 Let's put Joel on Pax's things. I will welcome everyone here today. This is a panel on Iraq, co-convened by New America's National Studies Program and the Middle East Task Force. I'm Layla Halal, co-director of the Middle East Task Force. And as I'm sure all of you are well aware, this panel was precipitated by the US military withdrawal from Iraq last month. And the political context that has been unfolding in the country. We are joined today by experts in the situation in Iraq and people who have some strong opinions and insights. And we look forward to a very thoughtful and enriching debate about the situation. I've asked the panelists to avoid getting into any polemical discussions about the merits of the US withdrawal. And of course, I would ask the audience also to try to focus a bit on what is the situation in Iraq today and what are the prospects going forward. The first speaker is Doug Olivant. He is a senior national security fellow with the New America Foundation. He is a recently retired army officer and director. And his last assignment was a director for Iraq at the National Security Council under both the Bush and Obama administrations. Prior to his posting at the White House, Doug Olivant served in Iraq as chief of plans from the multinational division Baghdad from 2006 to 2007. He worked with General Petraeus and was very much involved in the battle, if you will, in Iraq during those seminal years. He is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Veterans of Foreign Wars and American Political Science Association. And he currently is advising a number of companies on strategy and political risk. Seated next to him is Joel Rayburn. He is a US Army lieutenant colonel with 18 years of experience in intelligence and political military affairs. He is currently with the Center for Strategic Research at the National Defense University's Institute for National Strategic Studies and also a senior fellow here with New America. Joel served also in Iraq at a different period than Doug Olivant. He was in Baghdad from 2007 to 2008, also working under General Petraeus. To his right is Rahman Al-Jabrari. He is a senior program officer for the Middle East and North Africa at the National Endowment for Democracy. He has been engaged with capacity building in Iraqi civil society for the past eight to nine years. He served as the National Democratic Institute's NDI's Deputy Country Director and Director of Civil Society and Election Program in Iraq. He was also served as the Iraqi Community Coordinator for the Iraq Foundation in Washington, DC. He has undertaken various initiatives with civil society in Iraq, and that includes his recent initiative, the Marat Media, a monitoring network that is playing a leading role in monitoring the Iraqi government. Please, I welcome Doug to make the first presentation. Thank you. Thanks very much, Layla. I'm privileged to be here today. I look at the audience. I see not only a lot of native Iraqis, but a lot of my former colleagues from both Baghdad and the Washington Interagency who worked Iraq. I'm pleased to have all of you here, and I'm very cognizant that many of you know just as much about this as I do and could just as easily be standing up here talking. And I look forward to the question and discussions we have with you. On behalf of all the panelists, we were originally asked to prepare for 15 minutes, then we all met before this, and we started just debating among ourselves there. And Layla asked us to all compress down to about five minutes so we could get more time to discuss this, both among ourselves and with you. So all of us may sound a little bit rushed in how we present these initial comments. My bottom line take on the situation is, as we all know, there are three primary ethno-sectarian groups in Iraq. The Shia are in charge. They have won, but they still have trouble believing this. They have a history, not only recently in Iraq, but a long-term religious history of oppression. To be Shia in some ways is to remember and remember that you're a victim of oppression. That's part of very deeply ingrained into Shiaism from its very beginning. And of course, most recently in Iraq suffered under the Bath Regime, several purges. We all know the history of several of those. And of course, many of those members, many of the senior leaders of the government lost close members of their family to the last regime. So are deeply scarred and probably still wake up with nightmares that the Bath Party is coming back. We always need to be cognizant of that, the deep fear of the Bath Party, of Sunni domination of the Shia after decades of it. The Sunni in Iraq have been defeated. That's really the bottom line. They are the losing party in a civil war. We always need to keep that in mind. Losing parties in civil wars tend to get less than their fair share in the aftermath. It's a stubborn fact of life. And third, the Kurds, who are punching well above their weight. They've achieved de facto sovereignty in the North. They've achieved some amazing things, both in terms of their political institutions and especially in terms of their economic development. They are very vested in the status quo. They are very, very vested in peace. They've got a really, really good deal going and they know it could all disappear in a couple weeks or Iraq to plunge into violence again and where the Kurds would be a part of it this time. As we know, they escaped the violence of the last period. There's a terrorism problem in Iraq. There's not a sectarian violence problem, a large-scale one, but there is a terrorism problem in Iraq, largely driven by the nihilist al-Qaeda in Iraq. Most of the recent violence we have seen, I believe, is totally unrelated to the current political crisis. My assessment is that al-Qaeda in Iraq wanted to embarrass this government in the wake of American withdrawal. They wanted to make the case that this government could not secure Iraq. They have stockpiled their car bombs. They've stockpiled their weapons and they are using them against this government in the wake of American withdrawal, totally related to American withdrawal, totally unrelated to the current crisis between the prime minister and various other factions. The Iraqi security forces are capable, to some extent, of maintaining security inside the country. As has been well demonstrated, they are unable to defend their borders against other states. However, I'm not too concerned about this. Let's be honest, the only neighboring state we are concerned about is Iran. And were Iran foolish enough to do a high-end conventional attack against Iraq, Iraq would have more allies than it would be able to handle, from us to the Saudis and other players in the region. So while there is no formal security agreement, no formal security guarantee for the Iraqis, there is a de facto security agreement, security guarantee, they really don't have to worry about an Iranian invasion, or at least not for very long. At the high end, which is not to say the Iranians won't continue to do other things at a much lower level. The current crisis in Iraq, I think it's just the latest crisis in Iraq, it's hardball politics, Iraqi style. It's a rough neighborhood and they play rough. But when we should monitor this, we should be concerned about it. We have interests, we should try to temper it. But we need to remember there are some checks on power, even if the constitution is not as sufficient to check as the prime minister and his office as we would like. However, we have to remember that we've heard the sky is falling in Iraq several times. I remember hearing that the sky was going to fall when the Iraqi coalition was disbanded there in 2008 and all the allies were sent home. Many were convinced that that meant the end of Iraq, it would fall into chaos. When the SOFA was signed, I was told by several people, Iraq is gonna fall into chaos, it did not. When American troops withdrew out of the cities, many assured me Iraq would fall into chaos, it did not. And when we went down to 50,000 soldiers, I was assured that that meant that Iraq would fall into chaos, it did not. And now at the American withdrawal, again we're hearing this. So yes, is there a crisis in Iraq? Yes, there is. I would say we have a very short historical memory. We need to look back. There was one about nine months ago, there was one about nine months before that. They muddle through them. We need not to overreact. Issues with Iran, I'll leave for the question and answers. I'll just state that our concerns with Iran are real, but they are overstated. And I've said this in public several times. Moving forward, American influence in Iraq, we need to understand what the Iraqis want from America and what they will agree to. We've not been very good about asking the Iraqis, what is it that you want from the Americans and how can we help? In some ways we've treated them as clients, told them this is what's your interest, this is what you need from us. And that may well be what they need from us, but it's still polite to ask. So my bottom line, I'll close on this. Iraq is ruled by a democratic regime, albeit one with an authoritarian past and some authoritarian leanings. However, there are very real checks on, democratic checks on power. There will be elections. If this government wants a budget and it needs one soon, it has to go through parliament. As I've said elsewhere, the very fact that we could not extend the American presence in Iraq, and this is the only time I'll touch on it, is a democratic, it was a democratic check. The prime minister clearly would have appreciated American forces staying, as would some other forces. They couldn't get that through parliament. There is no overt sectarian violence, although again, there is a terrorism problem. These are good things. We tend to underestimate this. Quietest she-ism is the order of the day. Sistani and the quietest version of she-ism is very much the philosophy of the ruling party. The more activist, theocratic she-ism is only held by a small minority faction, largely among the solders. The Sunnis have it much better than is usual for the losing side in a civil war. I suspect the American southern states post our civil war would have very much liked to have had it as good as the Sunnis have it. And Iraq is resource well enough, thanks to its oil, to continue its transition. So unless you're vested in permanent US bases, this is a fairly good outcome. It doesn't look that bad. As I told you, my favorite indicator, you can now catch a Austrian air flight direct from Vienna to Baghdad, who would have thought we would have seen the day. And now, life is contingent. Could Iraq go a very, very bad direction? That's absolutely possible. But I think the likelihood is that Iraq will continue to muddle through, they will work through their politics, and I'm genuinely sanguine on the future of Iraq. Thanks very much. Good afternoon, everybody. I'm pleased to be here. It feels like 2006 in so many ways, not just because of what's happening in Iraq, but because people are actually attending an Iraq event again, which hasn't been the case for several years. Let me start by saying that what could be called the Iraqi Civil War did not end in 2008 and nine with the Shia community of Iraq defeating the Sunni community of Iraq with the Kurdish community of Iraq, sort of as Doug put it, punching above its weight. Having traveled to 16 of Iraq's 18 provinces, having met thousands of Iraqis on the street in the neighborhoods, in the government, in the security forces. What I came away from, my experience in Iraq understanding was that identifying Iraqis according to their sect is deeply offensive to most Iraqis who have a deeply felt sense of nationalism and unity. And so when political parties who use a sectarian card in order to advance their narrow political interests wind up polarizing the country and having the effect of that being a spilling over of conflict on the local level where people who have never identified themselves in their lives foremost as Sunni or Shia or anything other than Iraqis are forced to make a choice just in order to survive the week. This is something that the vast majority of Iraqis were very happy to put behind them in 2009. So the fact that we're back to that point in 2012 where they're being forced to make this distasteful choice again, I think is a signal that things are going wrong in Iraq. Generally speaking, I think the two most significant political legacies of the US involvement in Iraq have been a system of government based on separation of powers, which is something that Iraq has never really had before, and a political accommodation in which Iraq's main parties all agreed to resolve their differences using the country's political system rather than force or violence. But both of these developments are now unraveling and I'd like to discuss why and what it means for Iraq and maybe in the question and answer period we can get to what it means for the rest of us. First, let's talk about the unraveling of the political accommodation among Iraq's major parties, which is the factor that has secured the dramatic reduction in violence since mid-2008. Not even a month after the departure of US troops, Iraq's politics are in disarray. I don't think anyone can argue with that. And there's no clear route back to stability, whether driven by fear or tempted by an unmistakable opportunity or both Prime Minister Maliki and his Dawa party took advantage in the first 96 hours without US troops to purge their top political rivals. They ordered security forces to surround their rival politicians' homes. They issued an arrest warrant against Vice President Tariq Hashemi. They called for parliament to remove Maliki's own deputy, Prime Minister Saleh Mutlak, and they announced a terrorism investigation against Finance Minister Rafi El-Asawi. Taken together, these moves amounted to an attempt to decapitate Iraq, which is the Sunni majority political coalition led by Ayatollahoui that actually won a plurality in the elections of March, 2010. Now, there have been a number of opportunities in the intervening days since those first 96 hours for Maliki and his allies to diffuse tensions, but instead, they've mainly chosen to escalate them when confronted. When Iraqiyah staged a boycott of parliament and the cabinet in protest against the pressure being applied to their leaders, Maliki responded by threatening to appoint his own loyalists to head their ministries and to form a new government without them. And when Iraq's Sunni communities began to demonstrate against what they perceived as Maliki's attempt to drive Sunnis out of a share of political power, Maliki's office announced a deal that would allow the Iranian-sponsored militia, Asaib Ahl al-Haq, or AAH, to enter politics. When Vice President Hashemi sought refuge with Kurdish President Jalal Talibani, who is Kurdish, in Kurdistan, Maliki demanded that the Kurds surrender Hashemi back to Baghdad and one of his parliamentarians, Maliki's parliamentarians, declared that Talibanis should be charged with harboring a terrorist. And throughout the ensuing standoff, Maliki's security forces have continued to conduct raids against Iraqiyah's offices and homes back in Baghdad. Every few days, it seems that the Maliki government, or to be fair, its opponents, take another small step towards the cliff, past which lies sectarian conflict and possibly civil war. And every few days, this ongoing political struggle creates more space in which Iraq's sectarian militants on both sides can operate, both al-Qaeda and the former Jaisal Mehdi. Shia militants, as the recent horrific bombings in Baghdad and the South illustrate, they are not disconnected from the larger political crisis. Let me interject here, though, a word about sectarianism. The political developments that I'm describing have not been driven by sectarian motives, I believe. They are instead steps taken by one political faction to seize control of the state by pushing its rivals out of power. Prime Minister Maliki and the double party will play the sectarian card when it suits their interests as they have done in charging some of the Sunni-Iraqi leaders with involvement in terrorism, but they are just as ready to take steps against political rivals of the same sect when it suits their interests. And this is borne out by Maliki's current attempt to split the base of Muqtad-e-Saudar's movement, which is Maliki's biggest Shia opponent, by inviting A.A.H, Assad al-Haq, into the political process in order to set two wings of the Saudar movement against one another. It's also borne out by Maliki and Dawah's effort to strong arm the Kurdistan regional government. Just in the past few days, Maliki and his allies have signaled that if Kurdish leaders are not willing to surrender, Vice President Hashimi to Baghdad, then the Maliki faction will freeze the Kurds out of their share of national government by doing things like holding back the Kurdish share of the national budget or by removing the Kurdish chief of staff of the Iraqi army, Babakur Zabari, and so on and so on. So the current near-term political crisis is marked by a Maliki and Dawah effort to fracture and emasculate its main rivals on all sides, not just the Sunni side. Now, how can Maliki and Dawah be bold enough to challenge all rivals at once, you might ask? Well, it's because they've had great success in consolidating control of the state. As disturbing as the last month's developments are, they should not be surprising to us because they've been building for months now. For most of the past year, the question of whether to end or extend the U.S. troop presence in Iraq has obscured Dawah's campaign to take control of the Iraqi state for the long term. So let's talk briefly then about the unraveling of the second major U.S. legacy, the separation of Iraqi powers. Having signed an agreement with the other Iraqi parties in Erbil in December 2010 to share power, Maliki and the Dawah party have instead consolidated it through 2011 and they've steered the Iraqi government back toward the disconcertingly familiar territory of an authoritarian regime that uses state power to intimidate its political rivals and suppress popular opposition. This has been most pronounced in Iraq's security sector where until recently the prime minister held the positions of both minister of defense and minister of interior himself, despite his agreements to share those portfolios with other parties. At the same time, Iraq's intelligence agencies and the physical security of the green zone itself, i.e. the physical security of the government, are effectively controlled from Maliki's office by loyalists who include his national security advisor, his military advisor and his son Ahmed. Now, having acquired the state's course of power, Maliki and these loyalists used it in February and March to suppress another aspect of the Arab Spring in demonstrations that took place in Baghdad and Basra and some other major cities in which the Iraqi security forces killed almost 30 protesters across the country in a branch of the Arab Spring that got very little notice. And then in October and November, the ministry of interior arrested more than 600 former Bathis associates for their alleged involvement in what was an improbable coup plot. And you all know about the arrest campaign that sparked the crisis last month. Now, the killing of protesters in springtime made clear that this is an emerging state that will not tolerate popular dissent. While the wave of arrests in the fall made clear that the national reconciliation project begun with U.S. encouragement in 2007 and 2008 is over. It's not just the consolidation of the security forces that Dawah has been successful at undertaking. They've also consolidated independent entities that were meant to ensure checks and balances in the Iraqi constitutional system. For most among these is the Iraqi judiciary, which is under the effective control of the prime minister, the integrity committee and several other committees that are meant to exercise oversight and watchdog functions of the rest of the government. These are now under the control of the prime minister's office and even the electoral commission, which is meant to ensure the integrity of Iraqi commissions is now coming under the sway of the prime minister's office. No one can say where the commissioner of the electoral commission is, Faraj Al-Hadri, he's essentially in hiding after being brought under pressure by prime minister Maliki's office. Why don't I close there? And then in the question and answer session, we can deal with more of the consequences of this consolidation of power and the unraveling of the Iraqi political pact, mean for the region and for the United States. And I'll leave it for Rahman. Good afternoon. Since I have five minutes and I left my notes there so I don't need them. We went to Iraq for so many reasons, one of them to establish democracy in Iraq. I'm not gonna talk about other reasons because it is not related to this topic. So if we examine Iraq now, what do we have in the country? Okay, we have a parliament that divided and has no power and cannot do anything. We have a government is really short on responding to the it is citizen. It has been terrible in 2003, delivery surface for citizen and it's still terrible right now. We have judiciary system in Iraq, which is in no way we can say it is independent and you can't see right now with the vice president and nobody believe in that system. Even the people who are vice president and the president himself. What do we have else? We have a political parties in Iraq. We have many of them. When I was started in Iraq, we have actually the database that some of my colleagues sitting here was 450 political parties. And I have never heard in any country in the world we have they have 450 political parties. But do we have really a political party system? No, it's still Iraqi called individual. It is an Maliki group, it is a Jaffer group, it is Jalal Talibani group, and it is personalized. The political party itself, it is that person, it is enterprise for that person. There is no system, there is no democracy within any political party. Okay, with all this we have, do we have independent media in Iraq? No, definitely not. It is controlled by the government and it is all controlled by specific political party. So all these institutions are supposed to be the institution that hold people accountable in democracy. And if we don't have them, then we don't have democracy right now in Iraq. What left for Iraqis to build little hob on it? I think I'm watching the watch, I will keep my five minutes. You know, the military people didn't keep their five minutes. But one of the legacy of the U.S., actually civil society in Iraq, because we built some civil society. It is not strong, but it's still creating the debate about the issues. It's still, sectarian didn't get to civil society. And when I say that it is real, I mean I can mention people from Mosul going to Hullar to Basra to be on a board of director of own organization in Basra. But those are few. And they are weaking in general right now because with the draw of the military, although I'm not gonna talk about it, left these people who are loyal to democracy, loyal to better life for Iraqi alone. Left them alone from security point of view and then left them alone from financial point of view. For Iraq to go successful, we need institution. And if we don't have institution, then we don't have the Iraq that we I dreamed of when in 2003 left everything here in DC to go to build civil society. I'll keep it maybe basically for the question and answer so I can keep my promise on my five minutes. Thanks. Thank you. I think the mic is on. So I think we've heard at least two presentations which paints a rather dire picture of the political scene in Iraq. I think while Doug is a bit more optimistic in saying that it's to be expected that following the U.S. military withdrawal, there will be a political struggle ongoing and that this struggle will work itself out and that there is potentially still some hope if you take out the terror concerns. I think we can agree that there is at the very least institutional weakness in Iraq. There is weakness in terms of the checks and balances. There are divisions which are maybe not geared towards sectarianism but are geared towards division and there is not a healthy democratic democracy at play in Iraq. So what I want to ask now and I'm sure people in the audience will have more specific questions but what I would like to draw out from the speakers is more on what this means for the U.S. legacy. I mean, the U.S. was in Iraq at least in part under the banner of democratization. It went in militarily but it invested in a provisional government in Iraq. It sought to build a new state but clearly it has not been successful and the question is what does this mean for the U.S. in terms of its ability to leverage transitions in the region generally and continue working within Iraq? What is the U.S. responsibility in Iraq? What are its points of leverage given that it no longer has the military there and given that its credibility is at stake? So I would like to pose those questions to all the panelists to open the discussion. Sure, I'll start. Again, we need to remember that Iraq is eight, eight and a half years out of overthrow by a foreign power and it's about four and a half, depending on how you count, three to four years out of its civil war. Even were I to accept the characterization of politics that Joel gives, which I think is exaggerated, that would still be pretty good for this point. We need to understand this. When you decide to overthrow a regime and level its political institutions, the rebuilding of those institutions is a generational project. I'm sure there are people here in the audience who have extensive experience with building rule of law institutions and those of you who do it know that it's a 20 to 30 year endeavor. You don't create independent judiciaries on a single year timeline. You don't create a system of governments where legitimacy is given to all these counterbalancing institutions simultaneously in less than a decade. So while I certainly can see that there are weaknesses, no one can deny that Iraqi's political institutions are immature, that's clear. But grading on the curve for a state where it is, given its history, given where it just came from, given what it's gone through, we are, I think, well ahead of where we should expect this state to be, which should be a cautionary tale for other regimes that we're watching going through change elsewhere in the region. I'm all, like Doug, I'm all for setting the bar low in terms of expeditionary endeavors, but I don't favor setting them so low that we lose US interests. And we're Iraq and Ireland in the South Pacific, then I think we could maybe give it time to sort of come to some sort of stable modus vivendi. And we could tolerate some level of political instability, but Iraq is not isolated. Iraq is in the middle of an important region. Iraq is an important state for us and for the world because when we filter out the Iranian and Venezuelan propaganda about oil reserves, Iraq probably has the world's second largest oil reserves, and those are only gonna become more important as demand rises in the future, barring some sort of worldwide depression, which I'll leave to some other branch of the New America Foundation to sort out. But even if we set aside the political instability inside Iraq and the potential for civil war inside Iraq, the Iraqi government is slowly adopting a regional policy that is at odds with our interests. They are drifting into de facto an adversarial camp. They now have a foreign policy that is at odds with ours on the questions of Bahrain on Syria, on the Iranian regime, and they have adopted a de facto hostile policy toward our Saudi allies in the region. So this is not something that we can just sort of draw a line around and then choose to ignore while they get their internal house in order. This is something that affects us and it affects a vital region in the world. And there's a third reason. For those of us who have been watching the Arab Spring, Arab Awakening, and believe that this is an important set of developments for the world, it's hard to imagine the Arab Spring coming to a positive outcome, certainly in the Northern Arabian Peninsula, if Iraq is undergoing a sectarian conflict or sectarian political instability. And in fact, right now, Iraq is on the side of intervening in the Syrian crisis to shore up the regime of Bashar al-Assad in concert with the Iranians and with Lebanese Hezbollah. So this is not a problem. And in doing that, they're actually at odds with their own Iraqi Sunni citizens who are probably intervening on a much lower level to try and topple Bashar al-Assad in what may be a destabilizing way. So this is why we can't just afford to walk away from Iraq as it gets its house in proverbial order. Sorry, just before you go on, can each of you answer the question which is what are the points of leverage? If you can't just walk away and you don't have the military in Iraq, and you've lost some credibility to say the least in Iraq, what are the points of leverage? I think not having the residual military force did, we did trade away an enormous amount of leverage there. That's unmistakable. We still, as a superpower, we still have a great many points of leverage. We have political leverage. We do have some, there's still some vestigial role that we play inside Iraq in being an honest broker among the different Iraqi parties. There's our security assistance to the Iraqi military, which is very significant. That's a point of leverage. It's our ability to use leverage in international bodies whether it's the UN or the EU, other international bodies are also potential points of leverage. It's our ability to encourage trade relationships and so on and so on. We still have quite a bit of leverage, but to be honest with you, to this point, I think it's largely undiscovered leverage. And Rahman, if we were to leverage these things, what should the US be saying to Iraqis? First, let us go back a little bit for fact. The US need Iraq in that region. Definitely. Iraqis also need the US. International neighborhood, relation. Iraq is not a government right now can work the international by itself. Iraq is still under a lot of restriction from the UN. To use that leverage to help the Iraqi to kind of get over this political struggle or struggling to control the power. I think still some of the Iraqi, I'm not gonna talk about all the Iraqi, there are Iraqis who doesn't want to see us at all there, but the people who still respect our opinion. I think they are honest broker right now in the whole trouble. I mean, you see the embassy has no role in what is going right now in Iraq. That's not happening in 2007, 2006. This crisis will not last for long because there is internal pressure on all the parties. That pressure, we just lost it. And I just wanna go back to Doug when he said, independent institution need times. I do agree with him, I work in this field. But before the time they need the environment to create the environment that they will be independent institution. Do we have or did we create that environment to be independent institution? No, but if we don't have that environment then we'll never come. After even three years, actually it's the opposite right now. We're creating environment to create a new dictatorship. So we're open for questions. Do we have the mic? Thank you very much. My name is Rasul Shihab and I'm Iraqi and former NDI staff. I've been in Iraq a couple of months ago and I'm kinda like seeing what's going on there in terms of political measure and also to see the people suffering is also there. So my question is now, after to see all the facts going on today, do we should to grow a fear from the government, the current government right now in Iraq who actually start to kick either Sunni or do this and that and trying to eliminate all the allies and put it in one hand. When I talk to the people in street, they say, well, I wish we wish we go back to the Saddam Hussein time because at least we have electricity and we have service, but now there is nothing just a political fight. So do we have to grow a fear from the current government to be another dictatorship in Iraq? Thank you. A few questions. Over here, the side of them. I'm Mark DeWeaver with Quantrarian Capital Management. What I'm wondering about is the Iraqi army. Can anyone comment on how should we say this? In other words, should we think of the Iraqi army as sort of a non-political professional sort of army like the U.S. army or is the Iraqi army dominated by one or another faction, one or another political faction? Thanks. Front row. Thank you. I'm Ed Barakat from MBN, I read your solar. With the struggles going on on every aspect, political security and on the level of service for the citizen, how realistic is it that the American U.S. forces will agree to another agreement if the Iraqi government would ask for another agreement to bring back a small force or whatever that is needed to stabilize? If this works, continue for months in the future. Okay, I'll let the panelists answer. Doug, do you wanna start? Sure, I mean, obviously none of us here can speak for the administration, but I think that were the Iraqi government to come to the United States, asked for some type of force, whether it be training or intelligence assistance or what have you and be willing to concede the immunity's question, which is why we didn't get there in the first place and that's a major caveat. The Iraqi parliament would have to be willing to concede immunity's to those American forces and that's a huge caveat and I don't think that's going to happen, but were that to happen, I think America would have to consider that seriously. You wanna answer that? I'll go ahead. Okay, go ahead, Roman. You know, I think for the agreement, the Iraqi will not come to the U.S. again. Literally, it's not in the interest of a lot of groups in Iraq. And when I say their interest, even get violence, chaos, they still get benefit of it, so they are not coming back to the U.S. That's given, done. And even a prime minister can not go to the parliament, so whatever, because that's basically a political society for him. On the independent of Iraqi army, the gentlemen both work with the Iraqi army, but for me as a dual citizen, Iraqi citizen, I think the Iraqi army is a collection of militia. And that's basically came with the prime minister, Jaferi, at that time, burdened all the militia and brought them to the military. So it's really, there's no systematic military there. You could say yes, they are good, they are whatever, but end of the day, I have a family and my family is still in Halla, end of the day, the people on the militia from Halla, if there is a, they send them somewhere, they will not go somewhere else. Plus, they will, if there is a conflict between Halla and Karbala, the people from Halla will take the side of Halla. They are not gonna follow order, and that's exactly where, when a lot of people talk about coup in the military, there is no coup in the military in Iraq because they don't follow order. I mean, that's my opinion as a civilian, I leave it to them. For the fear of government, I think the Iraq is shared with the Urusul. There is a fear of government that has a 120 billion dollar budget. And they don't see that 120 billion but for the good of the people. It is good, but for a good of political party leaders, and it's good, it's for corruption. 120 billion, and we still get one hour electricity. I mean, that's basically on the agreement, we don't have any agreement right now with on the military side, and the sova is over. So there is no any agreement right now between the Iraqi government and the U.S. government on military. And I don't expect one unless it is, just tied to the military, I mean, tied to the selling arm or something. But we don't have one right now. I would just say, I'd agree with Rahman, that there's on the fear of the government or the possibility that a return to a Saddam-style system would be a more effective system of government. I mean, there's no, the consolidation of control of the government institutions under Prime Minister Maliki and the double party has not yielded any increase in effectiveness. The government is no closer to being able to provide electricity, water, sanitation, housing, transportation services than they were at the beginning of the, and they're not going to be. This is, because when you appoint ministers, when you appoint directors general, when you appoint officials down to the very local level based on political loyalty and political utility, as opposed to their competence, their effectiveness, then you have a state that is poised to hold on to power, but not to use it to effectively provide services. On the Iraqi army, the Iraqi army was politicized when I was in Iraq, 2006, seven and eight. They're not under any lighter political pressure now than they were back then. So you have, you do have, as Rahman described it, a collection of sort of assimilated militias. I would say, I would add that that's against a backbone of the old Iraqi army officer corps, which is a professional officer corps, but commanders are under enormous political pressure. Commanders are appointed based on their political, on their political stripes, and they all know that. And they can be chucked out based on their, on their political leanings as well. For example, the finance minister, Rafael Asalwi's brother we learned yesterday was just forced into retirement. He's a brigadier in the army, probably because of his association with the finance minister. I would say I don't speak for the administration or DOD, but as in my individual view, is that a follow on status of forces agreement in Iraq is not going to happen. It's unrealistic. We might have had an extension while we were there, but the idea that we would go back in now. I mean, nobody who's in a decision making capacity wants it on any side. Okay. We're gonna start in the back and move forward. Thank you again to the panel. I'm Samir Lawanian from MIT, and I want to go back to the question of leverage and interest that was posed earlier. I want to understand a little bit more about the scenarios for leverage. One of the things that seemed sound like most credible was sort of cutting off security assistance or other sorts of assistance to compel changes either in government or institutions. But does Iraq have any plausible substitutes to kind of wiggle out of that leverage, whether it be other donors or it's oil sales? And then the question of interest, leaving aside moral responsibilities, given that we have a lot of geopolitical competing priorities, what are the actual sort of reasons why we need to be focused on Iraq? It seems that if the Shias have defeated the Sunnis, that a risk of sort of a civil conflict that sort of spreads throughout the region is less likely. It seems that Iraq doesn't really pose a conventional threat to its neighbors. It doesn't really have sort of a nuclear capacity. And the threat to oil sales seems unlikely given that they have just as much interest in selling oil as we have in buying it. So go back to that. I think you make some really great points. I mean, the relationship between Iraq and the United States needs to become much more reciprocal. They have oil in the ground that they can't get out. We have lots of people who are really, really good at this who live in Texas and North Dakota. They have lots of money and they have a security deficit. We have lots of arms and military defense companies who aren't gonna be selling much to our Pentagon in the coming years and would love to have another market. There are clear matches between US and Iraqi interests. I think that's what we need to find in the coming years is how we put this together, mostly commercially. And that was, you know, since Joel touched on it, this was part of the reason that I was a fan of getting the United States military out of Iraq is they were a barrier to US commercial companies coming in, they were not helpful. In many cases, they physically threw American businessmen out of the country despite their having valid Iraqi visas. It was time for us to move to a next phase, get the military out of the way and let an equal bilateral commercial relationship build between Iraq and the United States. And I think there's a very clear natural fit for their needs or requirements and vice versa. I'm sorry, I'm gonna ask Rahman to respond to this. For the market and donor and oil and, you know, the Iraqi need the US, you know, if you talk to the Iraqi also, they, I mean, also if you see a lot of contract on the oil right now, mostly it's not going for the American. It's going somewhere else, you know, and for the sale of weapons and military, it's, you know, the Iraqis tried to get the Chinese, the Ukrainian, everywhere. I mean, yes, we have 16 or 32, I have 16. 13. Yeah, and the stolen is kind of, you know, but there is still, you know, I mean, secure safe Iraq is good for the whole region. It is good for the US. It is good for the Middle East in general, security-wise. Iraq is, yes, it is bad, but let us not forget Iraq has two good things in it. They have the resources and they have the human resources that they can come over the challenge pretty good. So now with the, also with the change in the whole political system in the Arab region, who we trust, you know. So it's going to Iraq. It is like it look really the paradise for the US policy right now more than anything else. You have Egypt in one hand, you have somebody else. There is no place you can say this are a friend of ours right now and we can work with them. But can you work with the Iraqis? I mean, is the climate ripe for US companies to go in? Is it ripe to have bilateral reciprocal relations? If the US is promoting legitimate accountable governments in the other parts of the region, is it able now to engage with the Maliki government? Look, Maliki cannot secure anybody going with a private sector going to Iraq. You need a safe, secure country so that you need a system, not Maliki, not whatever. You need a system in Iraq that allow people to go in. You know, business, I think that I was there. It's like almost the American company come with because the military can't save them or can't help them. But now there is no security. There is no unity in the country. And what a contract you make today might be not working tomorrow. So business is not going to go to Iraq unless there is a system and there is laws and it is a clear. Now they will go through corruption. You have to pay corruption to somebody else to let you in. And, you know, and also by the way, visa right now to Iraq is controlled by the prime minister office. So any American citizen when they go to Iraq right now, they get the approval from the prime minister office. And that's basically you need at least eight months, nine months to get that visa if you come. And if you go to Kurdistan, they give you the visa, but if you pass the border to Kirkuk, they will arrest you. Absolutely they will arrest you and I'm telling you that from experience. So you go to Kurdistan with no visa, you jump to Kirkuk, you get arrested. And if you need a visa, you're gonna go to the prime minister office and eight months. So if I am a businessman sitting here in DC for eight months for my visa to go to Iraq, I'm not going with them. Okay, we have one in the back and then this gentleman midway through. It's Samar Chatterjee from Safe Foundation. I guess we've at least observed from all three presentations that American invasion of Iraq has not worked. And also we see the way things are going in Afghanistan and the recent negotiations with Taliban, that hasn't worked too. So given that, I hope we have this lesson that United States would stop dreaming up more invasions of different countries and I hope America learns its lesson, hasn't learned it since it was defeated in Vietnam and thrown out and now it's going again into Asia Pacific, I don't know to do what, but given that I hope this is a lesson we have learned. Thank you. Okay. My name's John Postman, I work for 3P Human Security. I appreciated the comments of Ustad Rahman on about civil society as offering hope for the future. If I'm a congressional staffer in the US Congress, what are three or four things that you can recommend concrete realistic things that the US can do through policy to encourage political, even cultural, space for civil society to have a strong voice in the future of Iraq in the current context of Iraqi politics. Thank you. Why don't we take this question? Yeah, go ahead. You know, it's a symbol. These people need resources and I'm saying resources in a different way, not just financial resources. And we need to stand with them and that's the cheapest things. It's, you know, four, five million, can build a real good civil society in Iraq if we're talking about resources. Also, we need for all our institution here in DC to look really what's the problem, get it from the people themselves, not a design program here, and we go hire Iraq to implement the program. And that's the huge mistake we did early, kind design a program and looking for Iraq to implement it. And then when they implemented, we created the gap between them and their community. So please keep supporting civil society, keep engage them even here in Washington DC. Give them the connection to come here. Give them the space to tell the story of, it is not a sexist story to get a civil society organization successful in the South because nobody care about it. It's really we need to invest in civil society. We need to encourage our, even our senior people who going to Iraq, don't just meet with Maliki and meet with Taliban. Make it part of your visit sitting with the civil society organization. Because then you empower them in their community and you tell them, we think about you. Can I respond to Mr. Jennerjee's observation? His, I disagree with the premise because what's happened in Iraq was not inevitable. It didn't flow naturally, inevitably from the invasion of 2003. There was a window of opportunity for a different outcome in Iraq. And we made a couple of strategic errors that allowed the window to close. If you look back to the end of 2008 through a good part of 2009, there was the potential, especially around the provincial elections which resulted in the defeat of every incumbent party in every province that had an election and the wholesale rejection of the incumbents who were Islamist parties. There was space for cross-sectarian, nationalist political coalitions, Sunni Shia deal-making, Arab Kurd deal-making. And that was the proper, that was the potential for a pathway to a stable and largely democratic Iraq. But at the beginning of 2010, when the debathification committee, which was under essentially the direction of Ahmad Chalabi and his subordinates, played the sectarian card again and they acted like Iran's guardian council and they eliminated hundreds of candidates from their rival political parties. That polarized the political process on sectarian lines and it was ultimately with the tacit support of the prime minister and his party and that poisoned the well and really I think the national unity government was doomed because of that polarization and that poisoning. Our mistake was, it was a crime of omission that we didn't use our political leverage which was quite a bit more significant than it is now to try to put a stop to this polarization, to try to nip in the bud this reintroduction of the sectarian framework. Secondly, our decision to reduce troops by 50% during the period of government formation interregnum in 2010, signaled to the country that we were more interested in the security of the ballot boxes and the security of the polling stations than we were in the political outcome itself. And it also signaled to Iraqi leaders who were casting about for external support our lack of commitment. And I think that's why we're in the boat that we're in today because we traded away our, we failed to act when we had the leverage and then we traded away a great deal of leverage we had when it was needed most. Okay. Roland, I just have to ask a small question and hope that it's of interest to the audience. If we stipulate that the US policy encouraged sectarianism and now you are making the case that the US needs to reach out more to civil society. Question I have is, is civil society, are the NGOs also driven by sectarianism or is engagement with civil society a way to get around around this card? Definitely, when we talk about civil society we have to make a difference between charity organization, religious organization, which is totally sectarian. And when we talk civil society, NGOs, democracy forces in Iraq the NGOs, democracy forces, you know, I never honestly to be in my 10 years in Iraq never seen a civic NGO leaders believe in sectarian. I've seen, I mean, my colleagues sitting here, you know, when there is a problem between the courts and the hadba in Mosul. It is not solved by the US. It is not solved by anybody. It's solved by a small organization called a Tahrir organization in Mosul. There is an organization, Iraq's affection network, you know, both kind of legislative campaign. They brought people from Anbar, from Dialla, from Salah-e-Din to Halla. And the first time when they went to Halla, this is totally, I mean, my Iraq friends who are sitting here understand when you take somebody from Anbar to Halla and you think, oh my God, where I'm gonna go. Literally, the next week, the local government of these four governorate met in Halla on recommendation of the civil society. It is like you need to go there. You know, we have an organization, I don't wanna make advertisement for my program here, but we have an organization while all the, you know, the government, Iraqi government and the US government invest in reconciliation in conferences, bring the leaders to sit in a conference. This organization is like, no, this is not gonna work. We need to go to the local community themselves, understand, analysis, and to create what is the root of the problem. And then basically we can talk about solving it. But we're bringing Salih al-Mutlag and Maliki to sit together. They sit together and then the next day, they are in government. They are, you know, one is the prime minister and then one is deputy prime minister. So there is no reconciliation on the leader level. You need to go to the community. And we have the ingredient for that. Civil society is capable. And also, I mean, with little institution capacity. I mean, we're talking about NGOs like five years for five people. But still, there is a big hope there. And if there is an Iraqi talk, then civil society, not volatile party. Okay. Question, I'm here. Second row. Yes. Up front, please. Sorry. My name's Lee Yang. I just wonder what kind of plan or effort they have, whether it's oil or land or private ownership of the properties, whether it's toward a socialist or toward capitalism, and whether there's any kind of transfer of property right now from maybe then owner or proprietors to maybe dictators or some other abuse of power. Thank you. And then behind you, please. Hi, my name is Sabelle Cocker, and I'm with USAID. And I'm sorry to harp on the civil society question, but it's such an interesting one. Mr. Aljivore, you mentioned that the strong civil society right now is part of the American legacy, which I'm very surprised to hear. And I would, I'd love if you could elaborate a little bit on how and why that happened. Thank you. Sorry, before you answer one more question in the back here. All right. Thank you. And I'll just say that DC, what are the chances if the Sunnis in the Iraq fields that they are isolated politically, and then there is no way that they can operate in a political life? And what are the chances that they will withdraw from the system entirely? And then this will eventually lead to an autonomy or even a separate country. And if that happens, what happens to Kurdish also? So what are the chances that this is going to take the country to disintegration? And what is there that the American government could do to prevent that? Thank you. I think that's obviously an important question. And I will park it to the side and allow you to answer the questions on civil society and property transfer. I'll go to the Sunni political thing. Well, Alayla, I'll answer that last. Okay, for the ownership and land, land in Iraq is basically owned by government and who is in the office of government control the land. So the land belong to the government, although you know, and if they're for housing, for something, it is the government who gave you that land. So they still control, I will give you a small land to build your house on it, unless you are wealthy and you can't buy it. So the honor- So it's politically connected? Exactly, or politically corrupted. No, not connected. For the civil society, it's, you know, civil society wasn't immune from whatever happened in Iraq. I mean, especially earlier, when you don't have a civil society and we have a lot of contractors going there, the program is, it is, people wanna burn money, including the military. So it's basically, people went towards the money. So there is no kind of a driven mission organization. But, you know, after three, four years, they start figuring, we lost the connection to our people. We start being called an agent of the US. We start being called, you don't even do care about your community. And also because we start throwing a lot of money, and that suddenly it is easy to establish an NGO, but I mean, I have somebody who's established in his car, going from one contractor to another contractor. But end of the day, there are people who just, you know, civil society itself is part of the political system. And there are a lot of individual leaders within civil society, they didn't find a place for them with the political party. It is basically, literally, there is no opinion for them. It is controlled by the head of the political party. There is no advancement. There is no discussion. So these people who believed, there is other way to do, to be effective in Iraq. They start their NGOs. And if these people sitting in Mosul and in Basra, but again, with sustainable money for them, and I'm not talking money, money, I'm talking $25,000, $20,000, but you tell somebody to work on a project for five years. I will start with you. I hold your hand, you know, for five years, but after five years, I want to see you here. And that's exactly the success of civil society. You know, they're holding local government accountable right now. They're holding the government accountable. They, I mean, within the means they have, I'm not saying the civil society, it is the US civil society. But that's where long-term, I mean, I go back to that long-term investment, bold civil society organization, and they get a credibility with the community, you know, credibility with the US, credibility with even the political system. Now, even with the, I'm sorry, I will take one extra minute. Now when the trouble between Iraq and the state of the law, you find both the state of the law and Iraq going to civil society say, can you bring people together, make them understand what is going on? That's the civil society. That's the hope I'm talking about it. And then the French, the French, you don't find Abdul Aziz Jarba from Mosul talking bad about Fatma al-Bahadli in Mosul. You don't, you know, they are friends, they call each other. When there is a problem in Iraq, they say, how can we work it to solve it together? Okay, so would a decentralization, a disintegration of the centralized state of Iraq be a good thing? Can I, can I bring in on that? Not under the present circumstances because it, I mean, what we're seeing happen right now is the four Sunni majority provinces and two formerly, Anbar and Diyala are signaling that their distrust, their fear of a consolidation of power in Baghdad is leading them to believe that they have to insulate themselves from the government of Baghdad by seeking regional autonomy in a way that was unthinkable for them a few years ago. And the problem is that there's no province of Iraq that can be soft partitioned away from the rest without causing conflict. The fault lines run through practically every province, certainly the four Sunni majority ones that we're talking about. So that will signal a civil conflict if not a civil war, if it happens. What actually the struggle on this is one of our mistake too. What we told the local people, you have the power but we didn't educate the center that these people has a power. So suddenly the local council, they have all the power on their hand but their budget is tied by the central government. So you kind of tell me you have a power and you don't have to act on that power. So that's create a lot of a problem itself. It's like, you know, and then the law, the local government law is clear in the constitution. You know, they have a power, they have their own budget, they have whatever, but then they cannot spend that budget because the ministry, the central ministries control that budget. So a lot of local government in Iraq, provincial council, they sent 90% of their budget for that year back to the central government and the central government played them saying, we give them budget, they didn't, you know, they didn't wanna give you surface for political gain again. So it's like the laws itself, this is what the institution. You don't give people power with no legal frame for that to be basically followed. And the legal frame is not there. There's no kind of this connection. And then when you create it in the constitution, you say you have the right to be a federal state. But then it comes, where the political situation right now is not right for it. Or, you know, if you create your federal state, it will be refuge for the Baptist. You know, I was talking to Joel yesterday, all the Baptist when I got to Salahuddin, then we solved maybe part of the problem itself. So these are the things that need to be be able to think about it before we just saying, oh, central government, local government, federal government, we need to solve the laws that govern this. Just one. Very quickly, this really is a centralization issue. And part of this is the central government wanted to think. Part of this, though, is a training issue. You know, anyone who's lived in a bureaucracy, whether it's a foundation or a government or an institution and tried to buy a package full of pens and found out that that took, you know, a purchase order and three cross signatures and a stamp from, you know, it's hard to do. And it's, I mean, I've watched budget execution rates. And yes, some of it is maligned and the central government intended to keep money. Some of it really is just institutional immaturity and not physically being able to move money down to lower levels, not having the institutional muscle memory to do that. I think we need to distinguish between immaturity and malice. Can you clarify what the constitution says on this point of centralization and decentralization and in terms of local government power and control? Because you know this was a big issue in Tunisia and it has the potential to be disruptive. The constitution says that any Iraqi governorate or any combination of governorates can request a referendum which the Iraqi electoral commission is supposed to run. And if the referendum passes, then that governorate or collection of governorates becomes a federal region with similar powers to that that the Kurdistan regional government has right now. They have their own regional guard force. They have their own budget. They have control to some measure of the resources and so on. I mean the constitution is clear. You can't get your federal or a region but the way it made according to the constitution you go to the election commission and you ask there how to organize the referendum. And somehow the regulation, the election commission has to have approval from the prime minister. So then the prime minister is controlling it again. If there is no approval, I cannot do it. And that's exactly what happens. Or if there's no election commission. Or there is in fact no election commission right now. Okay, we have a question here. Yes, if you can. Thank you gentlemen. My friends up there, but also sir. Can you identify yourself? Yeah, my name is Lorelai Kelly. I'm a national security wonk for many years here in DC. My question, I just wanna say I really admire all of you. Thank you so much for spending time in Iraq and then coming back and sharing your experiences with us. My question is, what is the possibility? Since we've had the military surge, we had the civilian surge with not great results. What do you think is the possibility for basically a civil society surge in Iraq? Is there the capacity or the on ramps in civil society to accept help productively from the rest of the world in the non-governmental sector? So we create these sort of mediating devices that build a parallel system basically for the citizens outside of the government which might be dysfunctional in the short term or in the long term. Could we create some kind of a portal that allows projects to get matched and money to go to the micro level? Is that possible in today's world in the sort of social entrepreneurship and distributed technology and micro financing on cell phones that we have available to us? Is it possible if somebody set up a way to do that to move forward? Again, I said there is a hope in civil society. I didn't say they are the savior for us. Civil society also they have their own challenge internal challenge and external. The government is still controlled who is registered who is not. And I mean my colleagues remember that when we were there under order 45 there is 12 or 13,000 Ahmad, 13,000 Iraqi organization registered where under the new law, so far there is 150 organization registered and of the 150, I think 101 belong to either MBs or political leader. So can we depend on the civil society? We need to do it gradually. We don't wanna call the civil society. We don't wanna basically, because the government doesn't work, then we have to, because the community is told it is very mature to do all that work. But if we have a plan like five, six years, 10 years from now, little by little, I think that civil society can rise to that challenge. I mean, I would interject that civil society, I agree with Ramon that there's a great potential and those of us who were in Iraq saw it. It was shocking the resiliency of some aspects of civil society, especially in the South. But I would add that Iraqi civil society in just about every place is under terrible pressure from all sides, from whether it's from militant Islamist groups or whether it's from local political factions or whether it's from the government itself. Because there are great many forces, Ascendant Forces in Iraq right now who are threatened by a sort of a third way, a civil society organizations. And you see, I think, you see at the local level, the government actually in some cases moves to try to atomize civil society. They try to co-opt or to break civil society organizations that they can't control. In the South, you have the solder movement, which for whom civil society organizations are a competitor. As the solderists try to do their grass roots, sort of, you know, seizure of the Iraqi society, a la Lebanese Hezbollah. So these groups are under enormous pressure right now. Political conditions at the top just exacerbate that. And I just hope that we can help these groups survive the next five years or so. Thank you for reminding me of this. Look, civil society is growing right now because there is really the fighting between political party. And if we get a dictatorship again in Iraq, then we will not have civil society too because there is no space for them. They will basically demolished. And again, we have to be careful with civil society what to project. Is it the community beneficiary of this or us? And that's the different approach too. If it is us, just forget it because we are creating another challenge for, you know, good forces in Iraq. Well, yeah, I'm sure in Iraq it's the question of what is civil society is a very complex one. But Doug, I'll let you. If you, you know, I'm a political theorist by training. If you read the early civil society writers, the institutions they primarily talk about are economic ones. And, you know, I'm gonna come back to my emphasis on commerce. I'm a huge fan of microfinance, Lorela, but, you know, microfinance only works when you have macrofinance markets for them to sell to. If we don't have a robust, diversified economy in Iraq, it's hard to see these civil society institutions surviving for the long term. And again, I'm gonna, I really think that's how American can best help Iraq. There, you know, you've not, but you know that, you know, the country, they're natural business people. We do it well. Yes, it is really hard to do business in Iraq, but we do business in lots of hard places all around the world. It can be done. It doesn't always take eight months to get a visa. We, that's, that is, again, is the way forward for the US-Iraq relationship. It is robust promotion of commerce. And, you know, if we had, if we flip the number of commercial officers in embassy Baghdad with the number of public diplomacy officers that we have, I think we'd be much, much better off. Okay. I'm conscious of the fact that we have not discussed regional implications. If there is some kind of question along those lines, I'd be happy to take one. Oh, sorry, you've had one, so I'll let the gentleman behind you speak. I'm Lincoln Day. I'm a retired sociologist and demographer. We've heard a lot of interesting things that about politics and economics here, but politics and economics have to work inevitably within a natural environment. I get the impression from talking to people who have been to Iraq and also just reading the newspaper that a very messy thing, it's a very messy place economically or environmentally now. All of that material from war, debris, and toxic things, materials, things of that sort. You've mentioned the loss of electricity, which in a modern society is a very serious loss, but there must have been great damage to the soil, to water levels, things of that sort. And I just wonder, mustn't this be taken into consideration and isn't this setting limits on what you can do politically and economically? Thank you, we'll take a few more here, yeah. I'm Rick Brennan from the Rand Corporation. Let me just kind of bring it back into a regional perspective then to try to raise an issue for you. As we've seen the political process in Iraq transpire over the last several years, there's a relationship going on right now that as you know where the Prime Minister Maliki is viewed by the Saudi King as somebody that can't be trusted as an Iranian tool. You've seen the shift that Joel has talked about where you're seeing the Iraqis support programs that are against us, that both in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia in Syria. And we're starting to see the GCC starting to isolate or move away from some of what is going on in Iraq. So what are the things that we can do given that you're seeing a closer and closer relationship of Iraq with Iran and the Sunni and GCC countries, they're looking at the situation and looking at Iran as a threat to their security. What are the types of things that we can do to bring Iraq back into the fold and make them part of a broader regional friend rather than seeing them slide closer and closer to Iran? Okay, I'm gonna let each of you tackle this question starting with Doug. Look, we need to accept that Iraq has its own interests. And just as a matter of policy, they are almost always going to sympathize with the Shia population of a country, whether that's the minority regime in Damascus or whether that's the majority repress fraction in Bahrain. That's just going to be their interest and we need to understand that. It's not about us and it's not about, if we didn't exist, that would still be their policy. So we need to understand that's not about us and they're countering us. That said, we do need to take steps to integrate them better into the region. I still, Rick and I have worked together many times before. He's got more time on the ground in Iraq than Joel and I put together. We need to find ways to move these relationships forward. And I still think that as the American withdrawal becomes more and more apparent to the Iraqis and as the implications of that fully play out, the distinctions between Iraq and Iran will come to the surface, will become more politically salient, will bubble up as the most relevant issues in Iraqi politics. And I think we will then see that swing away. I think we're still seeing this natural alliance between the two states in part to counter the fact that we did have 50,000 guys sitting there. I couldn't agree, disagree with that more. The Iraqi policy toward Syria is not a sectarian one. The Assad regime behaved in Iraq for many years as a sunni power, pushing Al Qaeda in Iraq into Iraq to kill thousands of the Iraqi Shia. And it was just a little over two years ago that the prime minister called for a UN tribunal to investigate the Assad regime for its involvement in the bombings in August 2009 in Baghdad. So this shift of policy is a maliki shift of policy. It's an artificial one that's been done in concert with the Iranian regime's attempt to shore up its regional ally. So I think the sectarian policy of the maliki government is artificial. If there were proper power sharing in Iraq, if there was a proper foreign policy formulated on the shared interests of all the Iraqi parties, you would not see them adopting a sectarian regional policy. You would not see them trying to prop up the Assad regime. You would not see them favoring intervention into the Bahrain crisis to destabilize it there. What can be done to insulate Iraq from Iranian influence was Rick's question. I don't believe, I agree with Doug that in the very long term that there is an Iraqi inoculation to Iranian influence, it's distasteful to Iraqis. Iraqis are very nationalist. They would reject it if they had the means over time. But the Iraqi politics lies prone before Iranian influence right now. And Iraqis have to be political survivors. They have to accommodate themselves to the prevailing power just to get through the week and survive and that's what they're doing with respect to the Iranian regime right now. So in the near term you are not going to see the natural Iraqi antipathy to Iranian influence come out. Even amongst the Iraqi Shia of far southern Iraq are the most anti-Iranian Iraqis that I met because they were on the front lines of the Iranian-Iraq war and bore the brunt of it and they have a very long memory of that. This will kick in at some point in time but it's not gonna be in the near term. And the crisis that we have to concern ourselves with in the region, the potential for regional sectarian conflict, the potential chaos in Syria that could spill over, these things are happening in the near term. So we can't afford to just sort of let events take their course over a generation. We have to do things to insulate Iraq from undue Iranian influence now. In just a couple of minutes we'll be closing so if you can answer briefly. Iranian influence in Iraq, it is not just Shia influence in Iraq because we talk politics. The Iranian has connection to all the political part, all political leaders in Iraq. No difference between Tarq al-Hashemi and al-Maliki. All they have connection to Iran and the Kurds too. And if you tell General Taliban if you choose between the US and the Iranian who you choose as friend, he will choose the Iranian because they are next door. They respond quickly for him. They have leverage in the Iraqi politics. For the Saudi and Iraq, I think this is more struggle beyond the Arab Spring who's gonna be lead the Arab port. Literally historical is there are four countries who kind of set the agenda for the Arab nation. Saudi with their money, Iraq with their military and political force and Egypt and Syria. Egypt and Syria are not a player right now. So there is a struggle between Iraq and Saudi who will be the next leader that the Arab listen to. And then they mix it with little bit of the sectarian bar, Sunni Shia. So it is really economical struggle who is gonna control and political struggle who is gonna control more than those are close to Iran, those are close to. I'm afraid we're out of time. I want to thank our panelists for coming forth and giving us such great analysis on this very complex problem. I feel that we should have a vote. Yeah, like the Doha debates, but I'm not sure what we would be voting for. Although I can see that one would be a positive outlook and one would be a negative. But again, thanks everyone for coming out and thanks to the panelists.