 My name is Tom Sanderson, Co-director of Transnational Threats at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Thank you so much for joining us this morning. We have two superb speakers. Graham is our guest today. Graham Wood and Dr. Tony Koresman will offer some comments on Graham's article in The Atlantic. It's an excellent article. And then I'll offer a few questions and then turn it out to the rest of you for engagement. Since we have such a small group here, I thought we'll go around the room and have everyone introduce themselves, your name and where you're from. And then we'll open it up to Graham for about 10, 15 minutes of comments. And then to Tony. Okay. Olivia? On my turn early, I'm across the street of St. Matthews Cathedral, but I teach part-time at Caltech University, most recently, politics, international politics and religion. And I used to be in the Foreign Service in my previous hierarchy. I'm John Colclayser, Air Force Colonel, retired. I teach no or Fort Belvoir Command and General Staff Officers course. They wanted a blue suitor in there, too. So I do that. I teach multinational operations, creative thinking, things of that age. Good morning. I'm Josh Rosakis. I work as Tom's RA at the TNT project. I'm Hunter Keith. I work at DAI on violent extremism and governance. I'm Hamid Ghar. I used to intern for Tom and just here at a personal interest. I'm Alvaro Genie. I work at CSIS with the Brown Chair. I'm Max Peck. I'm in the Middle East program here at CSIS. Hi, I'm Mike. I work at the Italian Embassy. Nathan Puffer adjunct in TNT and CMS President of Global Strategies with North America. Caleb Johnson. I work at CSIS in the Strategic Planning Department. My name is Catery Carmola and now I'm a consultant for the private security industry, but before then I was a professor of political science and taught on comparative terrorism. I'm Tony Cordesman. I hold the Berk Chair in strategy here at CSIS. And I'm Graham Wood. I'm a contributing editor at the New Republic Magazine and the Atlantic Magazine and I wrote this year a large article about what ISIS really wants. Great. I'll actually pass this around for those folks who haven't seen it. But as that's passed around, we'll let Graham begin with his comments. Graham, thank you so much for coming down, making the trip during the storm. This has received tremendous attention, well deserved. Hunter introduced you to me and I'm real excited to hear what you have to say. So go for it. Thanks. Well, as the cover suggests, I was trying to ask this fairly simple question and my editor suggested that I ask it with almost a faux naivete, what does ISIS want? And as I tried to ask it, I discovered there was nothing faux about the naivete whatsoever. It was very, very murky what ISIS wanted. And I think in many ways the ways that the question had been implicitly and explicitly answered in public discourse had actually confused and muddied the answer that actually turned out to be the case. I'll tell you first just how I went about this. There are, as I think everybody in this room knows, there's quite a few statements that are put out by the Islamic state itself. And these, of course, are regarded as, there are verifiable statements and they're reliably translated into English and other western languages as well. So I regarded those as, shall we say, primary sources and was looking from there to voices outside of the Islamic state since the Islamic state doesn't really answer press requests or email in a conventional way. Voices outside the Islamic state that were viewed by the reliable voices within it or that were viewed as reflecting some of the doctrinal consensus of the Islamic state in the things they were saying. And this was partially just to compare what they said to the official pronouncements, but also to see who was looking to these voices as sources of authority or consistency. There had been studies done on social media, for example, to find out which accounts seemed to be looked to with deference, which ones seemed to be followed by the verified other accounts that were known to be supporters of the Islamic state. And of course, this is a highly, there are many problems with this approach, but it's the one that clearly was as good as I could get in finding out what the Islamic state wanted in theory. And I stress that that is the project that I was undertaking was to find out ideologically, doctrinally, what the Islamic state wanted and how it viewed itself with the intention of figuring that out and perhaps understanding something about the attraction that it was exerting to what we now are tens of thousands of foreign fighters and thousands of foreign fighters from Western countries. So where that took me initially, in addition to the digital explorations, was two groups of people. One individual in Australia named Musa Charantonio, who was named in a King's College London study as one of the two most important nodes of doctrinal enforcement and dissemination. And then this well-known group within the United Kingdom, formerly known as Al-Muhajerun, a group of very media-savvy fans of the Islamic state who are well known to the public, also well known to authorities and who at the time I was speaking to them had been prevented from leaving to go to the Islamic state through confiscation of their passports, although some members of that group already had gone. And actually on the very days that I was speaking to their comrades in the UK were tweeting out photographs of themselves in Raqqa with weapons and in one case a newborn son. So I went to London, I spoke to these people, and what I found was that they had, especially the media-savvy ones, they had spoken to many reporters before. The small contribution that I was hoping to add, though, was to ask them not just the sort of cable news-style questions that they had before, such as what's wrong with you, but really in detail what do you believe? What do you think? What is this project that you're calling a caliphate and what distinguishes it from previous types of jihadism that I might have heard or read about in the past? And the distinctions became quite clear. Their leader, a very well-known guy named Anjum Chowdhury, he was describing the caliphate as a kind of ideological light switch that had been thrown that was going to attract him and others the way an insect would be attracted to light. He said, as a Muslim, he gave the figure 80%. 80% of Islam he considered to have been essentially in abeyance in the absence of a proper Islamic state. And he said that once a valid caliphate had been declared, a whole slew of obligations suddenly were awakened. And that he expressed to me was why the middle of last year, the time of the declaration of the caliphate, was so crucial as a turning point in the attraction of Syria to like-minded individuals. So there are plenty of particular aspects of his version of the caliphate that I can get into. But I would just like to express that he seemed to think of this as a utopian project. It was not merely, although it was this too, a political one or an expression of defiance, but it was a society that he was describing that would be fully realized and include all sorts of very utopian is not even an inadequate word for it. Extremely optimistic views of how things would eventually be organized, the ability of a state to provide, for example, free health care, free food, free housing, free clothing to all of its citizens. That was the kind of utopian view that he was in particular pushing out and that I think in his core group was certainly an article of great importance and attraction to the caliphate. What I learned from the Australian was slightly different. He was almost entirely consistent, ideologically, with the London group, but he stressed a different aspect, which we could also see throughout the primary documents. And that is an apocalypticism. This was his, I would say, main preoccupation and he recently came out with, you can look it up online, a rather interesting learned document trying to interpret the Hadith mention of a group called the Rome, the Romans. And his claim, rather heterodox, is that the mention of the Romans as the army that will meet Islam at the city in Dabik in northern Syria, according to his interpretation, actually referred to the army of the Republic of Turkey, which I can get into why he thinks that he believes that the mention of Rome in Hadith would have referred to the Eastern Roman Empire, which was in Constantinople and the closest continuator of that group would be Istanbul slash Ankara today. It was striking to me to hear him speak in these apocalyptic terms, not because it was the first time anyone from this longish now and diverse tradition of Al-Qaeda had spoken in apocalyptic terms, but it was very clear that these were events that he expected to happen soon. And this, as I think a matter of consistency, is something that I would see constantly in social media, in the official pronouncements of the state, the propaganda that would come out, the imminent fulfillment of prophecy is something that, in his view, I was inclined to think that this was something that, even if he spoke of it in literal imminent terms, was in some way flexible or metaphorical, he urged me not to see it that way and has urged me, actually, since the article came out, not to see things that way, but to say, look, we really do believe, he said, even you, who have written about this with clarity in your article, he says, I sense that even you don't think that it's actually going to unfold quite like this and quite in the timetable that we claim. That is, not only do you not think it's going to happen, but you don't think that we think it's going to happen. We do. That is our view. And that ultimately was one of the two big distinctions that I came to find in discussing these issues with these people was that the emphasis on imminent apocalyptic thinking was distinguishing them from, say, the old guard of the core group of Al-Qaeda. And then, secondarily, or secondly, but actually no less of a priority, their emphasis on attacking other Muslims, this seemed to be an extraordinarily important thing to them in a way that in my understanding of that old guard of the core group of Al-Qaeda, it never was. The way that they, that both groups, both in Australia and in the UK, expressed zeal for excommunication was quite jarring. They would, without any hesitation, declare all current Muslim heads of state, non-Muslims, apostates, and they were very willing to declare essentially mass excommunication on the basis of sin, essentially. But sin of a particular type that they thought amounted to as a result of being sin that was taking place in conditions of non-ignorance. That is, the people who were doing the sins knew that it was sinful in fact denying the inerrancy of the laws that made it sinful. So they were very willing to declare excommunication on a mass basis in a way that Al-Qaeda, in my understanding, had not been willing to do. So these are the two main distinctions between Al-Qaeda and the people I spoke to. I might reserve some time later to talk about what their vision of a caliphate means for the way we might approach them and particularly how we might approach the questions of propaganda, radicalization of the possible overseas recruits who I think are likely to be more ideologically based than some of the people in the region who might have been more accidentally caught up in all of this. So I think I'll leave it with that and turn it over to Dr. Cordesman. I have to say that in many areas I think you bring an expertise to this that's a little hard to provide a lot of background on. But there is one thing that struck me about your work which I think is very important to all of us who are dealing with the upheavals and problems in the Middle East. And that is first, very often I have seen people focus on the number of volunteers and where the volunteers come from. And that's not unimportant. But if you look at similar movements in totally different contexts, the Russian Revolution, for example, and how you saw the Bolsheviks emerge as a leading force and take control, or if you look at the cycles of control and power struggles in the French Revolution, or you look at other factional groups which have been bound by very strong ideologies, what is really striking is how important the cadres are and how important the belief structures of the cadres are and consistency in the cadres have been. You also see that they have been able to enforce an ideological consistency in the middle of climates of violence and revolution. Almost all of them came to power by excluding similar movements, which were more moderate. At no point, if you look at this, either in terms of their success or failure in the classic sense, did public opinion broadly really matter. It was how these cadres influenced the course of violence and those actively involved in violence and particularly in enforcing the authority of the state. Now, I'm not going to try to push these analogies too far. There is obviously no real similarity between this vision of Islam, the vision of Marxism, or the vision of what became an almost incoate concept of secular class struggle in the French Revolution. But I do think it is important for us to pay a lot of attention to this because if you have these cadres, one thing that historically has not particularly mattered is do you counter them by educating people that there are problems in their belief structure? And the answer by and large has never been that you can easily counter the forces that lead people to become involved and support these patterns of violence that are the reasons they're recruited. They become caught up in a structure of power, a structure of ideas whose simplicity and contrast, whose absolutism is by itself a major tool in moving toward violence and yes, of course, in the case of the French Revolution, the structure eventually imploded and in the case of the Russian Revolution, it transformed into classic authoritarianism and state control. But I think as we look at this too, one of the things that I notice about what seems to be the attraction and perhaps you can touch on this in your comments is it isn't so much that people will believe what these cadres believe in detail. It is they have so little reason to trust the traditional authority structures around them. Now you began to see this in the Arab Development Reports that were issued in 2003. It was really striking to see that if you looked at the demographics that are driving the region and I won't get into alienation in Europe, the population according to what we estimate today in the MENA region is a little over six times what it was in 1950. The number of young men and young people 24 and under as a percentage of the population is twice what it is in the United States and about three times what it is in most of Europe. Looking at some of the studies done, the outliers for young men, the number of people unemployed directly or indirectly were far higher than in any other region. Perceptions of corruption, the illegitimacy of traditional societies and the state were radically different even if people did not have a clear idea of what they wanted and where they were going to go. So I think that one real question here and if they remain unified, if they become a subject with this many reasons why people both alienated outside young men and women but above all the large majority of people who come from the region have no reason to either trust their future or trust the secular society or even the traditional patterns of education and religious authority figures. How do you counter? How do you deal with this threat? Do you simply wait till it burns its way out or it transforms itself? I think these are issues we really need to address because let me just conclude with this comment. I look back to the previous war in Iraq when David Petraeus asked the question of how does this war end? And one of the problems I have with the way we've been approaching the Islamic State is if the cadres do have this impact and there are these broad factors. If we do defeat the Islamic State militarily or through classic counterinsurgency what kind of stability or order or lasting impact do you have? I don't know if you touched it all on the al-Nusra Front but given the fact that decisively defeated the one major moderate group of rebels in Syria we backed for the second time last week and I'll leave it to the experts as to whether there's any chance they're going to recover but at the end of it if you occupy Mosul if you win into greed and if these ideological concepts have the strength and unity you found what does it actually matter? What is the strategy if any that we seem to be pursuing both in Iraq and Syria and looking on to and I don't know if you'd care to comment on the similarities to Libya and Yemen and other areas. But these are issues where I think quite frankly as I look at the media comments and some of the military actions we're taking and some of the focus on numbers of foreign volunteers rather than cadres really bother me not so much about the Islamic State's ideology but ours. Thank you Tony. Graham I'll give you a chance to respond to that and then if we do want to go into the Libya side maybe Hunter Keith could offer a couple of comments on Libya but let's have Graham respond and then I'll ask a couple of questions to get the dialogue going. So Dr. Quartersman not only do I agree with many of the areas of emphasis that you've raised but I've found that many supporters of the Islamic State agree as well that is some of these questions about the origins and the important background aspects of where this group came from why it arose when it did and why it became a source of authority. I think that I have had I've had communication with supporters of the Islamic State and I've actually pointed to many of the topics that you raised the issues of development in the region the lack of authority from the governments and the lack thereof in the areas where the Islamic State has arisen and they've expressed that this is part of the mechanism of the rise of the group that they support they say that the fact that there is chaos the fact that there are there are clearly corrupt governments that have predatory relationships with their populations this is entirely in the Islamic State's favor and it's part of the mechanism of its rise that first that there will be chaos first there will be a lack of authority and that the Islamic State with an assist from God himself will arise and will exert the kind of anti-entropic force that is going to be sought by the people in the region and that I think is key to understanding how the Islamic State believes it will continue to survive and to expand and so to speak of Libya for example the chaos of Libya the failure of Libya to turn into anything that resembled order that is I think a model for how the Islamic State will expect to expand it will not be through conquest on the fringes of the territory that it has but it will be pockets of anarchy into which it can step and I think it would likely view the sources of those anarchy as being a menu of sources that it would regard as very favorable just as a matter of the number of ways in which the Muslim world in general is troubled in terms of misgovernment lack of human development all of these are considered to be in the Islamic State's favor so on the question of whether the ideology of the State is going to remain as consistent as it's been I would be surprised if it did only because it could hardly be more consistent as it is in this early almost pre-routinized kind of stage in its development and the ability that it has to keep that message enforced and consistent at this point I think is remarkable and even as I spoke to the supporter in Australia he told me some stories about the beginning of the State which I found quite amazing he said that at some point he agreed as I mentioned before the idea that the London group had about Islam essentially not being practicable without an Islamic State and so he said that at an early point in the middle of last year there was a group within the Islamic State that noticed that the conditions for a caliphate had been met and he said that they had approached the leadership of what was then ISIS and said the conditions have been met you are now obliged to declare a caliphate and if you do not do that then we will factionalize and we will fight against you and we are obliged to do that so the actual difference between someone who has stood up and said I am caliph and someone who is not is zero there is nothing that happened when that declaration took place practically but apparently it was enough a significant portion of ideologues within the Islamic State saying that it was a deal breaker and that it would cause internecine fighting between that group so I have been surprised by the amount of consistency and I don't know exactly the mechanism that it would take for it to break down with time like I say I could hardly imagine it becoming more consistent on the other hand how it would cease to be so is not something I can predict Fantastic, thank you both Graham and Dr. Cordesman let me start off with a question a couple of things one is that last example you gave Graham of factionalization and pushing the leadership to declare the caliphate and then to govern as such how much influence is there coming up from the bottom as time goes on from fighters from not just foreign fighters coming in who may be just young guns but more learned individuals and number two how does ISIS educate those young guys coming in who may not be educated do they want them to be educated is there a formal process for that happening yeah so I'm afraid a lot of these questions I'm just gonna have to plead ignorance on but I can certainly cite research of others describing the indoctrination processes of new recruits they exist they're formalized and then the question of whether the whether there is a kind of bottom-up influence on ideology it's been interesting to watch examples such as the the revelation that there is slavery going on the burning of the Jordanian pilot there has been this moment of cognitive dissonance that you can watch in real time in which there have been there were supporters of the Islamic State who said no no slavery is not happening and then of course the Islamic State itself comes out with propaganda that says slavery is happening and this is the reason why if you disagree with the practice you are an apostate so it's that cognitive dissonance ended rapidly with acquiescence to the official position of the Islamic State likewise with the burning of the Jordanian pilot there was I think a more muted sense of doubt about whether this was a Islamically proper reaction but the Islamic State came out with its line it's a very interesting reading shall we say of Islamic laws of war but it came out with its ideological justification its citation of history and scripture and that seemed to quiet the dissent so the top-down aspects of this seemed to be prevailing let's open it up again just identify yourself before asking the question thanks Graham thanks for bringing him in this is exciting as I said before to have such a really terribly interesting provocative article we've all been struggling with just the questions that you asked I looked at Baghdadi's sort of emergence and the emergency of IS as you know a brilliant military tactician he's done a great job sort of fighting and expanding his the area that he manages he's got the vision thing he can get people to express it he can get people behind him he's done great financial management he's trying to organize the state so it has governance he's done an incredibly creative use of terrorism to support his military tactics but you know as a Middle East hand I had trouble with the ideological roots and that's the thing that your article really made me really interested to try to see some of the reasons that they may be doing things which to me appear to be to quote Obama un-Islamic maybe the roots of the reasons they're doing some of these terrible things trying to get the end of time come quickly but I find it very hard to believe that 95% of the people who are following the leadership really understands or believes in the in the sort of ideological roots you know you've talked to some people who are real scholars and who have had their own sort of Talmudic interpretations of how things are being done I just personally think that 90% of the people are there just because it seems like a fun thing to do and they don't like what they're doing no jobs as you said can you talk a little bit about that yes I certainly agree that the ideological penetration is not 100% I don't think it's even 95% that said this is not this is not just the province of the very small group of scholarly individuals who might be attracted to the Islamic state the the general the general line the slogans these are things that are ubiquitous on for example social media how many people in the Islamic state are on twitter a very small number of course so perhaps this population aligns with the ideological minority or plurality or majority I don't know but what I would certainly say is that it's not it's not something that one could avoid well being an active part of ISIS and we can see that through even just through the reports that we see the images that we see on the street the the public gatherings the rhetoric it is constantly infused with this stuff and could one live a full and unhappy life in the Islamic state without thinking about this very much I think it's quite possible but you will go down the street you will see billboards about this you will every bit of propaganda that comes up the ticket you have on the dash of your car when you park in the wrong place will say something about the prophetic methodology so it's not it's not knowable to me whether this is something that everyone believes but it's certainly something that no one can avoid and I think particularly in the populations that are coming from overseas and that are being the kind of propaganda that is being fed to them it doesn't focus on this for no reason it's apparently very attractive to those groups Tony just sometimes because we focus on the Middle East I think it is important to remember that some of these patterns are not unfamiliar if you look back to the ideological structure of what went on during the Spanish Revolution or if you look at the differences between the so-called white armies in Russia and the evolving Bolshevik forces people became very clearly ideologically aligned they didn't question as long as there was a clear pattern of ideological leadership it was consistent and there was a figure that could keep people motivated yet became progressively more extreme in the French case it imploded finally in the Russian and the Spanish case depending on which side you want it was an open question as to which side became more extreme over time and I think we need to remember these patterns because we tend to look on this as somehow terribly cultural and terribly a matter of an individual religion or ideology but it isn't not historically you could look at why the shining path rose and failed in Peru and you would find many of the same given elements the other thing I would remember here is if you happen to be an Iraqi or a Syrian Sunni remember the other side of the ideological pressure there's very little about the Iraqi state which has emerged that would particularly reassure a Sunni there's very little about what has happened under Assad the one thing I would note is that we do need to remember that the Islamic state more or less lost to the al-Nusra Front so there are limits there is a real split here along an ideological line in Syria and so far it is the other Islamic extremists which seem to be having the most impact on the population in Syria but it is the Islamic state which has the most stable control of the river valley area in the east of Syria which is not all that populated Graeme do you want to comment on that or just let's go let me touch on three things that are in the news I'll get to you Hunter in just a sec and just to offer your opinion on the perspective that ISIS has on these issues some of which seem to be inconsistent we saw the destruction of the statues and antiquities at the museum in Mosul yet there's also an effort to traffic in antiquities and to benefit from them in their value there's also issues with their perspective on women and women rushing to join ISIS and then there's also the targeting of Christians potentially for chits in exchange but also be targeted for violence so can you give your perspective on how the Islamic state views these three issues antiquities women and Christians yes so on the antiquities issues very interesting so you know I saw with horror the same images that I'm sure everybody else saw of statues being destroyed at the museum in Mosul but I honestly thought it would have happened sooner but they they've been very clear about their policy about these antiquities which is that the ones they consider idolatrous must be destroyed the others are a fair game for sale and sure enough they're on the market so I think that they may very well be following through in exactly what they claim to be doing and then on the issue of women this is another interesting split I think between the Islamic state and the old guard of al-Qaeda and this was put to me by some European researchers on this topic very clearly they said in the old days if you wanted to bring women to participate in violent jihad overseas it was quite difficult to find someone who was a conservative Muslim woman who would meet with a recruiter on a street in London whereas now this is the one way in which online recruiting has really changed things you can very effectively recruit women to join and so this is something that I think the Islamic state is trying very hard to do because of this goal of creating a demographically whole society and rather than just finding some people to strap bombs to create a place that is going to have a true depth and durability and then on the topic of Christians I would only say that their own view of trading of hostages is that it's a perfectly fine thing to do they say they cannot trade apostates there's just no choice, they have to be killed but Christians journalists they see no inconsistency or moral qualms about getting whatever they can for them great thank you for that Hunter Keith please I wanted to go back to the earlier question that dealt with the the degree of ideological penetration that we might be seeing from the Islamic state on down in societies like the Iraqi one and the Syrian one possibly even the Libyan one you and I have been talking about the implications of the work more than a month now since before the article came out I think we could sort of anticipate what the response might be publicly to the notion that this organization is in some ways fundamentally religious and Islamic more specifically it is a controversial statement but I do feel like the discussion that has followed from the article's publication has in some ways missed the point of departure the point at which these things should debated and the way in which I think the discussion misses some of what you're trying to say is in the sense that I think that there's strategically speaking and this is where I'm interested to see how this discussion here would evolve but strategically speaking if we're looking to make a meaningful inroad against the Islamic state on the ground it seems to me that your argument makes a very fundamental assumption an implicit assumption but a fundamental one that elites matter that the ideological elites in the Islamic state particularly in Iraq and Syria matter in a way that others who might feel that the article throws out and accuses a much larger population of being complicit with what the Islamic state does and with its ideology they might feel that there are other strategic implications about the non-elites the broader population of Iraqis and Syrians who might have political interests they might have narrow or economic interests they might have and in that way they might be up for grabs in the context of a Western strategy moving against ISIS up for grabs in ways that your assumptions perhaps don't necessarily admit to and so I just wondered whether you could say something about the consequence of elites particularly ideological elites in the Islamic state where it pertains to our strategy against them and I guess to be a little bit more specific if we could come up with a Sunni leader politically who was acceptable politically to the larger Sunni population in Iraq and put that person in Baghdad in a position to attract politically again all those disaffected Sunnis in places like Mosul, Ramadi, Fallujah would that necessarily make a meaningful inroad against what we see from the Islamic state on the ground or is the purity of the ideological movement at the elite level in places like Mosul and Raqqa far more consequential than that so you're right to point out the importance that I'm placing in the article on an elite and specifically the ideological elite and that's purely to keep what was already a 10,000 word article just at 10,000 words to describe this ideology and not to place necessarily supremacy over the political considerations that you're describing the main point that I'd like to make about what you've suggested that is whether there could be a kind of ideologically impure political solution a satisfactory Sunni leader, I think that is perfectly possible. What I don't think it's possible is for that kind of accommodation to satisfy the broader movement which may be a smaller, a small enough portion of the Islamic state and its supporters that we can safely ignore them, but the broader movement absolutely will not be satisfied by that and there are many, many reasons for that the again, we might be able to discount these these hyper pure ideologically pure elites more broadly, but I think that what the Islamic state has shown it can do with great success and consistency and neutralize the and nullify any attempt to co-opt it on an ideological basis. So we will continue to have even if that accommodation works that kind of solution works is this base of the people who are attracted to the Islamic state from overseas they will certainly not be satisfied by that and I think it's quite likely that they would find expression for their dissatisfaction perhaps in a place other than Iraq. Yeah I'm interested in one aspect of what I've heard here today when we teach the army folks on this going out to confront this sort of thing we teach them you've got to identify that one thing that you're facing out there in this mass, this mass we call that center of gravity whatever that thing is it's got to be able to do something we call that critical capabilities to do that you have to have something usually a noun like money arms we call that the critical requirement. Somewhere in there there is a vulnerability what do you see as the one critical vulnerability that is there somewhere in ISIS? Well for a military vulnerability I don't know I don't know what that's going to look like as an ideological and propaganda vulnerability I think that for the reasons I just described to Hunter the attempts that we might have to produce for example a counter narrative these will fail I think that ISIS relative to the United States its allies any type of coalition it has that kind of insurgent cache we cannot produce anything that can be traced back to us in any way I think is tainted to such degree that it would be a failure to try be like trying to make Microsoft popular versus some insurgent start up it's just you can't possibly be cool that way so what I think the vulnerability then is the denial through fact of the most extreme aspects of the propaganda you know if they're suggesting that the caliphate has these following qualities including divine favor there are certain realities that we can provide to them that will make that less plausible as a claim and these would include simply a failure to expand making sure that territory shrinks stagnates and as I described that if the expectation is that this is going to be an a state in which Islam is equitably implemented along their peculiar lines then with time that utopian ideal I think will clearly fail and if that happens enough then I think the propaganda the ideological propaganda will be neutralized by that failure through time and stagnation so I think that might be one avenue it's just time yes I'm sorry some of the ISIS fighters they've walked away from this sort of thing that was a mistake this is wrong it has happened correct it has happened there's quite a bit of effort to stop these people from getting out and stop their messages from getting out it's happened enough that we've heard ISIS Jürgen Totenhofer the eccentric German went over there and interviewed ISIS fighters they spoke of these people and they said I hope they repent I hope they repent so it was noteworthy first of all that it wasn't the expectation that they had gone off to fight back in Europe but they had gone back and were dissatisfied by what they had seen of course we'd love to see more of those people and we'd love to have their voices not be polluted by power giving them a megaphone but just by their own power to make these statements in time of course there will only be more of them a couple of comments understand that we are not forward in Iraq we're advising from the rear we are not providing an ideological message in a direct sense through troops or our military trainers we are attempting to create elite forces forces capable of operating effectively in combat there are certainly smaller elements of this but I think this becomes critical because who's forward well part of it is at Shi'ite militias part of it is you can see in Iranian presence part of it is in Iraqi force where we may be able to rebalance the sectarian structure but we may not be interesting to watch and a lot of what we are doing is simply not visible one problem with air power particularly the kind of air power we're using is it doesn't send a clear message to a lot of people as to exactly what is happening and where it's going on you also need to remember that and here I would go back to a comment made earlier you know if there's going to be a Sunni leader they're going to have to emerge as an immense surprise because quite frankly one of the reasons that others lost was they were very ineffective at leading the other problem was they were visibly and clearly for sale in the case of many of the others and people in the Sunni areas saw this so it's hard for them to come back and emerge as leaders that have credibility so when you talk about ideology one problem we have is no there is no one center of gravity here you're trying to defeat an extremist movement in a country that enabled the extremist movement by having a leader which brought it to the edge of civil war before they came in if you look at the UN casualty data after we left in 2011 and take it to the end of 2003 it was a remarkable movement toward civil conflict among the Arabs and a remarkable division between Arab and Kurd so one of the great problems here is going to be what actually emerges and who has the ideological legitimacy or dominance to date and I will defer to anyone here our effort to create anything approaching a Sunni National Guard has not had one single major cadre emerge with any stable support in part because the central government finds it impossible to actually implement or keep its promises now if we move it to the other side of this equation when you talk about a center of gravity yes a nice military notion it's also how you lose a counter insurgency because you focus on the tactical side or one idea and you're fighting a complex political military war and why do you have that because the state failed and created the climate where the war now creates well the other side of this is Syria and the good news is that yes the extremist elements are fighting each other on occasion but the Assad regime is even worse and you created a situation when you have actually managed to convert half the population to internally displaced persons where is the source of ideological and political stability messaging from religious authority figures when you've got 10.7 million people according to the UN displaced something on the order of 5 million now under siege or without aid 3.7 million driven out of the country you're not messaging through tweeting and you're not having soldiers send political messages even if we had any soldiers which as of now we don't so I think remember whatever we deal with here I hate to use the term net assessment but you have to measure both sides not just one and you have to consider the extraordinary operational limits that broadly exist on the U.S. role in both countries please thanks both for your comments and also reminded that two days ago Dr. Quartersman you led another conversation downstairs on survey research throughout the Middle East which was fascinating you might want to mention some of the conclusions from those surveys but earlier your historical analogies I thought were really appropriate and so many times we just imagine that we have to do something now but in previous revolutions Russian revolution want to say Chinese revolution French revolution there's very little that outside powers can do when you have an internal revolution you can contain it we might be in a kind of containment phase but there's very little on the ground influence you can do when a revolution is coming from below like this successful invasion Graham let me ask another question concerning some of the issues we've seen in the news there are often distinctions made between al-Qaeda and ISIS that al-Qaeda focuses on the far end and is more interested in expeditionary activity with ISIS focused on establishing the caliphate yet you have what appear to be outposts for ISIS emerging is this organic to those areas or is this push from the center from ISIS how do they view ideologically but also practically the presence of supporters who are pledging biot allegiance to them around the world my sense is that it's actually quite organic and the connections between perhaps with the exception of Libya but the connections between the many different lia that have been declared and have had their allegiance received and the mother ship I think those connections are very easy to overstate the Islamic state is the front line organization everybody keeps talking about how wealthy it is there's not a great deal to lose by saying that you're allied with them with Libya obviously we've seen some pretty strong indications that there is at the very least consistency of message and branding and that I think is roughly how Libya I would think is probably the model that they will be looking forward toward in the future on the question of this far enemy issue I find it very interesting that ISIS the Islamic state has been very consistent in what it has asked its supporters to do in terms of attacks on the United States western targets and that is not to do them interestingly it has been instead to focus on immigrating to the Islamic state and only when that fails we perpetrate attacks of this lone wolf variety that are not officially branded sponsored attacks I find that a very interesting distinction between them and al-Qaeda that they would stay their hand a bit in this way and instead as I said tried to stock the Islamic state itself with warm bodies and play this long game of creating a durable entity that can attack in a different way yes please and please remember to identify yourself hello my name is Hermes Levy I'm from the OWS I just wanted to make some comment and have a question the comment is I think we have tendons to fool ourselves about the Islamic state and Islam in general because we differentiate between what we call political Islam and the other ideologies it's all the same it's all inside the book and it's just there is an intelligence that govern and direct all of this when the time is appropriate like now it uses extremism it's cleverly used somebody talked about the similarity that she just the existence of a plan that is being done so if we want to have a clear intelligence of what is going on we need to understand this higher level where there is intelligence that govern that direct this movement or all the movement the terrorism what we call the terrorism is the verse inside the book it says it's known when it comes to the weakness the only weakness we can focus on is also inside the book is when they were they were divided between Shia and Sunni it's inside the book so in order for us to formulate something coherent and able to be a significant response what do you think is appropriate given the information that we have also to investigate this high level that some call high politics that intervene and we usually in our analysis we don't take it into account thank you if I've understood the point properly I think the question of how we respond especially to religious questions which as my article makes clear I do think that this is a group with a religious background background and my point in saying that which this has been a point that's drawn quite a bit of attention that I think is a side show the actual purpose of making it is by recognizing that this is a religious group I think that we we do not need to take a stand on whether it is the correct interpretation of the religion that it claims to follow and so I do think it's very important that we understand as we try to understand propaganda, attraction the religious nature of the group but to avoid making points of theological findness with authority that we cannot possibly have and shouldn't claim to have so if that speaks to your point I think we should acknowledge the nature of this propaganda and ideology without trying to take that trying to claim authority that we do not have so to that point Graham can you interpret President Obama's position on this issue that he's been criticized about regarding using the term Islamic or Islamist? Yeah so the again the terminological the nomenclature issues they are I think it's very easy to confuse political rhetoric with that has very good purposes building coalitions Muslims both American and non there is not a fight against them with an actual analytic failure and I'm not sure that failure is actually there certainly at this point even if the statement is made that ISIS is not an Islamic group I would say that's simply factually incorrect in the same way it would be wrong to say that the Westboro Baptist Church is not a Christian group it's just a matter of the traditions in which they fall what I would be wary of doing and not because it has strong negative effects but because it has at best neutral ones is trying to claim that they are incorrect in their interpretations of Islam which the president just like me and just like just like most people has no authority to say. Other questions please back to Hunter and then we'll go to Ali going back to the issue of communications and even strategic communications the gentlemen's point here a very practical one how do you take the fight particularly in the propaganda war to ISIS and then also to consider what Dr. Korsman has spoken about in terms of historical revolutions that have imploded in the past imploded by imploded largely because their own ideology becomes something that can no longer sustain or can no longer encompass a large enough group of people to sustain the movement we spent a lot of time talking about alternatives to the sort of the ISIS interpretation or expression of Islam and putting those alternatives out there making cases for why the organization is not Islamic but I wonder whether there do you see weakness inside the organization from a communications perspective or strategic communications perspective if we think a little bit outside the box and we think about the dangers of ideological movements that try to enforce a kind of purity that is unattainable I mean this is very literally a holier than thou logic within the organization that allows the organization to remain coherent in a way in the eyes of its followers but at what point does that holier than thou attitude sort of propagate to an extent that the organization itself cannot hold together any longer because the internal differences of interpretation among various elites make it so that they wind up essentially at each other's throats so far the squabbles over the holier than thou attitude don't seem to have by and large risen to the level of public awareness I don't see some burbling unrest on that topic within the Islamic state but then again they're very good about controlling their message so if it's there it might just be invisible to me and to most others we'll go to Tony for I think a two-fingered interjection here and then to Ali Sada I think that first it is very important to keep reminding ourselves of the importance of strategic communications it's equally important to remember who the hell we are which is a bunch of secular Americans who are not Islamic and not part of this I think that we need to be very careful about what we can and cannot do we could help I think countries in the region if they were better prepared to be proactive less reliant on traditional lines of authority more willing to react and investigate and involve themselves in a much wider use of media reaching out to targeted groups and so on which I think are serious weaknesses as I watch what governments are doing although they're trying to get better but quite frankly and I would defer to Graham on this having watched us over ten years try to message in a different context I'm not sure we've done much to demonstrate we have great capability to really reach out to the countries we need to reach out I would say that in contrast what has weakened movements like this in the past well it isn't that they have power struggles every single revolution I can think of had a bloody cycle of internal violence and killing of rival cadres the question is does somebody win and preserve some degree of unity when they break up that's been a key issue but if they are simply fighting for who is in charge that doesn't seem to have the impact historically it might I think that losing does matter you say there's no military solution and ultimately there isn't but losing the fight really does matter to movements historically breaks them up, splinters them they lose legitimacy economic and social factors can have an impact over time but here one thing that you have to remember is when you're fighting in the context of a civil war everybody has serious economic and social problems and so you don't get the immediacy that people sometimes expect it doesn't have quite the same faction what cost them the last time as I think many of you know because this is really the successor to al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia was they became so extreme they alienated their own internal cadres and I didn't see any evidence from ground what you found that they had reached that yet and that was in part I think because they're focusing on people who are seen as legitimate opposition but that doesn't mean that they will continue that way the other thing that might have a major impact and this has been a key factor in counterinsurgencies we tend to forget if the insurgency meets a government that becomes progressively more legitimate that does have a major factor in breaking up and undermining the insurgencies ideology it's kind of strategic communication which really reaches but let me just say Syria is going to become more legitimate Iraq maybe but we haven't seen that so far and remember that last year's diagnostics without a lot of progress we're in a country which had approximately 40% more oil revenues and I think one thing we do have to remember here when we talk about what's going to happen over the course of the next year is Iraq and per capita income is next to Yemen in terms of having actual economic strains it's basically at about a quarter of Iran's per capita income which is the next lowest in the region and that was before the oil revenues were cut so the question of legitimacy here is going to be a fascinating one because we may find our partner is going to be in at least as much trouble as the Islamic State I guess I would ask you any of you for all of the talk about El Hurra and creating this centralized message in the United States to counter Islamic extremism has anybody seen any really positive results thanks Tony we have time for one more question Ali can I ask a brief question and then I want to wrap it up I'm sorry I'm sorry to be late I misunderstood the time just one question by saying Islamic in the States aren't we falling into Daesh's propaganda aren't we saying exactly what they want us to say no I think what they would like us to say they're not interested in the description of them as Islamic the way that I for example have described them as being Islamic the question that they want us to weigh in on is whether they're the right kind of Islamic you disagree Ali I'm sorry we are giving them the banner in the 1950s, 60s, 70s the banner was communism socialism now we are giving them the banner of Islamic just the impact of the world is very important for them that's my point so it may be the case that accurately describing them is something that they would like and I I I would certainly agree that the truth has its own uses for many different sides I could as a journalist not describe them as having religious convictions at all and that would be I think something that they would immediately be able to counter by pointing out exactly the ways in which they do care about these things if the reality is that they have as you know councils of scholars these are fringe elements and to understand the way that they think of themselves does require describing them in these terms that they I think justify them but it's also I think in the long term you do want to have a clear-eyed view of who they are and how they conceive of themselves to understand what their messages are what's important to them and what's important to their potential recruits so if we call them Islamic and accurately say that they care about about scripture religion then they have even said directly to me supporters have said to me that you have accurately or you've represented us in a way that we recognize and that is exactly what I was trying to do and this certainly does have its uses but they've also said by doing this you've also given a pretty good blueprint on how to counteract our messages and they say it's ironic we even find it ironic ourselves that an article that we find in the depiction of us and that we endorse in a way and would send out to other people who are curious about us also contains instructions on how to defeat us so in a way that you are an enemy and in a way you are a friend in writing this piece and that's that's something I'll I'll admit to if they want I understand that there are limits to political rhetoric I acknowledge that Excellent, thank you so much Graham this was a great event a spectacular piece you wrote thank you so much for coming down from Yale to discuss this with us thank you Dr. Cordesman as well for your superb commentary thanks to everyone for coming we have some great upcoming events we will have a similar discussion on Libya which may involve Hunter Keith which would be great and we will also have the counter ISIS point person the White House National Security Council come over as well so look out for those events coming up and thanks again and have a good day thank you