddam Iraq, focused on us, the U.S. government, the U.S. military, and there was usually, the Iraqi dynamics and political trends were either greatly oversimplified. Not that my own book isn't oversimplified. I mean, Iraq is a place so complex that you can't help but simplify it if you're trying to explain it. But I thought that most literature was either an oversimplification or they just ignored the Iraqi dynamics altogether. And I thought that there were many places during the war when we were fighting it where the Iraqi dynamics were more important than what we were doing. And that was actually usually the case. But it was usually, it usually didn't register here. And I also thought that Iraq is an important state in an important region toward whom we should have a policy that's based on Iraq on its own merits. But I thought that we've been weighed down for so long by our own political baggage, first by the question of invading or not in 2003 and then the question of leaving or not in 2011. I thought these were distracting us from a clear-eyed assessment of where our interests lie and what the nature of the newly emerging Iraqi state and policy should be or is. And because, I mean, Iraq, everyone knows about the oil. Iraq is an enormous oil power. Probably has, if there were some honesty applied to the numbers, the second largest proven oil reserves in the world. It has a growing population. It's well over 30 million now in a high rate of increase. And obviously it's the center of a security situation that has implications far beyond its borders. All of these are important factors that I thought should be dealt with on their own merit. I wrote this book as a thesis at the National War College. So I'm really grateful to the National War College for giving me the time and space to do that, especially professors Joe Collins and Nick Rostow who offered me such good mentorship and advice. But I owe the most in writing this book to the late Flaad Ajami who really urged me for years to write a book like this. And then once it was written, they accepted it for publication at the Hoover Institution. And I don't think I would have written it without his prompting over several years. So that, for example, if I would ever send him an email on what I thought was happening in Iraq based on the news of the day, he would always reply back saying, that's going in the book you're writing, right? As a way to keep me on task. And I actually tried to consciously model this book on what Ajami did in books such as the Syrian Rebellion. My method was to go back and examine the post-Saddam power struggle and the civil war that ensued from an Iraqi perspective, mainly with Americans and international forces factored out. And by doing that, I hoped to let the internal Iraqi competition amongst different political factions come into greater relief. When you do that, you realize that Iraqi politics didn't just begin from zero in 2003. There are much longer running trends and competitions going back for several decades. That there are larger tectonic plates shifting in Iraqi politics and society. And I think those are actually more important than a meta phenomenon such as ISIS. What I believe I observed over the years of being in and watching Iraq was that there were three trends that had come to dominate post-Saddam Iraqi politics. Authoritarianism, sectarianism, and Islamist militant resistance. So I set out to trace those trends back in recent Iraqi history to explain where they came from and how they've interrelated and collided at times since 2003 and where they're likely to lead the country in the future and what they mean for others, including us. And along the way I wanted to describe what I thought were the most powerful of the emerging Iraqi political factions today and how they relate to one another and to us. So let me describe each of these three trends in turn in a little more detail. The first authoritarianism was mainly a matter of tracing the rise and then the ultimate fall, or maybe fall, of Nuri Maliki and his faction of the Dawah party. So former prime minister Nuri Maliki, now current vice president, and his cadre of Dawah party loyalists since 2006 undertook an extensive consolidation of state power and they succeeded largely in reverting much of the Iraqi government to the muscle memory of the Saddamist state that Saddam and the Ba'ath had ruled. So these Maliki yun, or the Maliki regime, originated as part of an Iraqi-Shia Islamist movement in the 1960s and 1970s that was led by Muhammad Bakr Sader. But as young men, Maliki and the rest were profoundly affected by the Ba'athist crackdown against that Sader-led movement and by the events, the course of the Iran-Iraq War during which time they grew into a militant cadre that became essentially a mirror image of the Ba'ath with whom they were at war. And so once they came into power after 2003, they resembled the Ba'ath in power. They weren't the strongest Shia opposition party at any point before 2003, but after 2003, once they returned to Baghdad, they managed to grow from a weak junior partner in the Shia Islamist opposition or coalition into a powerful ruling network that essentially came to control virtually all the national-level institutions of the government and they dominated Iraqi political life until a few weeks ago, and we're not sure that they will release their grasp actually ultimately. We don't know where that's going to go. And Maliki himself grew during these years from a weak premier who was elected because he was viewed as a harmless cipher to a strong man who towered over the Iraqi political class strangely. And he began to lead Iraq back into dictatorship by consolidating control of the pillars of the Iraqi state, especially its military and security apparatus and oil revenues. And it remains to be seen whether this neo-authoritarian structure that he created can be unraveled by better-intentioned leaders of whom I think Haider Abadi is one. Next on sectarianism, sectarianism has always been present in Iraq, but I don't believe it anywhere. I mean, I would argue not to the extent to which it dominates political and social life now. What we've seen since 2003 I think is a hardening of Iraq's sectarian and ethnic fractures into a rigid political order so that Sunni Shia and Arab Kurd rivalries dominate every political question and they enable ethno-sectarian extremist groups and terror networks to thrive inside the society. I think this process, I argue that it did, began when mainly ex-patriot parties returned to Iraq in 2003 without a mass following but with sectarian agendas in mind. And I think they set out consciously to polarize Iraqi society along sectarian lines in order to create constituencies for themselves and things spiraled downward from there. There are three different strains that I've written about. The first are what I call Shia supremacists. And when I say these, I don't mean all Shia, but I mean people who are Shia supremacists. These emerged out of the Shia Islamist opposition to Saddam, mainly in militant factions, many of them associated with Iran. And they sought to replace Iraq's Sunni political and social ascendancy with a Shia one. And they took advantage of the collapse of Saddam's regime in 2003 to gain control of state institutions and to attempt to push Sunnis out of Iraq's mixed provinces, especially greater Baghdad, something that they had great success in doing during the large scale sectarian cleansing of 2005 to 2007 when upwards of, I don't even know how many, I forget how many, but I think three quarters of a million Sunnis were pushed out of the Baghdad region. Groups such as the Border Corps, led by Hadi al-Amri, still politically, if not militarily, went into the state institutions, such as the Interior Ministry, and they remade them into sectarian sorting and cleansing machines, and they continue that kind of activity today, just at varying levels of intensity. In response to that was a strain that I call Sunni chauvinism. Again, not all Sunnis, but chauvinists amongst the Sunnis, who are the analog to the Shia supremacists who fought back against the new Shia ascendancy in 2003 and they used violence to try to derail the U.S.-led political process. They originated in the Sunni Islamist movement of the 1970s and 1980s, which was affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood directly, and which covertly opposed Saddam during the Iran-Iraq War, inside Iraq. But after 1991, this strain of Sunni Islamism was fused with baptism when Saddam undertook his faith campaign of the 1990s, which was an Islamistization of the Bathis regime that was intended to rebuild the Baths' broken legitimacy after their defeats in Kuwait. When the regime and the Intifada, the uprising that they had to fight after the defeat in Kuwait, when Saddam's regime fell in 2003, this fused Bathis Islamist machinery immediately moved into insurgency. Against the new Shia and Kurdish-led government and against the U.S.-led coalition. And much of it remains in armed opposition to the Iraqi state today, such as in Mosul and the upper Tigris. A third strain of sectarianism is Kurdish maximalism, which is a question of those who aim to enlarge Kurdistan and to preserve a Kurdish ascendancy over Sunni Arabs and Sunni Turkmens in northern Iraq. They saw an opportunity to do this in 2003 with the disappearance of Saddam's divisions, and they moved into traditionally Sunni Arab-dominated and Sunni Turkmen-dominated territories to do a few things, to create a land bridge to other Kurdish territories outside Iraq, to occupy the oil and gas-rich territories of the north, and as I say, to cement a political ascendancy over Sunni Arabs and Sunni Turkmens in the north. But these events sparked an Arab-Curd war that has never really ended along the green line and over for control of the disputed territories, especially the oil-rich districts of Mosul and Kirkuk, on which the future viability of any Kurdish state will depend, or for that matter, the future viability of any independent northern Sunni state, which is I think the biggest reason that they're fighting. The end result of these three strains of sectarianism over the last decade is in Iraq that's more thoroughly sorted by sect and ethnicity than at any time before, and it's ruled by community leaders that are so sharply at odds with one another, I believe that a return to full-scale war amongst them is plausible at any moment, based on an unpredicted spark. The truth is, in my view, that Iraq is already divided into at least two countries, an Arab-Iraq and a Kurdish-Iraq, and someday could well be divided further still. With the ongoing fragmentation of Syria, which we have to concede, which is now a failed state, there's a greater Kurdistan that's emerging, and it's going to be one that will be beyond Baghdad's means to control, I believe. And that'll be one of the dominant questions of the coming decade, which will be whether this enlarged Kurdistan remains within an Iraqi confederation or it just departs from Iraq altogether for some new political arrangement. And also, at issue is whether a full-scale Arab-Kurd war will ensue in either case. The Iraqi state today, obviously, is already at war with Sunni militant groups such as Daesh, and so far the state is losing. With each passing month of the war between the Maliki government, the recent Maliki government and Daesh, Daesh demonstrated its growing capacity to do damage to the Iraqi state, and the Maliki government proved its incapacity to stop it. What Daesh showed, ISIS showed, was that the Maliki regime was a faction with ever greater control over an increasingly ineffective state. But I think, away from the politics, probably the most disturbing feature of this new sectarian political scene in the last decade in Iraq is that the sectarian leaders who began by dragging their people towards sectarianism now often have to run to keep up with them. So opinion polls and elections, for example, tell us that the harsher the politicians' rhetoric and the more provocative the deployment of their forces, the more their political support grows. While Iraqi leaders who reach out to other sects or quarrel amongst the sects in public tend to pay a political price for doing so. So in other words, after a decade of having sectarians empowering Iraq, their project is threatening to take permanent root in Iraqi society. The last trend I'd like to mark is that of the Shia Islamist resistance. The Shia Islamist resistance movements originated in the grass roots Shia Islamist movement that followed Muhammad Bakr Sader. And they were presided over by Muhammad Sadik Sader in the 1980s and 1990s who created a vast grass roots network of several million people especially across the south and the Baghdad region. And which became a militant insurgent network after 2003 under Sadik Sader's son Muktada in which today is still sort of a nebulous political movement that represents I think the largest political movement in Iraq. During their long war against us and against Iraqi Sunnis, this larger Saderist militant movement fragmented into smaller militant groups that each quickly came under the domination of the Iranian regime especially Qasem Soleimani and the Quds Force. And that remains the case today. But in recent years, especially since our troops departed in 2011, these Iranian-sponsored Shia militant groups have ranged beyond Iraq to Syria and even elsewhere to fight in sectarian wars outside Iraq's borders and they become sort of little brothers to Lebanese Hezbollah. So in other words, Muhammad Sadik Sader's heirs have spawned both Iraq's largest political movement and their closest parallel to Lebanese Hezbollah. And they enjoy the bounty of the Iranian regime. I think that means that in the future, these Iraqi Shia militants will be able to pursue their aims while enjoying resources and open political support and freedom of movement around the region that Sunni groups like Daesh cannot replicate. Given the youthfulness of this Iraqi Shia militant movement, I think these resistance groups will be able to visit violence on their opponents inside Iraq and out for at least a generation to come. So some conclusions from these trends. I think these three trends of authoritarianism, sectarianism and resistance have had a highly destructive effect on Iraqi politics and society over the past 11 years. And it's one that's accelerated since the U.S. departure in 2011. The current war in Iraq didn't break out in June of 2014 after a period of peace. The war never really ceased at any point since 2003. It's just had periods of varying intensity. After a nine month government formation stalemate in 2010, the longest of any parliamentary government in modern world history, Maliki returned to the premiership in a power sharing deal that he promptly reneged upon. And then many of his opponents took part in an abortive Arab Spring that the Maliki regime violently suppressed in 2011, after which began a two-year crackdown by Maliki's regime on the government's mainstream Sunni political opposition. So as Maliki and his allies destroyed the Sunni political center, they opened up political space for the spillover of the Syrian civil war, where every Iraqi faction was fighting as though part of a foreign legion. So the war next door in Syria came home in early 2013, when the initially nonviolent political rallies in Sunni cities became armed opposition camps and clashed with Maliki's security forces. When Fallujah fell to Daesh and other militants at the beginning of this year, that takeover of the city had already been a year in the making. I think the most tragic consequence of this litany of events has been the tearing of the Iraqi social fabric, which has been cosmopolitan and relatively cohesive for the Middle East for at least centuries, not millennia. Iraq's people today know that they live in a country at civil war, and it's impossible to understand them or predict what they'll do either in their daily lives or at a political level without recognizing that they make decisions and conduct their day-to-day lives and behave toward one another according to that simple reality that they are at war. Few of them can afford to do otherwise without risking their own survival, as the numbers of the killed and wounded, day in and day out, week after week, year after year tell us. But the casualty figures don't tell the full story. For example, throughout Iraq's modern history, Iraqis who migrated into the country's urban areas worked and studied and lived alongside other sects and ethnicities, meaning that several million Iraqis live and families created by intermarriage, especially those in the greater Baghdad region where young Sunni and Shia people would meet in universities or work alongside one another in the ministries and wind up married in the same with Arabs and Kurds. The idea of partitioning the country into sectarian cantons would leave these millions of people with no clear place to go. It would be a vast human tragedy. But even so, the problem may be passing into history because the Baghdadis of 2014 report that the separation of the sects has extended into the schools, the markets and the offices with the result that intermarriage has virtually ceased. So for Sunnis and Shia, sect in Iraq is hardening into a new ethnicity. It needn't have turned out this way, I firmly believe. I know many Westerners think that since Iraq's borders were originally an artificiality created by Europeans that it must follow that Iraq itself is an artificiality and there's no genuine Iraqi national identity. I mean, how many times have we seen that written in some op-ed? But for all of these fractures that run through Iraqi society and for all the deepening fissures that I've described, it seems to me there remains a silent majority of Iraqis of all kinds, even Kurds, who would greatly prefer to live together as one people in one country. And there were many instances, even in the darkest days of the Civil War of the popular backlash against sectarian parties, something that I think showed that common Iraqis were hungry for an opportunity to express a common national identity. And if ever there were a political movement that could harness that cross-sectarian spirit, it might just captivate a large enough following to overcome the sectarian zero-sum game. But that kind of movement would have to arrives from the connections that bind Iraq's people and institutions, their professions, civil society groups, tribes, and the local communities together. And these are the ties that the sectarians have spent the last decade systematically trying to dissolve. As I said at the beginning of the remarks, I consider Daesh or ISIS to be a metaphenomenon. There's a larger conflict going on on several different levels. And even what I would say is, I'd bet that even if every Daesh fighter dropped dead tonight, that the war would go on tomorrow. So my main point is this, the fundamental political issues, the fundamental questions that have dogged Iraq and led to near-constant conflicts since its creation, such as the relationship between Shia and Sunni Arabs in a state, the relationship between the people writ large in the state, the relationship between Kurdistan and the rest of Iraq, the relationship between Iraq and its neighbors. All these remain unsettled. And unfortunately, it's Iraq's strongmen, sectarians, and Shia Islamist resistance that control the pathways towards resolving them. And as long as they do, further conflict among the Iraqi communities is assured, I believe. In December 2011, as the last U.S. troops were leaving Iraq, and Prime Minister Maliki was visiting D.C. for sort of a farewell tour, I heard an Iraqi politician visiting the city tell a small audience, you Americans seem to think this means the end of the power struggle in Iraq. It does not. Now that the Americans are going, we'll see the real start of the power struggle for Iraq, not the end. And with that, I'll be happy to take your questions. Interprospects. And in fact, Colonel Rabin has been predicting what was going to happen in Iraq over the last three years, and quite a bit of substance he was having with friends and experts on Iraq. So is there anything that gives you some modicum of hope? Is there any, because the burden of what you've suggested is an almost permanent state of civil war for a time period that this could go on indefinitely? Well, yeah. I mean, there are some causes for optimism, or I'd say there are some opportunities that could be taken if there was a political will to do it. The first is that Iraq has enormous resources of many kinds. Not just the oil revenues, but they have arable land and water, so they have the potential to revive an agricultural sector. The society has a memory of being together. That's not yet broken. And I think I'm cautiously optimistic that the authoritarian bent of the Iraqi government can be reversed if Prime Minister Abadi can rally around him sort of a reform team of technocrats and people who are willing, you know, non-sectarian politicians, and they do exist. But he'll be hamstrung in that by the influence of the Iranian regime and by some of these other sectarian actors. So it's not something that's going to happen overnight. But you see glimpses that he and the people that are allied with him want to do that if they can. So yesterday, for example, they abolished the office within the sub-office, within the Prime Minister's office that the Prime Minister had used to directly control the Iraqi military, the office of the commander in chief, which was something that had undermined the entire defense institution and intelligence institution. So for that thing to be gone is a very good first step. But there are, you know, there's a Saddamist and there's a Malakist muscle memory in the government institutions now that a reform team would have to overcome. So I mean, we'll watch for the signs. Those are the encouraging bits. Has there been any agreement on the oil law? No. Has there been any agreement on the sort of provincial boundary law? No. These are the two big ones? Well, what they represent, yeah. I mean, it's more than just the oil and it's more than just where the line is between this or that province. What you're talking about is the relationship of Kurdistan to the rest of Iraq first and foremost and what share of Iraq's resources will Kurdistan have and will it have them directly or will they have a sharing that is administered by Baghdad? And where the line is on the ground, it's more than just will this village be in or out of the Kurdistan regional government. It's, will Kurds dominate a larger territory than Sunni Arabs and Sunni Turkmens are willing to accept or will Sunni Arabs and Turkmens try to fight to prevent that outcome? Would an Iraq minus Kurdistan, well, would it be functional? Well, it could potentially be functional. I mean, Iraq's not functional now with Kurdistan. So, good point. The Iraqi state is not. But I mean, yeah, Iraqi, would there be enough oil revenue to go around? Sure, yeah. I mean, Kurdistan has, I mean, the estimates I've seen are that Iraqi Kurdistan has about 45 billion barrels of oil and the rest of Iraq has probably more than a hundred million or a hundred billion, rather. So, I mean, there's enough to, there's enough to share and both an Iraqi Kurdistan and the rest of Iraq could be middle income countries on the world scale if their resources were developed properly. So, let's take some questions and have a question raise your hand and we're going to have a mic if you can just wait and start with Phoebe Maher. Phoebe Maher, I'm a historian of Iraq and I want to thank you so much, Joe, because I thought that was a fascinating talk. Thank you. And I have to say, Peter, I hope that Joe and I are both wrong but my inclination at this point is to sort of tend to agree with where Joel comes out on this now. Just one comment and I do have a question. This whole issue of communal identity on the social level, how bad it has gotten. My husband, who happens to be in Iraq, he's been in his country since 77, we have multiple Iraqi friends of all kinds. This regime, all the way back past Saddam's regime, the monarchy and so on. And for the very first time in the last couple of years when we have a dinner party or a small gathering, we have to think whether we're mixing Shia and Sunni because some of these people simply won't come if certain other people are there. That's just mind-boggling to me, but it's happened on a number of occasions so it's going to be very difficult, I think, to pull people back from these feelings at a personal level. On the question, Joe, in looking through Iraqi history and I couldn't agree more that it's time to look at Iraqi agency, not keep bringing in the United States, how does that function and so on. My question myself has always been with this long history of opposition to Saddam, much of which, of course, took place right here in the United States, in Britain, with a great variety of opposition elements. Not only the religious Shia, but the secular Shia, Kurds, you know, all kinds of people how is it that, before long, we ended up with the one group that I didn't think really had that much support on the ground, dominant, namely Dahua and the better or Iski, what turned out to be the, I can't even remember what it stands for anymore, but the religious Shia groups. And one of the reasons I think that gave that a big push is I go back and look at the 1990s, for example. After we got in, a rapid attempt to introduce a constitution and democratic reforms and the argument with Bremer and so on and the Bush administration on the election, the early election, which Sistani in fact insisted on, of course, he was right in one sense, you can't have a constitution written by the Americans and handed over to the Iraqis. But in an attempt to do that and adjust the timetable, the election was held very early. And given everything that took place beforehand, that almost assured this narrative. The Shia are a majority, not just a Shia who have a different particular point of view, but this time it was organized and helped along by, let's say, sectarian religious Shia. And so we now have this pattern. Oh, I'm sorry. We now have this pattern where if you have an election, it's going to be on a sectarian or ethnic basis. How do you see that going forward? Yeah, I agree with you that we helped to bake the sectarianism into the cake. And it's true that people who are a Shia sect are a majority in Iraq. But if you were to ask the question differently and say, let's say they're 50-something percent, upwards of 55 percent of the population. But for how many of that 55 percent of the population was the fact that they were of the Shia religious sect, the most important aspect of their identity before 2003? And I think you would have had a small minority or at least you wouldn't have had more than a plurality. You'd have had a very large Shia population that were much more nationalist, much more across sectarian in their attitudes and I think would have been part of a silent cross-sectarian political majority. So when we traveled in in 2003 and those who traveled with us put them into the Rocky Governing Council on a sectarian... it wasn't just that it was according to a sectarian quota. It's that we advertised it as a sectarian quota and then we put as its representatives those who were representatives of religious political parties. So Islamist political parties as opposed to saying here's a secular Shia person about whom Shia identity is not the most important aspect who represents a non-sectarian political party and it happens to be on the Governing Council. So we sort of... we went in as though with a Lebanese conssociational formula from day one and that helped to accelerate the polarization of the country and you can sort of see though at times you could see Iraqi society and Iraqi electorate kind of try to shrug that off at different times so that the Islamist parties who were voted in in the early elections when they were the only ones who were really organized to fight the election in 2005 by 2009 they were shucked out of the provinces when there were local elections and I think also probably that was another mistake was having national level elections as the first thing and then declaring the entire... adopting an Italian, you know, no offense to the Italians but you know it's not exactly the most stable parliamentary political system that they've got so to do it the way we did it or it was done was to declare the entire country one political... one electoral district and then have closed lists where you didn't even know who the candidates were it was just a bit mad. I understand the reasons why it was done they didn't want to put people's names on the list so they'd wind up getting assassinated but I mean it was... the surprise composition in the parliament that ensued was highly negative and produced a highly... you know a very very controversial constitution where partition was almost built in so I think all of those were mistakes but again that's sort of... I mean those were mistakes that we contributed heavily to and the Iraqis have been saddled with Would Iraq be better on Saddam? No, I wouldn't wish Saddam back on the Iraqis Is there any Saddam that's sort of nostalgia? There certainly is Saddam nostalgia I mean people remember... some people not all I think remember life under Saddam as being more secure and predictable as opposed to having militias roaming around in no rule of law under Saddam, you know people who were not in opposition to Saddam were just kind of normal people kind of recall fondly that they could go to the market and not have it blown up and that kind of thing but I mean that is an extremely low bar but it's a bar that a lot of Iraqis now feel I don't know how many to be honest with you I don't know how many I would suspect not many Kurds and not many Shia, you know, would want especially in the south especially in Kurdistan proper and in the very heavily Shia majority south where there's not a lot of fighting going on So violence today is back at 2008 levels What does that mean for the average Iraqi? Well, I mean this month is going to mean that there are 2,000 civilians killed violently in Iraq And the population of Afghanistan in Iraq is roughly similar? Yes And 3,000 Afghan civilians were killed last year in the war? Right, so it's many times more violent for the average Iraqi and it's even further concentrated because it's in Central Iraq and the upper Euphrates Valley and the upper Tigris Valley It's 8 times more violent in Iraq for the average civilian that is in Afghanistan Yeah, I think that's probably Just doing back of the envelope So that isn't really well understood in the United States I feel like people tend to bracket Afghanistan and Iraq together Yeah, the character of the conflict is different in Iraq, it's much more violent This gentleman here Bill Tucker I've worked in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein representing a number of U.S. companies and I guess my question is two-part Wouldn't Iraq and the rest of the world be better off if Iraq separated into three parts? The Iraqis and the Shiites and the Sunnis and the Kurds and the Kurds seem to be on a path to do that and I think they have the capability of defending the Kurdish area and maybe taking over the oil fields and the two oil fields in that area in Kirk and in Mosul And wouldn't that be a better outcome for the country and also a better protection for us and the rest of the world for this oil supply that Iraq represents? If that oil supply is taken over by insurgents that do not have democracies in their best interest then we're going to lose and the rest of the world is going to lose a huge supply of oil and gas So was Biden right? No, I think that would be a nightmarish outcome and actually I think the oil would be less secure if the country were to truly fragment I mean, where do the lines wind up? So there are at least half a million there used to be far more Sunnis south of Baghdad and in the Diyala Valley Do they stay or are they marooned in Shia stand in the future? Something that they'll fight against or are they just visited at their homes and told they have to leave? I mean, the separation is India Pakistan just on a smaller scale So it's the Sunnis who would be left in Shia stand It's all other religious minorities of the north who would be left in Sunni stand and we're already seeing them chased from their homes in very large numbers It's all the Kurds who live beyond the green line who are in unprotected communities and so on and I also don't think that it stops there it's not just that there's a Sunni state and a Shia state and a Kurdish state I think then that the Sunni territories would not combine in one state they'd be at least two and then you'd have what results I think you'd have wars amongst the statelets that would result and they would most particularly fight over the oil and the gas fields and the infrastructure so I think that'd be even worse That may be the most likely outcome but it's not by any means it doesn't mean we should just go ahead and enable it to the extent that we could Is the Beiji oil field is that the biggest oil facility? It's the biggest refinery Beiji is not an oil field Beiji is fed oil from Kirkuk and other disputed territories To what extent does ISIS control or not control Beiji? I don't think they control it only the people on the ground can say for sure they're certainly in the area and when we say ISIS we say Daesh it's not really just ISIS or Daesh we're talking about Sunni militant groups of all flavors that are there and just as Al-Qaeda in Iraq got 90% of the media attention but was probably 20% of the Sunni insurgency even at its height the same thing now I think ISIS dominates the airwaves but there are far more people under arms than those that are calling themselves ISIS and even those that are calling themselves ISIS maybe they called themselves something else last month and maybe now that they're air strikes against ISIS they'll call themselves something else next month we saw that that people below a cadre level that people flow in and out of these militant groups based on who can pay and who's winning and so is that just digging into that a bit the other Sunni groups are the Nashkir Bandis well actually Naqshbandis are not in religious doctrinal terms they're not actually Sunnis they're Sufi but isn't that a kind of misnomer I mean they're really sort of they're Bathis by another name they're Bathis they're not really like Sufis who are practicing well in dervish dances that's right just like right like the Shriners aren't in Egyptian or whatever they're supposed to be so who else in this kind of potpourri of Sunni is sort of groups ISIS is at the top but it kind of gives us a typology of these other groups and how big they are do you really want that yeah well I think it's pretty relevant there are so there's ISIS but there's also there are other groups that were very closely under al-Qaeda and Iraq's umbrella and al-Qaeda and Iraq just being the earlier incarnation of ISIS so ISIS used to be ISI remember that the Islamic State of Iraq became the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham some people say Syria or ISIL if you're in the government but so in the Islamic State of Iraq there were a lot of different militant groups al-Qaeda and Iraq was one Ansar al-Sunnah Ansar al-Islam and I'll forget the rest and then there were a whole bunch of little cats and dogs that were sort of affiliated with them but those were the big ones then there were Bathis Islamist insurgent groups and the Naqshbandis are one and they're very much centered around Kirkuk and Hawija and Tikrit Saddam's old home territory there's a group called Jash al-Islami and then there are several others that are smaller who are they were Bathis and Islamist at the same time so Jash Rashidin Jash Muhammad Jash Mujahideen you know Mike Pregent sitting there knows these encyclopedically and I'll leave some out but there were basically there were two strains there was the al-Qaeda types and the Salafi militant types and there were the Bathis militant types and are they kind of morphed together now? you know it's very interesting that over time al-Qaeda and Iraq which began as Zarkawi's organization was foreign led so it had Jordanians, Egyptians and Saudis in the leadership and they absorbed Iraqis in as foot soldiers and mid-level management but as the guys, as the foreigners were killed off Iraqis rose in that organization and the ones who rose they were both pure Salafis some of them who had been able to study in mosques under Saddam's faith campaign in the 90s but they were also Bathis Bathis intelligence and Bathis military people some of whom Saddam's regime had encouraged to go study and be Salafis in the 90s when he was Islamizing the Bathis regime so that's why you get reports like we have recently that one third of the top guys in ISIS are former Bathis military or Bathis intelligence do you think that's true? yeah I do because you could see it we detained or killed thousands of these guys we had them in the detention facilities interrogate them and find out to the extent that you can accurately their backgrounds and you find out there were a lot of people that had positions in the old regime who were in these Islamist militant groups this gentleman here my name is Hal Kasoff question about the vision of Shia political leadership the Maliki types who are still lurking very close to the surface there do they feel that they could eventually dominate the Kurds and the Sunnis and if so are they willing to accept Iranian domination within their movement and the final part of that is how does the United States deal with that especially since we're virtually allies in this fight against ISIS there are different I mean amongst the Shia Islamist politicians they sort of fall in different places along the spectrum in terms from you know non-sectarian slash cross-sectarian over to believing themselves in alignment with Iran's interests and willing to sort of be an Iranian satellite state those are the guys all the way on the extreme but they're there to my mind Maliki fell further away from the Iranian side toward the side of you know Maliki wasn't interested in channeling Iranian power into Iraq he was interested in establishing a Maliki state that was going to be strong enough to be able to be independent of the Iranian regime so the ways in which he cooperated with the Iranian regime I think it was all a matter of expediency for him it was something that he had to do in order to finish off internal rivals and consolidate his power to the point where he could someday tell the Iranians to take a hike and to the extent that he was interested in a strategic relationship with us in my opinion it was as a balance against the Iranian regime so that he wouldn't have to rely so strictly on them but I also think that he represents a strain that believed that the Sunnis and especially the Sunni Bathists were the biggest political threat to that Maliki state or Adawa state and that that was the first order of business and so if they needed to enlist Iranian support they needed to enlist Kurdish support to finish off the Sunni Bathis threat then so be it and that's what they've done for the last ten years but you could also see Maliki ultimately Maliki was not interested in having an independent Kurdistan especially one that was going to carry Kirkuk out of the country and or carry the upper Diyala valley out of the country he was going to fight against that and you could see that by the way he would deploy troops he was willing to deploy Sunni Iraqi army units up on the edge of Iraqi Kurdistan in order to try to deter the Kurds from doing this or that or to try to tip the balance in the national political struggle over the Kurds share of the budget or the resolution of the disputed territories so Maliki was much more interested in keeping the Iraqi state intact than I think those who are further down the spectrum toward Iran and I think his formula was going to be that from Samara down to the Gulf was going to be that was going to be solidly Shia territory and in the other territories that he would just sort of divide the factions and broker amongst them or he'd pick a local faction and use it to sort of keep order both in Anbar and in Mosul you could see him doing that constantly looking for Sunni tribal partners for example in Anbar through which his largesse could flow and who could kind of keep things under control in territories where there were no Shia so he didn't seem to care that much who kept the peace there as long as they stayed in their box followed his instructions and didn't start a war against his state but of course none of those things happened is there any reason to think the Ambari tribes will rise up against ISIS or is that unlikely? the Ambari tribes will always rise up against whoever is trying to dominate them time immemorial but it's a question of do they have the means to do it and can they organize and actually pull it off they're not going to do it independently and they're not going to stick their necks out if it's a grave risk which I think is why for example when we say Ambari we're talking about those tribes all along the Euphrates valley I think up to Derazor and look what Daesh just did to the tribe I don't remember the name of the tribe that had an abortive tribal uprising in Derazor district and they massacred 700 of them so that was a message I think that was to be sent up and down the Euphrates this is what happens to your tribe if you defy us with all this talk of awakenings if you try an awakening against us this is what we do to an awakening any other questions? Tara? back here my name is Tara McHelvey I work for the BBC can you tell me about Khursana the group that we've been hearing about Khursan? Khursan, thanks I don't know too much about them to be quite honest with you but I mean they represent just as I understand it they represent that faction of al-Qaeda that has been able to transit Iran both to come into Iraq and then now to relocate as part of Jabhat al-Nusrat so I mean they're known I think to people who have been following the different branches of al-Qaeda that branch that was in Iran was affiliated with Atiyah Abdul Rahman you remember him? at one time he rotated through the number three position al-Qaeda central he's the late Atiyah Abdul Rahman but I don't know too much about them other than that gentlemen here international consulting company thank you for your very nuance and I think accurate and very very tragic description of the events since 2003 and I think if I were in Iraqi I'd much prefer living in January 2003 than I would now given the description of the current state that you both discussed two to three thousand deaths a month the riveting of Iraqi society the sectarian cleansing the refugee problem the destruction of Christian society which nobody talks about my question is could this have been foreseen in March 2003 or were our policy makers and occupation authorities woefully ignorant or was there a kind of intent about baking Shi'ism into the Iraqi political structure? I think a lot of this is my personal view but I think a lot of the approach that we took was founded on an ignorance of all of these complexities of Iraqi society and Iraqi politics for example I know we assumed going in that there was no Iraqi politics it was just the regime and then everybody else well I mean they had a very dynamic you know politics even during Saddam's time but it was just for us we knew so little about the inner workings of the state and the Iraqi society other than I think what was channeled to us through expats many of whom had become unfamiliar or had an interest in misrepresenting the actual nature that for us Iraqi society was a black box and so we underestimated the degree to which these fractured and the thing that I think the cardinal sin was collapsing the Iraqi state and so we I've said this before here we conflated the Saddam's regime with the state and so we thought all the state institutions had to go had to be cleaned out but when we did that then comes there was so many academic studies what happens in a society in which the state has collapsed look at Somalia, look at Afghanistan and it becomes Hobbesian and every social fracture every political fissure that's possible then comes to the fore something that has not mattered for a hundred years all of a sudden becomes something that people are killing each other about but it happens in the absence of the state so when we disbanded the Iraqi army when we outlawed the bath party too deeply then we essentially we, you know put a bullet in the head of the Iraqi state So Joel, what did the British get right and what did the British get wrong how long were they there I mean it was a little bit different Iraq was much more tribal then the Ottomans didn't really rule anything outside of the cities in the big towns so there wasn't I mean it was on an opposite end of the spectrum from the Baptist state which was pervasive throughout all of Iraq's geography and all of its territory so the state that Saddam presided over had a much bigger presence in the average Iraqi's life than the Ottoman state did in Iraq's life in 1914 so it's a bit of apples and oranges and what the Brits had to do now both our coalition and the Brits had then to embark on a really intense nation building campaign state building campaign but the one that we did it was because we killed off the state that was there for the Brits it was more about developing a state that had existed or was just really small this is sort of like a big philosophical question but is America always going to get it wrong because sort of embedded in the American DNA is the idea we're not in the empire building business and the US military come in and overthrow any regime in three weeks as we did but since it's not part of our mental cosmology that we're going to stay it makes it very hard to say to anybody hey this is a long-term project yes we will protect you from the insurgents we won't leave in nine months and that's true in Afghanistan as much as it is in Iraq is it just a sort of problem that we have or do we not have the apparatus to make these things work because obviously in Iraq the outcome has been not that great in Afghanistan I think it's maybe slightly better I think there were some very ambitious policy goals that were stitched on to the military invasion of Iraq after the invasion was already underway or had just ended that were at great odd with the spirit that you're talking about we don't come in, we're not colonialists we don't do state building in somebody else's country and yet that is what we had adopted while we were on the move we decided to do we have some sort of moral responsibility if we go in and basically overthrow the regime to produce something that will sustain itself thereafter I think you have to carefully distinguish between a regime and a state and to say a regime may be odious and its behavior may be such that you decide to remove it but as much of the rest of the state as can be preserved you should not collapse willfully because however odious you think the state is it's better than nothing and if you think you have to change the nature of that state that's a longer term thing and you should do it bit by bit and reforming it after the regime is gone as opposed to just saying knock down the whole structure and then let's start from scratch James Kipfield I'm James Kipfield from National Journal so I missed the first part of your discussion and I apologize for that America's back into Iraq we're back into the politics we helped get Maliki out of the way we have decided we're going to defeat ISIL which owns half a quarter of Iraq say if you had to knowing what should we all the mistakes we made we can't go back and change though but we can, we are going forward back into Iraq if you were called today by the White House what would your plan be to get it right this time what would be your five bullet points I think that's going to be a tough one for you Joel yeah yeah it's tough I mean can we why don't we talk after can we do that I mean there were some unfortunate things that occurred toward the end of our military presence in Iraq but throughout I'd go back to what I've written is that I think we have to understand and I think we do actually understand much better now than we did in 2003 or than we did in 2011 the character of the conflicts in Iraq which is to say that this is not merely a counter-terrorism campaign that's going on that the reason that ISIS manifests itself there is because there's a larger political struggle going on and you have to be cognizant of that political struggle who's fighting and why in order to address the metafenomenon of Dash that comes from it so I mean that would be that's my one big bumper sticker but that's something I've already written in this book well and that's basically what President Obama's right I mean it's like there had to be this agreement by the way do you think this agreement what's your prognosis for this agreement the present one is it it's hard to tell well you mean the agreement that produced the new government well I mean it's tough because you're talking about I mean Fallujah large tracts of Ramadi the border crossing between Al Qaim and al-Bukamal is not under the central states control nor is Tikrit nor is Mosul for large stretches of Iraqi history Mosul has ruled the rest of the country Iraq has been ruled by Mosulawis or it's been ruled by people from Ramadi so for these to be essentially effectively out of state control is that's the big problem and I think it's a more pressing problem than whether the politicians in Baghdad could agree on the formation of the government look at the task before them now they've got to reintegrate these vast Sunni Arab majority and Sunni Turkmen populated territories into the state and they're going to have to fight to do it I mean this is not easy and it's not going to happen overnight I watch that because the Sunni representatives who were a party to that agreement in Baghdad were elected from cities where they can't go back to now if they went back to the cities that elected them they'd be killed to a man so I mean that's a more that's a more pressing problem than the signing of the deal any other questions great well there we want to thank you we'll be happy to sign books after this thank you very much for a brilliant presentation