Capitol Hill Series   |   Briefing Series   |   Special Forums   Unedited Transcript For a printable version of this transcript click here. Middle East Policy Council Forty-seventh in the Capitol Hill Conference Series on U.S. Middle East Policy   Iraq, Iran, Israel And The Eclipse of U.S. Influence: What Role For America Now?   Speakers: Anatol Lieven Senior Research Fellow, New America Foundation Wayne White Former Deputy Director, Near East and South Asia office, Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Department of State Kenneth Katzman* Congressional Research Service W. Patrick Lang Former Defense Intelligence Officer, Middle East Moderator/Discussant Chas. W. Freeman, Jr. President, Middle East Policy Council New America Foundation Washington, D.C. January 19, 2007 Transcript by: Federal News Service Washington, DC CHAS W. FREEMAN, JR.: Well, it's about 9:30 in the morning Arab time, and so we should get underway. I'd like to ask everyone please to take your seats. Let me express the gratitude of the Middle East Policy Council, of which I am president, to the New America Foundation for making these facilities available. The Middle East Policy Council, for those of you who don't know, is a small organization about 25 years old. We do three things, and only three things. We go up on Capitol Hill, or sometimes elsewhere, as today, and raise a politically awkward or incorrect question for public discussion. We do not take a position on the issue but we try to ensure a fair and balanced review of it. We then take those discussions and edit the transcript, which will be up on our web site within a week, and make it the lead item in Middle East Policy, our quarterly, which I'm proud to say is the most often cited in the field. And finally, outside Washington, D.C. in the real world beyond the beltway, we train high school teachers how to teach about Arab civilization and Islam. We've trained about 18,000 such teachers. We reach about 1.4 million kids a year. This program is currently being restructured and is under review, and we would welcome donations to enable us to continue it. We depend entirely on donations to continue our work, and while we are working on an endowment, we don't have much of one, so anyone who feels inclined to do so can look at our web site and see where to send a check. Now, we're here today to talk about some important issues affecting American standing not just in the Middle East but in the world at large. The subject is Iraq, Iran, Israel, and the eclipse of American influence. I think many Americans have a sense that there has been a loss of control on our part, that we are in a defensive and reactive rather than initiating mode in this region, that many of our policies seem to be coming to dead ends, and that we don't have a great deal of support, either within the region or more broadly, for what we're doing. The good news, of course, is that having gotten into trouble, we are at long last consulting, at least with our friends, even if we continue not to talk to our enemies. I think this is a success of the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group, which, derided as it is by the opponents of new policies, did have a major impact in the United States in that it provoked a policy debate that was long overdue, and justified a presidential review of policy, which was also long overdue. The results of that presidential review are apparent in what some call the surge and others call the "squirt" of troops in the direction of Iraq, and in a revised military policy, the political context of which remains somewhat unclear, despite the recent visit of Secretary of State Rice to the region. It's clear that our friends in the region do not want us to fail in Iraq, but it is also quite clear that they remain skeptical about our ability to pursue the objectives they share with us in that country. There is no current effort underway to repair the collateral damage that Iraq and related policies in the Middle East have done to our alliances and other relationships around the world. In many ways what we seem to be trying to do in Iraq is to avoid humiliation rather than to accomplish anything terribly positive. In the meantime, our intervention in Iraq has, to the concern of many in the region and here, produced a significant increase in Iranian influence throughout the region, not just in Iraq - with which Iran enjoys an unprecedented intimate relationship at present - but also in Lebanon, thanks to the Israeli intervention, which empowered Hezbollah as the dominant political force in that country, and through the continuation of Iran's relationship and alliance with Syria, which no one seems to be seriously attempting to undermine. A question of whether the U.S. is actually dividing or uniting our enemies in the region must be asked. We have, I should say with some pleasure, and I'd like to acknowledge and welcome the presence of His Royal Highness Prince Turki al-Faisal, the ambassador of Saudi Arabia here. We have finally seemed to begin to engage once again with the government in Riyadh, with the secretary of state and secretary of defense having recently visited for consultations. And that is a very welcome development. But it is not clear to many of us exactly what this consultation is producing by way of cooperative endeavor, if any, and whether what it is producing is either wise or likely to succeed. Finally I should say, and with regard to the loss of control and influence, that the suspension of independent American judgment with respect to Israel and its policies over the past six years, which allowed Israel to do whatever it wanted with assurances of American support, has produced nothing particularly positive, either for Israel or for the United States, still less the region. Israel's choices in this circumstance in which it could make any choice it chose to, have simply deepened its isolation in the region and in the world at large, alienated the world, in fact, to an unprecedented degree, as shown in votes of the United Nations General Assembly and elsewhere. And, as I mentioned earlier, handed Lebanon to predominant influence of Hezbollah and the Iranians. These policies have not aided the image of the United States or improved our influence either. Instead, they've brought great discredit on us and further weakened our reach in the region and elsewhere. So we now face the ironic situation where, as a result of our close association with Israeli policies that are deeply unpopular in the region and elsewhere, were democratic elections to occur the results would likely be highly unfavorable, both to Israel and the United States. This is ironic, given our continued dedication to the idea of democratization. I've painted a rather dark picture of the region, not a full picture to be sure. Perhaps I'm completely mistaken in what I've said, and perhaps the picture I've outlined is too dark. I ask the panelists to provide their own snapshots of what is happening. Is it true that the United States has lost influence and control in this region to the extent that it appears? If not, what are the realities? And how do we recover and reposition ourselves for the future? Here to talk about these issues and specifics within them, we have a wonderful panel. I will introduce them very quickly. As I do so, let me note that the pattern of these meetings is 10 to 12-minute remarks by each panelist, rigidly enforced. I have made heroic efforts over decades to achieve the bulk necessary to eject people from the podium - (laughter). Yes, I'm a ferociously Stalinist chairman of these things. If people exceed their time, they will see me moving ominously in their direction, so I put you all on notice. Ten to 12 minutes is it! After the panelists speak we will have a question-answer-comment session, which is always the most interesting part of these meetings. I'd simply ask that those of you who wish to make a comment or ask a question identify yourselves to me. I'll note you down and call you in the order in which I've noticed you. Then I'd ask that you identify yourselves and keep your comments succinct, if you can. Finally, the panel. We have, as I say, a wonderful panel to talk about this set of topics. Anatol Lieven, who I think probably needs no real introduction to any serious student of policy in Washington. He is the author most recently of "Ethical Realism: A vision for America's role in the world," an attempt to reformulate the basis of American foreign policy in terms that might actually work. Hopefully. And Anatol will speak first. Wayne White, to whom we've inadvertently given a well-deserved promotion in the promotional literature, was for many years the deputy director of the Near East and South Asia office of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research in the Department of State. Since his retirement after 30 years of commendable government service - or his release from government servitude, as I would put it - Wayne has been an outspoken fixture on many policy panels and discussions, including most recently the Iraq Study Group. Colonel Pat Lang, again a very well-known figure in Washington. Former professor of Arabic -- I think the first one -- at West Point. Green Beret, Special Forces, a commentator and blogger of great renown on issues and someone to whom the Middle East Policy Council owes a great deal for his many years of willingness to contribute to our policy discussions. And I have of course skipped over Ken Katzman, leaving the best for last, although he's to speak third. Ken is at the Congressional Research Service. He is a very noted expert on Iran, Iraq and other elements, including terrorism, of the region. He is also the author of many, many reports which are relied upon in Congress to inform members about these topics. So Ken, thank you again for coming. With these few words let me invite Anatol to come up and we'll start the clock ticking. ANATOL LIEVEN: Thank you so much, Chas. Welcome to New America, on behalf of New America. I'm sorry, we really must move into bigger and more convenient - an intimate gathering, exactly. It will be even more intimate if the roof starts to leak, which I hope it won't. I'm delighted to be speaking to this highly distinguished audience, including Prince Turki. Chas. has asked me to give my view of the present situation in the region as a whole and where America is going. One problem about doing that in America is of course the very grave lack of information here on the part of the media, which is reaching, alas, not just the American public in general but also, as a number of rather painful recent stories in the media have reminded us, senior officials and U.S. elected representatives as well. A situation in which the new head of the House Intelligence Committee thinks that al-Qaeda is a Shiia group is not terribly encouraging from that point of view. The actual complexity of what is happening in the region, and in Iran in particular, has of course been brought out by the Iranian elections to municipalities and to the assembly of experts in December, and the latest apparent moves, or at least reported moves, in Tehran by a newly emboldened conservative establishment to rein in President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. From that point of view you may have seen a rather good joke reported in the New York Times last month, not generally a paper to which I go for the humor columns. Actually an Iranian joke about former President Rafsanjani being asked what the name of the new planned superhighway north of Tehran should be, and he said, well, it was obvious. It should be named the Shahid Mahmoud Ahmadinejad highway, which tells us, I think, a great deal about the solidity of support for Ahmadinejad in the Iranian establishment, and indeed the love for him among many of his Iranian colleagues. Now this news out of Iran does reflect, it must be said - I think one should acknowledge that frankly - in part the success of American and, of course, European pressure on Iran over the past year and the isolation of Iran that has resulted from that. Not, of course, American pressure on its own, which would have, if anything, only united the Iranians. All the evidence suggests that it is a combination of America and Europe which has had this effect, and of course Iran's isolation within the region to a considerable extent among other states in the region, as a result of what is seen as Iran's over-ambitious and even menacing strategy within Iraq. This I think is an example of how multilateralism, combined with a certain degree of toughness can actually have an effect, but not America working on its own. However, toughness of this kind, tough multilateralism, must be accompanied - must be accompanied if it's to work - with a willingness to seize the resulting opportunities when they occur. And if indeed these reports out of Iran are accurate, about the desire of moderate conservative figures like Rafsanjani and Latajani (ph), to adopt a more conciliatory policy towards the US, then it would be a crime not to try to seize this opportunity. It is of course a crime which the Bush administration would almost certainly commit, and indeed is already committing. Assuming that we are going to miss this opportunity of talking directly to the Iranians, how in general should we think about the future of the region and U.S. strategy? Well, in my view our standpoint should be, we should proceed from the assumption that not just the present military surge in Iraq will fail, but to all intents and purposes it has already failed. It cannot possibly work. I think that is the evidence of every sensible military analyst, counterinsurgency analyst and expert that I have read. Pat may disagree, but I rather doubt it. One of the reasons why it can't possibly work is that at least in its declared intention it is trying to strengthen the existing Iranian government by attacking its principal support from the Shiia militias in general and the followers of Sadr in particular. Now if one cuts through all the details of the news and the propaganda and the spin, that is the hard reality about what America says it's trying - the Bush administration says it's trying to do there, which is self-evidently not just contradictory but in a way surreal. Now if in fact, whether consciously or unconsciously, the intention is not actually about Iraq as such, or the situation on the ground, but it is indeed simply to stave off for a couple of years for the Bush administration the humiliation of presiding over actual withdrawal, with of course perhaps a view to the future status of the Republican Party within the United States, well, it may work for that long perhaps. But if so, as far as the region is concerned it will simply dump the whole stinking mess into the lap of President Bush's successor, whoever he or she is. If we proceed from - looking realistically at politics within the United States, I think we can also proceed from the assumption that the American military presence in Iraq, or at least outside a few limited bases in Iraq, is also not going to last for very much longer, whatever happens, and whatever the dreadful results of a withdrawal may indeed be. I just don't think, if one looks at the opinion surveys within the United States, that the American public will put up for very much longer - maybe for three years maximum, possibly four, not longer than that - with a situation in which American lives are continually being thrown away with no end, no realistic end in sight, with not even the glimmerings of a light at the end of the tunnel. So I think we have to proceed from the fact that America will be out of there pretty soon. As I say, they may retain bases, preferably no doubt out in the desert where it would be difficult to attack them, but they will not be there trying to maintain order in Iraq itself. That I think is a domestic American political reality. The other reality is, I fear, that, well, we already have a civil war in Iraq. Let's face it. But undoubtedly after an American withdrawal it will get worse and the consequences could be very grave indeed. So looking at the inevitable consequences of American withdrawal, the situation after America does withdraw, what should we be concerned with most critically? Well, the first is something which is too often not talked about in the context of the Middle East, and that is of course Afghanistan. De facto defeat in Iraq will be bad enough. De facto defeat in Afghanistan would be a catastrophic humiliation for the United States, and would in effect mark defeat in the war on terror as a whole. Now by defeat in Afghanistan I don't mean that the Taliban can actually chase us out like Vietnam in '75. But that we also get into a situation where America, and Britain for that matter, and whoever remains there, which won't be very many allies, I think, are suffering a continual stream of heavy casualties with no prospect of actually creating a successful, halfway successful and stable Afghan state. Now this fits into the Middle East not just because American strategy as a whole in the war on terror, but also because Iran is absolutely critical to the stabilization, the development of Afghanistan. And not just that, but if in the future we ever face the situation in which we are going to withdraw from Afghanistan as well, well then, we go back to the situation before 9/11 in which Iran and Russia were critical to keeping the Northern Alliance going against the prospect of the Taliban conquering the whole country. So, in all of our dealings from now on - in my view it's not going to happen but it should - we have to the put the future of Afghanistan front and center in our strategy towards the Middle East as a whole and recognize that this is, or should be, another reason to talk to the Iranians and seek compromise with the Iranians. The whole question of compromise with the Iranians leads to my final point, which is, how does America approach the indefinite future of serious conflict within Iraq? Put it that way. Basically as far as I can see there are two alternatives. The first is a strategy of divide and rule in the region as a whole, essentially between Shiia and Sunni, with Iran on one side and of course various Sunni states on the other. And there has been a great deal of speculation about this in private and to some extent in public. The second is the attempt at a regional consensus or concert of powers, at the very least to contain or limit the future violence in Iraq. Now, it must be said that from a really harsh and brutal realist perspective, from the point of view of America or Israel - one more minute, I did have to frame quite a lot. The divide and rule scenario could look attractive, particularly because of course the attempt at creating a concert of the powers in the region, given their mutual anxieties and fears, is not an easy one. Three critical objections: first, of course, it is absolutely obvious how this would contribute to greater instability in the region with possibly disastrous effects for the world economy. Secondly, even more obviously, it's very difficult when one actually tries to divide and rule along these lines not to take one side or the other. Which side does America take in such a conflict? The side of radical Shiias? Or the side of Al Qaeda in the future Iraqi civil war? Not, I think, an easy decision. Thirdly, and for me most importantly, we have heard for many years now that America is a force for good in the world. That is, a force for spreading democracy, for spreading peace, for spreading development and order. A strategy of this kind, appealing as it might be in crudely realist terms, would I think mark America's role in the Middle East for posterity, for history as not just a politically but also a morally disastrous one. Thank you. (Applause.) MR. FREEMAN: Thank you very much for such a thoughtful presentation, delivered in such a timely and succinct manner. I think it's been said that optimism is to diplomats as courage is to soldiers. I suppose we should add it is also as pessimism is to scholars. That was not, Anatol, an uplifting set of choices that you posed at the end. And I think your remarks at several points illustrated one of the fundamental troubles we have; the contradiction between the imperatives of American domestic politics and the realities of the region. Is the issue in Iraq the number of American dead and maimed? Or is it the consequences for Iraqis and others in the region, and thus for American interests, that need to be put front and center? The answer in this city is not as obvious as it might appear elsewhere. With this introduction, let me ask Wayne White to take the podium. WAYNE WHITE: Good morning. I'll certainly try to stay within my 12 minutes because I saw that I'm not going to get past a minor little note. I'm going to see Chas. glowering in the immediate neighborhood. MR. FREEMAN: I was smiling- MR. WHITE: Oh smiling, okay, good. I'll also try to avoid falling into a pattern of simply briefing His Royal Highness Prince Turki as I did in the 1980s, which could easily happen during the presentation, as I forget where I am and resume an old role as an intelligence officer. To start off, quite frankly on Iraq, America's ability to meaningfully effect the direction of events in Iraq is waning steadily. We all know that rather dismal course of events up to this point. But 2006 laid bare three stark realities. First, the arrival of a so-called permanent Iraqi government has had virtually no impact on the violence on the ground, at least for the better, that is. Second, the bombing of the Gold Mosque in Samara triggered a devastating blow, a new cycle of violence further undermining stability and opening a costly second front for U.S. forces and Iraqi forces as well. Third, getting back to those realities in Washington, the November U.S. mid-term election and polling reveals that a significant majority of Americans have pretty much had it with the U.S. effort in Iraq, for better or worse. Recent congressional actions and threats concerning the war and financial support, whether well advised or not politically, confirmed that time has run out for the president's near-monopoly of U.S.-Iraq policy. And reinforcing Anatol, quite simply the current surge is doomed to failure. A force, a U.S. force in Iraq barely adequate to contain the Sunni Arab insurgency cannot take on and successfully suppress this new front, this new violence with the addition of a mere 21,500 new U.S. troops. So like it or not, we will probably leave behind a serious, destabilizing, for lack of a better word, mess in Iraq, quite possibly a full-blown three-way civil war. U.S. influence over the post-American phase, and we must start thinking in those terms, of what happens in Iraq could be rather limited. Some air elements in addition to U.S. fast and light ground assets, would almost certainly be left behind in places like Kuwait to strike at selected terrorist targets that may offer themselves inside a destabilized Iraq, one much more destabilized, I should say, than it is right now, and that is saying a lot. Perhaps one silver lining associated with a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq would be the ability to reinforce the increasing beleaguered NATO mission in Afghanistan, to at least give that effort one more chance for success. In a civil war scenario in Iraq, the U.S. would likely try to persuade some Sunni Arab governments in the region to refrain from supporting Iraq Sunni Arabs. This could very well be in vain. These governments may not be able to stand by and see Moqtada Al Sadr's Mahdi Army, Shiia Kurdish military forces, and Kurdish Pershmerga drive Sunni Arabs out of practically every mixed area of the country and quite possibly even more. And millions of refugees, Sunni Arab refugees, spilling into Syria, Jordan and countries beyond. As a result, ugly as it might be, we probably will increasingly find ourselves in terms of influence, as observers, not key actors on a more and more violent drama playing out on the ground inside Iraq among Iraqis and to the detriment of Iraqis. In fact, the only way to preserve some influence would be to join with the international community writ large to encourage and pressure where possible all parties, both inside and outside Iraq, to help take down the levels of violence and to seek a desperately needed political solution inside of Iraq and in the region generally. The administration, however, has proved even less capable in the area of international diplomacy than in its approach to Iraq since 2003. But acting more multilaterally is the only way to go for the United States because our own unilateral credibility is terribly low. Confidence in our ability to act wisely and effectively also is awfully low. And our regional popularity is at an all-time low. If the administration wants to even further destabilize Iraq, and the Persian gulf more generally, it can attack Iran primarily in the context of the ongoing nuclear standoff. Contingency plans aimed at taking out much of Tehran's retaliatory capability in the Persian gulf is possible, like anti-ship missiles near the Straight of Hormuz, would likely leave Iraq as the most inviting Iranian venue for payback in such a scenario, an extremely dangerous scenario for Iraq as well as Iran and as well as the region at large. One final note, in various exchanges with observers across the political spectrum, those seeking - seeing the Iraq situation as I do, are often criticized for giving up or urging that we cut and run, et cetera, without sufficiently examining the serious consequences of failure. Most old Middle East hands know the consequences of failure in Iraq all too well. Some of our critics suffer from a far more dangerous delusion - the belief that sending more penny packets of troops, wasting more American blood and treasure over several more years, expecting a dysfunctional and unbalanced Iraqi government to deliver can at this late stage of the game somehow avert such a negative outcome. Thank you very much. (Applause.) MR. FREEMAN: Thank you very much for that very encouraging presentation. I think it's fair to note, since we have been discussing Iran -- and I will now invite Ken Katzman to continue that discussion -- that when one travels in the region and consults with people there, one finds much more concern about the implications of the Iranian progress towards regional hegemony than one does over the Iranian nuclear program. It's not that the nuclear program is of no concern, but that the extension of Iranian influence throughout the region is of much greater concern. And in that respect, Wayne I'm grateful to you for raising the specter of a punitive attack on Iran which could, of course as you suggest, result in retaliation against U.S. forces inside Iraq, where many are pro-Iranian. But it could also -- here I wish to acknowledge the presence of His Excellency Nasser Al-Khalifa, the Ambassador of the state of Qatar, who quite remarkably is sitting in completely amicable repose next to the Ambassador of Saudi Arabia. So obviously peace is possible. I would say that Qatar, which has been a very loyal and dedicated regional backer of the United States in recent years, also might suffer some consequences from such an action. This simply underscores the requirement for the United States to consult and not to take actions that are not consistent with the interests of our friends in the region, as I'm afraid we did when we entered Iraq in the beginning. The stakes with Iran are very high. We're pleased to have Ken Katzman here to address that and other issues. KENNETH KATZMAN: Thank you, Ambassador Freeman, for inviting me back, and I hope you'll continue to invite me back despite my talk today, which is I think from the heart a little bit more than I've been in the past. The media and other analytic material are rife with assessments that Iran is ascendant and the United States is greatly weakened because of the U.S. policy failure in Iraq and I will cast the third vote for this failure of the troop surge that's likely, as well as the summer fighting in Lebanon and related fronts such as Afghanistan. Some Arab leaders, including President Mubarak of Egypt, King Abdullah of Jordan have seen the emergence of a pro-Iranian Shiite crescent or belt instigated and supported by Iran, which many see as well on its way to a nuclear capability. I would generally not dispute these assessments or this analysis. I would however, argue that Iran's ascendancy is not only manageable but it is eminently reversible if we understand and analyze Iran's vulnerabilities and weaknesses, of which there are many. Iranian leaders have successfully propagandized the international community that Iran is a, quote unquote, "great nation." They have successfully convinced many experts that Iran virtually verges on superpower status and that the future belongs to Iran and that the international community needs to prostrate itself before Iran to incur Iran's good graces. Iran's leaders view the international community as supplicants who need Iran more than Iran needs them. Iran's leaders in my view are secretly concerned about the implications for Iran, should the United States and the rest of the international community call Iran's bluff. Why? Because in fact, in my view, Iran is a very weak nation. It meets almost no known criteria to be considered to be a great nation in any sense. Iran's economy is not only mismanaged but is actually quite primitive. It exports almost nothing except oil. It does export some caviar, pistachio nuts, carpets, dried fruits and the like, but it has little heavy industry or manufacturing base. Many of its carpets are in fact weaved by relatively young girls working from home or in small shops with no adequate labor regulations. This is not the economy of a great nation in my view. Iran now exports about 2.7 million barrels of oil per day and earns from that, let's say, $50 billion a year as current prices. However, it gives back about 30% of that in the form of imported gasoline because Iran has no sufficient refining capacity and maintains heavy subsidies on gasoline. Not only that, but a new National Academy of Sciences study says that Iran's oil production capacity is in fact declining, even though Iran opened itself to foreign investment in 1996. Foreign investment has remained fairly, actually minimal in Iran's energy sector, about $12 billion since '96, not because of U.S. sanctions law, but because of the difficulty of negotiating with and operating in Iran. A much more accommodating country, like tiny Qatar, whom we have the ambassador today, which is far easier to deal with than Iran, has attracted several multiples of the foreign investment that Iran has, despite Qatar's small size and population. Iranian leaders might not want to hear this, but in terms of military, conventional military power, Iran is a virtual non-entity. A week of U.S. air power in, my view, would leave Iran militarily naked and defenseless. Their entire naval capability would lie at the bottom of the Persian gulf. Its air force would be in pieces and its tank and armor forces melting hulks. This is not the makings of a great nation in my view. It is no wonder that Iran has always backed off its threat to close the Strait of Hormuz if Iran's nuclear facilities are struck. This is because Iran knows that not only would its own oil-dependant economy be shut down, but that the U.S. Navy would be able to reopen the Strait within hours rendering Iran's actions almost embarrassing. It is a military that is so lacking in capability and confidence that it shrunk from even taking on the lightly armed Taliban in September of 1998 after the Taliban killed nine Iranian diplomats in Mazar Sharif. This is one of the only episodes I can ever recall in official Washington where official Washington was actually rooting for Iran to take military action, but they did not take that action against the Taliban. It is a military that still has not recovered from its loss in the Iran-Iraq war, in which Iran's population was actually much larger than Iraq yet it still lost the war. Even fears of Iran's nuclear program are overblown in my view. Iran would be easily susceptible to a nuclear deterrence posture, much as we had with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. That, in my view, would prevent any reasonable use of such a weapon. Yes, Iran has options to activate Hezbollah. Iraq, as we've heard, other movements. But I would ask to what end would Iran activate these movements? Activating these movements could actually rebound to Iran's disadvantage in many ways. In Iraq, for example, if Iran were to turn loose, let's say Sadr's Mahdi army, the U.S. response or other responses could even provoke a situation where the Mahdi army is lost or defeated. Hezbollah, the same. You know, Iran would not want to see Hezbollah defeated in any type of confrontation. So, even here I think Iran's options are more limited than is commonly portrayed. What are the implications of this analysis? Clearly, it is my view that the administration, the United States needs to firmly challenge Iran and refute its assertions that it is a great nation deserving of respect as an equal of the United States. It is not an equal of the United States and it is never going to be an equal of the United States. Sanctions are not to be feared if they can be made effective. Military action against Iran's nuclear program is not to be feared if it could be effective. Containment of Iran is likely to be effective. This is not to say that the U.S. should seek early confrontation or any confrontation with Iran. And I would not want my talk today to be interpreted that way. If a grand bargain can be found that suits the interests of both Iran and the United States and sincere Iranian interlocutors for such a bargain are available, that should be pursued, I think. The analysis today is for the purpose of refuting those who believe that the United States needs to go out of its way to accommodate Iran, rather than risk, quote unquote, "dire consequences." Iran in my view is not in a position to impose dire consequences on the United States unless the United States were to make the horrendous mistake of conducting some sort of ground attack or ground invasion of Iran, which I do not believe is under consideration by anybody. This analysis is to say that the United States has more leverage over Iran than I think is currently portrayed in the press and some of the analytic material that I've seen. Thank you. MR. FREEMAN: Thank you very much, Ken. We will certainly invite you back. Your remarks were very interesting and quite provocative. One could draw the conclusion from your disparagement of Iranian capabilities that there is also a great deal less to fear were we to enter into bargaining process with Iran, that our position is vastly stronger than many of the opponents of engagement suggest. And that is something that I hope we will explore in the question and comment session. You are the third speaker to mention Afghanistan. I want to take note of that because this has been a topic which in many previous sessions has not been mentioned. It has become a matter of concern because there is a widespread sense that things are not going well in Afghanistan. And there is also for the discussion period, I think, some reason to ask what our objectives are in Afghanistan and whether they are attainable. Clearly, we entered Afghanistan with a very limited agenda, which was to apprehend and punish the perpetrators of 9/11 who had found lodging there, and to chastise their hosts, the Taliban government of Afghanistan, and thereby deter others from providing lodging and comfort to future terrorists with global reach. That was the mission; that is, punish the perpetrators and deter others from aiding and abetting people of like mind in the future. We now seem to be engaged in a much broader agenda, the precise dimensions of which are not clear. I know of no one who has defined what victory in Afghanistan might look like. So this is also a topic, perhaps, for the question and answer session. I will mention in that connection, just to give you a head start, that right after Pat Lang speaks, we will move to that session. Apparently there are no mikes for those of you in the audience, so you'll have to depend upon those of us here to paraphrase your question. Please do identify yourselves when you speak and try to ask a question or make a comment which can be summarized by those on the panel. Pat. W. PATRICK LANG: Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen. I would like to begin by mentioning Afghanistan. I have been given the task today, which is always a fearful one, of commenting on the effects of American power and policy overseas of its relationship with Israel. In the state of take-no-prisoners kind of debate that goes on now in Washington and New York, I expect, you know, that the proper sort of savagery will occur during the question and answer period. A famous American once said that the American Constitution was not a suicide pact, and that was quite true in the circumstance. Well, I think you can paraphrase that this day, today these days and say that we should hope that the U.S.-Israeli de facto alliance is not a suicide pact in fact because in the last six years or so, in the period of the present administration here and the Sharon and Ohlmert governments in Israel, our attitudes have approached a kind of state in which we have plunged our hands into the boiling water everywhere and apparently contemplated plunging our hands into more pots of boiling water. And there is a general underlying attitude which is very difficult to deal with because it is one of basically a sort of an endless belligerence. Really, an attitude in which, in fact, the idea seems to be that to negotiate with people is in fact a kind of sissified, weak sort of thing to do, unless in fact you are negotiating with them to dictate the terms of surrender. And you hear this all the time, whether or not it is explicitly stated. One does not say that kind of thing openly in press conferences but if you're asked, why don't we talk to the Syrians, for example, and the answer is, well, they know what we want, this is not exactly a call to the kind of Hegelian dialectic, a back and forth process of negotiating an outcome with an adversary or even somebody you just disagree with, that would lead to a process in which the answer would emerge from the process itself, the process of discussion. There are places in the world where people do believe that negotiations are properly restricted to gracefully setting the terms of surrender. But that has not usually been our procedure in the United States and it has not always been the procedure with the Israelis as well. There have been other times when things were approached in a more open way. But this seems to be very much the case right now. There are real problems with this. I go to a good many foreign policy seminars around this town and other places and there's usually among the American participants a kind of unspoken assumption that whatever it is that we really resolve to do, we can do. That we are strong enough really to do anything. That in fact we posses the means, that we posses the population, the materiel, the money and if we really set our minds to do something that we can achieve anything. Well, in fact, that isn't really true. It's a kind of illusion that we have given - that proceeds from the fact that we are so very rich and so very strong and so very numerous in fact. But for example, it was just mentioned a moment ago that people who favor the Iranians might well take decisive action against us in Iraq if we struck Iran in a big way, maybe in any way. And a lot of people assume that we could easily reopen the Straight of Hormuz, and we could reopen the Straight of Hormuz, and that our army is such in Iraq that we could defend ourselves. But it has now been endlessly, and I suppose boringly said by many commentators, including myself both endlessly and boringly, that in fact that our supply situation in Iraq is in fact extremely precarious. Our forces are located in the central and northern part of the country. And both internally between our operating locations and across the long, long supply route to the south to Kuwait, which is where our supply lines terminate in fact, these lines of supply, which are revittled continuously by large fleets of trucks under minimal military escort, are extremely vulnerable to guerilla action in all the villages and towns in southern Iraq which are overwhelmingly Shiia in number. And so for people to assume that because we are stronger, we have more tanks, we have more aircraft, that kind of thing that we are not vulnerable to people who are determined to take action against us, is I think is not a good idea; is not correct at all. Because as Ambassador Freeman said, I spent a long time in the army and Special Forces where we knew a thing or two about guerilla warfare and in fact, one man with one RPG launcher, two men with two AK-47s can sufficiently disrupt with enough friction, as Clausewitz would have said, into the system to impede the process of re-supply by X amount. If you multiply that by 1,000 men making 1,000 attacks, you end up spending all of your time trying to keep your supply line open, and if you could do that you'd be very lucky. People ask, well, what about air power? Well, you know, the awful truth about this is that the U.S. Air Force knows very well, in fact, that it now supplies 20% of the logistical needs of the U.S. forces in Iraq by air. It could conceivably do 35% maybe, but not enough to keep the force in beat. I mention this just because the fact that we shouldn't be deluded into thinking in fact that we can do just anything we like in the world. There are ways that people, little people in their great numbers who are determined to do something about you, can hurt you very, very badly. And that's one of the reasons why you can't simply go around seeking to bully people all of the time. You have to in fact try to resolve your differences with them in ways in which - that - in ways in which that you don't come to situations like the one I just sort of sketched out. As everybody here knows, as I look around the room I see a lot of people who are very familiar to me, in fact, everybody here knows that over the last six years or so, for example, the Syrians have tried repeatedly to get the attention of the Bush administration to talk behind closed doors somewhere in an attempt to resolve various issues that lie between us and them. And they've gotten nowhere because we have in fact relied upon this attitude of belligerence, sort of take no prisoners, you know what we want you to do and we're right kind of attitude and we've gotten nowhere. We're doing exactly the same thing with the Iranians. Whether or not Iran will ever be a great power or not, I have no way of knowing, but a good example - and we and the Israelis largely share this attitude. And we're in fact tending to reinforce each other in this kind of attitude of eternal belligerence. A good example is the war in Lebanon last summer between Hezbollah and the Israelis, in which anybody also who knows anything about what really goes around here knows there was a good deal of prior discussion between the Israeli government and the United States over the fact that if there is an opportunity to teach Hezbollah a lesson. it ought to be done. This ran into an inadvertent gesture on the part of Hezbollah and cause tremendous explosion in which the Israelis then assumed that based on technology and their superior skill in the military art and the Westernized nature of their economy, et cetera, that they could in fact crush Hezbollah and dictate the political result in Lebanon in a way that would favorable to both the United States and to them. In fact, there is a good deal of effort right now to rewrite history about last summer's war, but anybody who really thinks that these Israelis didn't fail in this, in their endeavor there just doesn't - isn't paying attention or is easily persuadable by various kinds of statements and propaganda of one kind or another because they did fail. They failed terribly. And as a result of that failure, their reliance on brute force rather than willingness to do real negotiations with various groups, including the Hezbollahi's, in fact the position of Hezbollah and the Iranians standing behind them in Lebanese politics was greatly strengthened. Are there really any of us who don't know that that's true, that their position was strengthened in this regard? Now, I don't see any indication so far that the Israelis, for example, have given up the intention in the long run of smashing Hezbollah, so I would imagine that somewhere down the road after they think it over and they decide that they didn't lose that they're going to have another go at it. And I don't believe for a minute that the United States is not in fact probably at least tacitly encouraging that kind of thinking. And it's typical of what we're doing everywhere and there isn't any reason to think really that the Israelis will do very much better the next time around. And what will be the further political catastrophe wrought upon all of us by something like that as well as the kind of Iranian adventure that might take place. So, on a hopeful note, I too believe in the concert of the Middle East. Well, I'm going to try anyway. I actually like this panel because for once I don't sound like the most gloomy person here. I wrote an article some time ago which is in, it's a very short article, it's in the National Interest online, entitled, "Toward a concert of the greater Middle East," in which I suggested it actually would be possible to, using our force as a weight in the diplomacy using everything else we've got, to go around to the external actors and the internal actors in Iraq and throughout the region and actually in a series of negotiations seriously, seriously, try to resolve a lot of the perceived conflicts of interest among the various groups that see themselves as contestants, you know. And if you did that and if you persisted at it so in the way that people did in Europe after the Napoleonic wars, in fact he tried hard and didn't give up and you really want to see compromise. Compromise, imagine. You know if you really did that, you might succeed in getting the temperature down low enough in the region so that these things didn't keep exploding into actual fighting. Now I know one of the biggest, biggest conflicts in the region is in fact the ancient rivalry between the Sunni and Shiite communities. You know, everybody talks about how there is a civil war in Islam. You know, it's between the progressives and the reactionaries. Well, there are of course these conflicts, but I think in fact the most dangerous of these things is the ancient rivalry between the Sunni and the Shiia and in fact we are beginning to encourage that in the American government by our actions and things of that kind. We should stop doing that. We should go around trying to help people to resolve their differences enough so that they don't kill each other. That ought to be the - that ought to be the goal of our policy instead of just saying to everybody that we know what you should do and let's see you do it. Thank you. MR. FREEMAN: Thank you very much, Pat. I'm still, I'm left a little puzzled about whether the Ohlmert government has a strategy. If so, what is it?. MR. LANG: They have an attitude. MR. FREEMAN: They have an attitude. Okay, well that answers the question, I guess. Seriously, one wonders whether this sort of policy of eternal belligerence that you describe is a path to acceptance in the region in any timeframe or not and what the alternatives might be. Perhaps the alternative is the one that you suggest. We now come to questions and comments and, sir, will you stand up and tell us who you are. Q: (Off mike.) MR. FREEMAN: Thank you. The question is actually, there are actually two questions. One is, how can we talk about Afghanistan, which of course we didn't really talk about very much except mention it as a problem, without addressing the issues confronting Pakistan, which are intimately connected with the problems in Afghanistan. And I'm sure all of the panelists will have something to say on this subject. The second question, which I also invite everyone to address if they wish, is the one that Pat Lang just mentioned, and that is whether it is wise, or indeed whether it is even conceivably effective to get the United States involved in between Sunni and Shiia, given our lack of standing in that quarrel. So, I don't know, Anatol you might start. MR. LIEVEN: Yes, the reason that I didn't mention Pakistan is that as a journalist I spent a number of years in the former Soviet Union and large gentlemen in leather jackets make me nervous. (Laughter.) There was somebody standing behind me -- MR. FREEMAN: I'm not as big as they are. MR. LIEVAN: There was somebody standing behind me telling me that my time had run out. No, of course Pakistan is absolutely critical to Afghanistan. And on Pakistan, I would say one of the same, basically the same thing in a different context that I said in my talk as a whole about Iran. Which is that we've got to do something, which unfortunately - I mean humanity in general, but I must say perhaps the American establishment in particular is not good at, which is, we have got to look two strategic moves ahead. Now, at the moment, it's quite true, we do have to put a certain amount of pressure on Pakistan. In my view, it has to be pressure accompanied by real aid, much greater aid than we're giving at the moment and real inducements. But we do have to put pressure on Pakistan to do more to suppress the Taliban, while recognizing that the Taliban problem in Pakistan is only in part a creation of the Pakistani state and the ISI. On the basis of my previous travels in the Pashtun areas of Pakistan, I believe I can state for a fact that the most important element is the mass support among Pakistani Pashtuns for what the Taliban is doing. Not all of them by any manner of means, but enough to create a genuine problem. The second thing that stems from that is, now I hate to say this because it really does risk turning this into a Gotterdammerung doomfest, but we have to recognize the fact that we could in effect lose in Afghanistan as well. After all, it's not just me saying that. If you take seriously what NATO commanders in Afghanistan said last year, they said the new six months will be crucial to success or failure in Afghanistan. Now if that was more than rhetoric intended to wake up people in the West, that could imply that we have already lost effectively, in terms of our ability to create a stable and halfway successful Afghan state. Well if you proceed from that assumption, what do you have to think about? You have to think about the long-term prospect and indeed the reality that Afghanistan is not the most important country in that equation. Pakistan is. With six times Afghanistan's population, with a big Diaspora in the west, and of course most of all in my country, Britain, and therefore with a capacity if Pakistan goes badly wrong to spread terrorism and extremism in the West and of course with nuclear weapons. In other words, what we mustn't do is risk by putting excessive pressure without inducements on Pakistan. We mustn't risk destroying Pakistan for the sake of Afghanistan. That really mistakes the lesser for the greater in our strategic interest. So I'll answer that bit and leave Shi'ia/Sunni to others. MR. FREEMAN: Well, while we're on the subject of Afghanistan, I think Ken Katzman has a comment as well. MR. KATZMAN: Yes, I do. I do work on Afghanistan for the Congress for my official duty. MR. FREEMAN: Is that mike on? It's not on. MR. KATZMAN: I do work on Afghanistan in my official responsibilities for the Congress and I have to say I'm much more positive. I would like to inject some note of optimism in this discussion. I am more positive, I think, than many commentators on Afghanistan. I do believe we are winning in Afghanistan. I do not believe it is complete. And I do not believe it is as quick as we would like. But I do believe we are basically successful in Afghanistan. The Taliban insurgency did have an upsurge in 2006, but there was no popular adoption of the Taliban in any sense. They do not have popular support in Afghanistan. NATO was expected to collapse or go home when challenged. It did not. And in fact it went on the offensive and drove the Taliban back considerably. The democratic Congress, I believe, all indications are actually committed to more aid to Afghanistan and General Eikenberry (ph), who is still there, wants to redouble efforts on road-building in the southern area and I believe he is doing that. So I do not believe that Afghanistan is a doom and gloom scenario as some press make it out to be. MR. FREEMAN: Ken, I thank you for the more optimistic note but I'd like to ask you a question myself. And that is, since you referred to winning, what is it, what does it mean to win in Afghanistan? When and how did the Taliban, who managed the flophouse for Islamic revolutionaries but were not themselves implicated in 9/11, become the enemy? And what is winning in Afghanistan? MR. KATZMAN: Well, I, you know, again it's sort of like art. You know it when you see it. Karzai was elected. He was popularly elected. It was a fair election. actually he did have competition from another major faction that did not win the election. And I would say winning is if his government is stable and not challenged by insurgency, I would say that that could define winning. MR. FREEMAN: Thank you. Pat. MR. LANG: Well, I'm actually pretty optimistic about Afghanistan as well. I think there is a fundamental difference in the situation in Iraq and in Afghanistan. In fact, if you take President Bush's criteria for what he refers to as victory in Iraq, I think it's, we're unlikely we're going to achieve that. And we ought to start thinking about how to live with the aftermath. In fact, how to structure things in such a way as to re-stabilize the region without breaking anymore china and without throwing any more bricks through windows, things of that kind. And so this is, this is a real catastrophe that is taking place in sort of slow motion. But Afghanistan I think is quite different. This is a place which is a high, wild place of smallish towns and lots of tribesmen and villages and things of that kind where the sort of skills that are implicit in a lot of our theories about how to do counter-insurgency and things of that kind apply very well. And the trouble is that we went off and abandoned the place after we decided to move on to Iraq. In fact, if you had more troops and more people who were skilled at doing the kind of work that I'm familiar with and the right kind of diplomats and more foreign assistance and things of that kind, I think you could really still make something of Afghanistan. And it probably wouldn't take a whole lot more in the way of troops. I saw that Senator Clinton the other day at her press conference said that the American commander on the ground there had asked her for two more infantry battalions. Two more infantry. Senator Clinton knows what an infantry battalion is. She's been studying these things pretty well. And you know this is quite a small reinforcement to ask for. I'd say want to give them three or four more brigades, in fact, because it would make an enormous different in a place like Afghanistan to have that kind of reaction force. And I have to believe that the threat of an actual nuclear weapons state in the Islamic world, which is posed by Pakistan if things go awry there as they well could, that's certainly to be, is going to be affected by what the outcome is next door in Afghanistan. Because people look across the border and they look at this and they are either encouraged or discouraged. Some people are encouraged to do things they shouldn't and vice versa and all of that kind of business. So in fact, I think you know that this is - Afghanistan is a very important place and it's a place where we still actually could win something and improve a lot of people in that part of the world. MR. FREEMAN: Thank you. Nobody has commented on the issue of our injecting ourselves into the quarrel between Sunni and Shiia. And so I'll simply close that topic if I may. Oh, Anatol, oh good. All right, I was going to say that it would be possible to answer this way, that the danger appears to be that within the Dar al-Islam there might be something resembling the Thirty Years War, which destabilized all of Christendom and led to the death of millions in Central Europe. The Islamic world wisely sat out the Thirty Years War and did not engage itself in a quarrel among Christians and perhaps that's a model to ponder. Anatol. MR. LIEVEN: Yes. That's actually not entirely true, Chas, because thanks to - well, with the help of Richelieu of course they played a diplomatic game. But what the Ottoman Empire largely got for itself from the Thirty Years War was, well, thirty years of Habsburg distraction, you know the Habsburg counteroffensive could have happened a lot earlier. Sorry, this is historical disquisition. Meanwhile, of course, actually while the Thirty Years War was going on, fighting was raging between the Ottoman Empire and Shiia Iran, with of course horrible consequences for populations on either side who were driven out. What I would say about our role in that is that, in part thanks to Iraq but also because of the entire American and indeed Israeli presence in the region, the option of simply standing aside in my view doesn't exist. We are involved whether we like it or not. As long as we're in Iraq, we are deeply involved in it. We simply have no choice. The question is how, you know, what the aim is. As Chas. has indeed said, do we aim at helping. We can't abolish this. After all it does go back a very, very long way. But do we aim at trying to damp this down for the sake of regional stability? And yes, for the sake of the price of oil, frankly, because of what a full scale conflict along these lines could do. Or do we, as to some extent we did in the 1980's, although not of course then explicitly Shiia-Sunni but Iraqi-Iranian, do we in fact try to whip this up, to encourage it? I would like to say again that there is an obvious realist temptation to do that. The Iraq-Iran war was greatly welcomed by many people in this town and indeed in Israel as well. But I think as we see from Iran-Iraq war, of course what is the first law of war, the first law of war is unintended consequences. We got things out of the Iran-Iraq war that we never expected and that were of course very bad for us and contributed to our present disastrous involvement in the region. In my view, therefore, default mode should always be as far as we can and facing and acknowledging all the difficulties of this peace and stability rather than encouraging conflict. MR. FREEMAN: Thank you. Oh yes, sure, now you've started something here. MR. LANG: I see I've started something interesting here. My point was not that there was some way we could remove ourselves altogether from this contest, But that the contest exists and we have contributed to it in the various ways we could all think about, in Lebanon and Iraq and now in other places as well. But I think what we should try to do is try to avoid exacerbating it further with our kind of ham-handed interference in these things, in our attempts to use one group of another to further some fairly minor goal of foreign policy without realizing in fact that we are fanning the flames of something like the Thirty Years War. And I think that's a bad thing to do. And it is likely to result in very long, bloody, messy, shambles kind of a situation across the Islamic world. And we should just stop doing anything that in anyway tries to pit one of these groups against another. Q: My name is Karl Uskers (sp?). I write for Executive Intelligence Review. It's not clear to me that any of you really directly address the question of, how does the dynamic in the region change if we change our policy. I'm not suggesting that the present administration is going to do that, but I heard General William Odum say yesterday that if we announce that we're going to withdraw from Iraq, that totally would - he described it as that would cause a polar shift. And then we would be unable to do things that we cannot now do because of our commitment in Iraq. So I wonder if anybody could comment on that. MR. FREEMAN: You're asking specifically only about Iraq or are you asking a broader question? Q: No it's a broader question. MR. FREEMAN: I see. Q: Including negotiating with Iran. Dealing with the Israeli-Palestine situation. MR. FREEMAN: Yes. Because everyone in the region of course insists and has insisted that the Israeli-Palestinian issue is the core element destabilizing the region and discrediting American influence. I think, Wayne, you might want to react to this first and then I'm sure others will do, too. MR. WHITE: Yeah, I would caution against people becoming too worried about some of these, some of these outcomes. It's amazing what the United States has weathered in the past when it's made mistakes. But more to the point, I guess, is that some of the issues that come up, you know, as part of a grand bargain, you know, in terms of the region to some degree look out of reach to me. For example, if we take off of what Chas. was saying the, you know, trying to resolve the Arab Israeli-Palestinian, Israeli-Syrian issues, these are issues that have remained unsolved, you know, for decades. And we currently have an increasingly weak Israeli government and we have a fractured Palestinian leadership. And right in the, at least in the near term it doesn't look like any of that is going to be solved. And probably the United States, even applied itself to trying to solve that issue at this juncture in time is not going to be able to effect, you know, a significant breakthrough. Iraq, as I implied very strongly in my presentation, Iraq will probably have ramifications in the region because the United States is not going to prevail in Iraq and things are just going to continue to get worse there. In fact, one of the things that bemuses me continuously with respect to the national debate, you know, on Iraq is that many of the critics of the critics - I heard this from Tony Snow yesterday most recently, is often to turn to the critic and to say, well, what is your plan for a successful way forward in Iraq? And in fact, the way things are going there, the fact is that there may very well be no plan for success in Iraq. And nobody is really facing up to that. People are batting around this question of whose plan, whose plan, which plan, what plan, and the only plan that may actually hold any water at this stage is preparing for the United States to withdraw. Now, I mentioned a civil war in Iraq and I recognize that there is some danger that if the United States pulled out that some of the more negative regional, you know, consequences that people have talked about, fighting spreading beyond Iraq could take form. I could be wrong completely on this, but if Iraq broke into wholesale civil war after a U.S. departure largely from Iraq, and even if certain Sunni Arab states came to the aid of Sunni Arabs who would be very beleaguered in the initial stages of such a civil war because they do not have security forces to turn to, they do not have well organized militias yet, the insurgency is rather small - there would be a tremendous ramping up of strength I'm sure, but there would be a tremendous initial disadvantage. Even in that scenario and with the Iranians supporting Shiia, my model would be more like the Spanish civil war of the 1930's where, God help them, 95 percent of the fighting would be on the part of Iraqis. Almost 100 percent of the fighting would be in Iraq with other powers, as in the Spanish civil war, the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and fascist Italy basically using it as a way of trying to push and shove their way to a triumph in another country for their particular ideology. Anyway, I think that a civil war in Iraq could actually be somewhat confined. I may be incorrect about that. I am much more worried, and I don't want to steal any thunder from Ken here, I'm much more worried about the consequences of a U.S. or Israeli attack against Iran's nuclear infrastructure. That's the one that deeply worries me because I've seen some of the planning and we're not talking about just so-called surgical strikes against an array of targets inside of Iran. We're talking about clearing a path to those targets by taking out probably much of the Iranian air force. We're talking about sinking the Kilov (ph) submarines, knocking out the anti-ship missiles that could attack commerce or the American fleet in the Persian Gulf. We're talking about probably even taking out, trying to take out much of the speedboat capabilities, although that would be the hardest. We may even be taking out ballistic missile capabilities in Iran. You're not talking about a surgical strike. You're talking about a war against Iran and the Iranians are not going to take that sitting down. They will do everything in their power to retaliate. And then once again that could rebound heavily into Iraq. But it also could hammer the region to some degree. In other words, some of the planning that I've seen in reporting relates to, and I think somebody mentioned it as well - it might have been you Ken - something that would be sort of something like 1,500 aerial sorties and Cruise missile launches stretching over a matter of days. If you think that the Iranians during those days are not going to fire off what they haven't lost yet at commerce in the Gulf and aren't going to try to, you know, launch missiles that haven't been taken out, think again. The Iranians are going to be fighting back very, very hard. There will be no ground dimension to this campaign. This will be an aerial assault. Some people might think, well, maybe the Israelis will do it and we won't. And the United States won't be involved and that might mitigate the situation in the Gulf. It may be worse. Because in the fog of war, in the first hours of the first day of such an assault, the Iranians might not even know who the enemy is. They may assume that the Untied States is well involved and therefore the Israelis not taking out that array of retaliatory capability in the Gulf could provoke a far more dangerous scenario by doing it themselves than if the United States did it. But to bring this to a close and give other people an opportunity to speak if they wish, the worst part of going into that tunnel, that fiery tunnel is similar to what's happening in Iraq. What's the end game? How do we turn it off? Are the Iranians going to run up a white flag and say, oh, you know, it's over now? I think not. You could open another can of worms that could linger, destabilizing the Gulf for years by going that route. So it has to be thought through very, very carefully. MR. LANG: Well, to back up what Wayne said, of course the actually geometry of such an attack if the Israelis were to make it, given overflight and problems with tanking aircraft and all kinds of things, you know, would imply strongly that the United States would at least have to tacitly accept such an attack by the Israelis and that would be very obvious to everyone. All you just have to do is just look at a map and you can see that. But to go back to my point about this thing, I mean I know how difficult it would be to try to take up a campaign of diplomacy of the kind that I described. I know how difficult that would be and I know it would take a long time and the day of jubilation would not have arrived everywhere, all problems would not have been solved. But what I'm saying is that I think somebody has to state an alternative policy to the policy of rather permanent truculence that we are following at this point, encouraged, in fact, by the Israeli government of the day, and in fact that we need to do something different. We need to get a handle on what it is that really ought to be done as an alternative. And maybe you wouldn't succeed altogether, maybe you wouldn't succeed very much. But it would be different from what you're doing now. Because the direction we're going into leads to at least to endless conflict in the region. It doesn't have to be war between organized armed bodies of people. Political murder or assassination, street fighting, unrest, all of these things are possibilities in the kind of spectrum of violence that we're so prone to. So, in fact I think, we ought to seriously give thought to the fact that even though the Bush administration is not going to go down this road that there is an alternative to what the path that we're following. MR. FREEMAN: So, your answer to the question, which was, whether a change in U.S. policies could change the dynamics in the region, is an emphatic yes. MR. LANG: Yeah, it is absolutely. I see it as the only real alternative to living with what the results of what we have started. MR. FREEMAN: Ken. MR. KATZMAN: Well, I'm generally in agreement with everybody else, although I'm certainly in disagreement with how dire a conflict with Iran would be in the end, but I think it would require just a dramatic change in U.S. policy on all these fronts at once. And from what I hear in Congress and from what I can tell, I just don't see that that dramatic a change is in the offing. I mean, I think President Bush clearly, you know, his legacy is in what happens with Iraq. And if we were to diminish our commitment to Iraq, there certainly is a fear, although I tend to agree with Wayne that the conflict in Iraq could remain limited within Iraq. That's a hypothesis. It could easily go the way some - I think there was a Ken Pollack article, Dan Byman, a few months ago, talking about just conflagration throughout the entire region if we pulled out. And I think I disagreed with that piece, but you know, which of these two is right? In advance, you can't prove either hypothesis. It could be, it could wind up dramatically, that dramatically dire as was painted in that piece rather than, I agree with Wayne, that it could remain contained. So, for that reason I do not see the administration taking, you know, dramatically shifting on all of these fronts at once. It would require making the Arab-Israeli dispute a much higher priority than it's been. If we remember for the first - I mean, while Arafat was alive, the administration's view was basically that we're not going to deal with him. He's not democratic, he's corrupt, and they basically kept him, you know - they just didn't deal with him at all and we lost four, five years and then Hamas won the elections. The mistakes that have been built up are so, there's so much pressure in the system that to try to relieve some of the pressure you could have an explosion. And this is why I think its so hard to come to the conclusion that you'd like to see. MR. FREEMAN: Anatol, briefly. MR. LIEVEN: On Iraq and the Spanish civil war, one should point out that one of the reasons why Spain didn't explode directly into a European conflict is that none of the other powers involved were actually neighbors of Spain. Iraq is very different from that point of view. Iran, Saudi Arabia, other states, border directly on Iraq. Much more difficult for them to remain aloof. Secondly, a question of who is a great power and who isn't. Power, real power to paraphrase Tip O'Neill, is always local. I was always reminded of this in the former Soviet Union. Russia, it's true, is no longer a superpower. It has no influence in Latin America as the Soviet Union did in Africa, in Southeast Asia. It does have influence in eastern and southern Ukraine. And as we've discovered, if at a given moment the issue is, does Ukraine get into NATO, well, guess what? Russia is a great power again. Only there, not anywhere else. Thirdly, on Afghanistan where I obviously sounded gloomier than some of the other participants, I should clarify my position. When I talk about defeat in Afghanistan, as I said, I don't mean defeat in the field, being chased out directly. What I mean is a situation in which Western publics, starting with European publics, simply see a war going on and on and on, not with very heavy casualties, but to start with too heavy casualties for the Germans to bear, that's for sure; with no prospect of this ever coming to an end; with no evidence that the Afghan state is in fact becoming more successful, that real development is occurring; and gradually the will to go on fighting evaporates. And we don't, by the way, end with the Taliban ruling the whole country; that will never happen again, but what we end with is us pulling out and arming what used to be the Northern Alliance - the other nationalities - then we have an endless civil war there going on - you know, the 1990's continued indefinitely. Then we have to think about what the implications of that are for Pakistan and for our long-term interests in the region as a whole. That's what I meant by victory or defeat. MR. FREEMAN: Bob? Q: Yes. I'm Bob Dreyfuss, a journalist here. I want to talk about Iraq from the standpoint - Wayne White mentioned that there's very little perhaps at this stage that the United States can do to affect the situation there, although I do think we could make it worse. But in terms of making it better, I recently talked with a very well informed Iraqi who was visiting in Washington, who said that there is emerging a consensus among Iraqi politicians and parties on a new coalition to replace Maliki, and that it can include - and this goes to the Sunni-Shiite war, which I think is way overblown in terms of - especially in terms of Iraq. Sunnis just don't hate the Shiites. But that Sunder (ph) and his forces are talking actively with Sunni - the Sunni parties, the 55 Sunni parties with Alawi's party, with the Fadillah (ph) party among the Shiia, among them a majority, 160-plus majority in the parliament, to replace this absurd Maliki government, and that what's left on the other side is Hakim and the Kurds, who want to split apart Iraq. In other words, you have a conflict emerging between people in Iraq who are nationalists, who want the United States to withdraw, and I think all of those parties of the Sunder-Sunni alliance want the United States to withdraw as nationalists, versus the parties that want to split Iraq up into Shiite region, Kurdish region, et cetera. So maybe we're making that worse or preventing this alliance from coming in. But it certainly goes against this hammering conventional wisdom that the Iraqi Sunnis and Shiites can't work together. They certainly can. As witness of these talks. And I'm not saying that this is an easy alliance to accomplish, but it's possible. So what about that, and why don't we step back and allow that kind of natural consensus to emerge among the Iraqis about getting the United States out? MR. FREEMAN: It's a very complex set of issues you've posed, but I think they boil down to the question of whether some sort of new coalition, which is nationalist in character rather than "splitist," to use an old communist term, is not possible in Iraq. And if it is possible, because we over-estimate the divisions, particularly in the religious level, why aren't we going after it. I think that's the question. You started with Wayne, so I'll ask Wayne to begin. MR. WHITE: Bob and I talk a lot, but I think in this case, Bob, we have some differences. There has been an effort to put together a government that either would supplant Alawi - excuse me, Freudian slip. Maliki. Or more precisely, at least in the form that I've seen it, align behind him a different collection of actors that would make him less dependent, or not dependent at all on Muqtada al-Sadr. I don't see this lack of intense Sunni-Shiia animosity in Iraq. In fact, I think this year 2006 has vastly increased the levels of anger, rage, hatred in all of this. And the class of Iraqis, the great secular middle class, the middle and upper middle professional, business and governmental classes that once inter-married Sunni-Shiia commonly, these are Baghdadis primarily. And many of them, a vast number of these people have given up and left. They're in Jordan. They're in London. They're in Damascus. They're in Cairo. And so what we have in fact been left with are more extremist elements, which makes me very, very concerned over the future, you know, of the situation there. One thing connected with the formation of such a government or such a coalition is that at least one report indicated the Grand Ayatollah Sistani was disinterested in such a coalition, that he was more interested in maintaining a Shiia front, the old Shiia list, Shiia alliance, and therefore some of the talks related to this have broken down as a result of that unexpected development. And my impression of the contacts that Muqtada al-Sadr has had on the Sunni Arab side is somewhat narrower than the ones you're talking about. And that he has not been able to have more broad-based exchanges, mainly because, of course, Sadr City has essentially become death squad central with respect to attacks against Sunni Arabs. So I don't see the picture quite that brightly. I see Sunnis and Shiia continuing to square off. In fact, I was worried in the context of the surge, not only that the surge might fail - and I don't see this happening and I'm very relieved - that because the reporting surrounding the surge and the briefings were so specific about occupying 23 mixed neighborhoods, that Moqtada al-Sadr might actually initiate a surge of his own in order to clean out as many of those neighborhoods before we got there. And we might find some ghost towns instead of mixed areas. I have not yet seen such a development, and I pray that I don't. Anyway, I guess that's it. MR. FREEMAN: Ken? MR. KATZMAN: Yes, I totally agree. I think Sadr's flirtation with the Sunnis is in many ways purely tactical. I think Sadr feels if he can get the U.S. out, he can prevail against the Supreme Council and the others, and those interests are the same as the Sunnis, who feel if they can get the U.S. out, they can either come back to power or win a larger share of power. So I don't think there's really any sustenance to that flirtation between Sadr and the Sunni groups. And I also think that in the press I think they give the impression that Maliki and Sadr, that their alliance is sort of tactical and temporary and superficial. And I think I disagree with that because Mohammad Bakr Sadr, who is the uncle of Muqtada, founded the Dawa Party and Maliki is the Dawa Party. So the Dawa Party and the Sadr family have organic historic linkages, and I don't think that that's easy to sort of separate. I think that's what's really got Maliki and Sadr together more than any real tactical alliance. MR. FREEMAN: Pat? MR. LANG: You know, Bob, I think you're quite right. In the old Iraq, which is Iraq before 2003, you know, that the country and the population was well on its way on a journey toward becoming really one people. They had progressed a long way. They had gotten to the point they could live together, there was a lot of intermarriage, especially among more Westernized people, or modernized people, whatever you want to call them. That was all true. But in fact, this was a project in progress in fact, that had been going on - you could pick your date. The foundation of the Iraqi state. The Ottoman tan-zy-mad (ph). Pick whatever you want to pick as a start date. But in fact I think we have reversed that process. In fact we have removed the impetus for people to in fact cooperate and we've tried in fact to bring into power a government that felt that that kind of thing was a good idea. It was obvious that Mr. Alawi was our candidate in that regard. When it came to elections, he lost miserably because I think that's part of the process that has happened. We have reversed the process of assimilation in the communities in Iraq, and they are in fact growing farther apart. There are lots of people who look back to that earlier state of society with great fondness and desire for it to be like that again, but you know, there are some things that in fact are gone with the wind, and I think this is probably one of them. MR. FREEMAN: Sir, the well-watered gent in the rear. Sitting down. Q: A question for Ken. I wonder if you could address more directly, for lack of a better term, the Bush administration's - (inaudible) - consistent tendency in the administration policy toward Iraq, it seems to have gained force - (inaudible) - so in the context of your thesis that Iran, for a variety of reasons -- (inaudible) - is this Bush administration approach as it's now evolved sufficient to rattle their cage in a productive way - (inaudible) - but is there a vehicle ready to do business with them - MR. FREEMAN: Ken, I'm going to ask you to summarize the question as you answer it. MR. KATZMAN: I guess the question is, can the squeeze play or the squeeze strategy have any value as a negotiating, and will it work, will it scare Iran, will it actually make Iran more amenable to negotiation. I think I would have preferred to present my paper in an environment where we were not in Iraq and perhaps the USG was more amenable toward negotiations with Iran. I think that's where what I was presenting works better. But of course we can't separate that. We are in Iraq, next door to Iran, and we do have the administration, which appears dead-set on negotiating right now. So - and seems to have clearly - the Iraq Study Group recommended engaging with Iran and the Bush administration seems to me went deliberately in the complete opposite direction, which was quite puzzling in some ways. But I mean, what I was presenting, I think what I was trying to say is we have a lot of leverage on Iran that in other circumstances where we were not in Iraq I do believe Iran would be badly shaken up by some of the naval moves and the U.S. deployment of power because I think that they, as I said, are not all that powerful when you get down to it, you know. This is not North Korea, which can run over into Seoul and devastate Seoul. I mean, they just don't have that type of power. I do believe the Cuban missile crisis was mainly a function of the U.S. preponderance of conventional power in the Caribbean, rather than its nuclear power, and I think we have much the same situation vis-à-vis Iran. It is conventionally very weak and I think it's a good - we need to figure out how to use our leverage to get a good grand bargain with Iran where we are basically in the driver's seat in that negotiation, and it can be an outcome beneficial to both sides. MR. FREEMAN: Wayne, and then Pat. MR. WHITE: Yes, I'd just like to talk about sort of the issue of the grand bargain and the nuclear standoff or impasse, whatever you want to call it. As a member - excuse me, as an adviser to the Iraq Study Group, was actually somewhat skeptical of the issue of engagement with Iran, and I'll explain why. Not because I wanted - did not wish a diplomatic solution, but because as I ran it through my mind, I couldn't see how that was going to be affected. In other words, Iran was not going to stop interfering in Iraq, or Iran was not going to agree to enrichment outside of her own territory or under extremely tight strictures unless it was in exchange for something. And exactly what was the United States going to provide Iran in exchange? Was the United States prepared to lift sanctions against Iran? I think not. Was particularly this administration prepared to, in order to gain cooperation in Iraq, to ease off on the nuclear issue? I think not. And another problem we have with the issue of Iran in Iraq, and I know this from being in the intelligence community until March 2005, almost everything that we are upset about with respect - and rightly so - with respect to Iran's connections to militias and our own activity inside of Iraq, almost all of that is highly covert. And you could easily have the Iranians agreeing to something and only finding out six to nine months later that you'd been had and that they were still doing it and the standard response would come back from such governments, which is, oh, we didn't know that was going on. We'll get right on it. When in fact they knew darned well it had been going on and didn't really have an intention of getting right on it. So I just couldn't see how the specific talks were going to proceed, particularly the talks that would proceed that were on the table, which was the talks scheduled between - or tentatively scheduled between Zalmay Khalilzad and Iranian negotiator team on Iraq only. The only way you get somewhere, it seems, with Iran is the grand bargain. Everything is on the table. And I see that even further out of reach, especially considering the tonality of this administration with respect to Iran and even these other slices of negotiations that I've been to some degree getting a negative or a pessimistic read on. Obviously it would be much better to approach Iran than not to. What have we got to lose? I remember in INR we were always urging negotiations and sometimes the policy side wasn't, just because if you have negotiations with another party, you cannot possibly come away with less information about their intentions, less information about their bottom lines, and numerous other pieces of information of considerable value to us. So I was always in favor of talks, but I was rather bearish, you know, as to where they were going, especially considering the cards that the administration has to play in all of this. And it's a shame because only recently, for example, they've had - there's been a lot of publicity about an old, old story that was known to many of us a long time ago, the 2003 letter from Khatami which actually was delivered out of fear that Iran was next and I didn't think was a very productive line of thinking beyond the immediate months after the fall of Baghdad. But there are other interesting signs, signs like damage to Ahmadinejad as the result of local elections in Iran, even statements on the part of senior Iranian officials quite recently expressing some disquiet over Ahmadinejad's approach to international diplomacy, his rhetoric, et cetera. So there obviously is a little bit of an opening. But as far as getting a lot of these issues off the table, I'm rather skeptical once you really get into it. But talking itself is highly useful in many other ways. MR. FREEMAN: Pat? MR. LANG: Well, I think Iran is only weak militarily if you're thinking in terms of conventional forces. I mean, if you're thinking in terms of aircraft, naval vessels, tanks, infantry, brigades and artillery pieces, things like that, yes, I absolutely would agree that they are not a really strong power and unlikely to be one any time soon. But there are many other kinds of military power. In the war of the ants against the elephants, which we became so familiar with in the 20th century, they have a lot of cards. They have a great number of friends in Iraq, where we have the kind of vulnerability that I mentioned before. They have been a major supporter of both Sunni and Shiia jihadi activity across the world ever since the revolution. And they could simply increase that and encourage people to do things that obviously we wouldn't want. They can take action within the boundaries of other states in the Islamic world. There are a lot of things they could do, and a lot of these things would be very difficult and they'd be likely to do them in retaliation for a full-blooded attack on them. Which, as Wayne says, I estimate would run at least 1,500 sorties and take a long time to execute in a real attempt to put down the Iranian nuclear program. And even then, as long as you use conventional weapons, it would just slow them up for a few years. So they're going to - they would survive that and they would begin to take action against you in the spheres of strength that are appropriate to them, which are not - are in a different - they're in a different paradigm than the ones that we normally operate in. MR. FREEMAN: It's fair to say, if we posit such an assault on Iran, that it can't be conducted without the support of governments in the region because tankers are required to refuel aircraft, even if they take off from carriers. Overflight permissions are required, and the like. And therefore, no attack on Iran can succeed without the collusion and connivance of regional governments. This means, of course, that Iran will target those governments and those societies for retaliation as a matter of deterrence. So I think we have to take that into account. One of the possible effects of an American assault on Iran is our expulsion from the region, including from the bases we now use to conduct operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan because, as Pat pointed out earlier, logistics are key. MR. LANG: They always are. MR. FREEMAN: Sir? Q: I think Colonel Lang spoke about Syria - (inaudible) - that seems to be - well, the ISG's - well, Secretary Baker suggested that - has suggested several times that Syria was both livable and - (inaudible). And it also seems to be a source of some contention between Israel and the Bush administration. It's clear that like a year ago or so the - well, even when Sharon was still in power, the Israelis were making very clear they did not want to see - (inaudible). And now of course with the revelations about these private negotiations that it appears the Israeli government were - (inaudible) - that there was some dealing. And this is also reflected in the polls in Israel, that show great interest in negotiations. I'm wondering if people would comment on the - (inaudible) - and the different interests regarding Syria - between Israel and this administration. MR. FREEMAN: Is Syria's position mutable? Is there a difference between Israel and the Bush administration on this question? Is President Assad is better than the alternatives? And, finally, how are we to interpret the recent contacts which appear to have been at least known to the Israeli government, if not authorized between Israelis and Syrians? I don't know who would like to take a stab at this? Ken, you don't want to do it? MR. KATZMAN: I don't cover Syria. MR. FREEMAN: You don't cover Syria. How fortunate you are. Wayne? MR. WHITE: I'd just make a couple of comments. I do think that possibly Syria could be of more interest than with Iran because I think Iran is determined to retain its nuclear enrichment capability. That would be very, very hard for them to give up. Whereas Syria has long wanted, has long yearned for the grand - the grand deal. The problem I see on the Syrian front, in fact, is that the situation on the ground just doesn't seem again, to lend itself toward saying - in other words, with a very weak government in Israel, how do you address an issue like the Golan, which Syria surely would not sign a grand deal without having been resolved. But if of course that could happen, I think Syria would be quite pragmatic and withdraw support to a number of the radical groups that she now assists. Even though it's been buried over the years when pressured, for example, to do something about border security along the Syrian or Iraqi border, the Syrians actually did take some action. People can say, well, it was limited, you know, ineffectual, or what-have-you. (They bermed huge sections of the border to stop motor transport. The Syrians in fact, during the period of setting up a much more thickly manned border surveillance system noted one of the principal problems relating to that border with respect to infiltration, our problem. The Syrians saw no one on the other side of the border doing the same thing. It was the Syrians being called upon to take care of the infiltration, with the United States armed forces badly under-strength in the country and not able to really secure the border, aside from occasional raids. But anyway, the bottom line, again, I think Syria yearns for this kind of an agreement, but I don't know whether the cards right now are stacked for negotiations that would actually produce one in the end. MR. FREEMAN: Anatol. MR. LIEVEN: Yes. Given Syria's isolation, we would to give - to break them away from what are after all their only allies in the region, Iran, we would have to give them basically everything that they wanted on Golan. And as has just been said, I don't think realistically we're in a position to do that. I would just like to suggest briefly, though, that we should look at Syria and Iran not just in terms of threats but also in terms of opportunities because, of course, of the historic hostility of these regimes to Sunni radicalism. The situation in which we've come to see the Syrians and the Iranians almost as allies of al-Qaeda is of course, objectively speaking, lunatic. And this is also of course, as I've repeatedly stressed, why you have to factor Afghanistan into everything that we do in the Middle East with regard to Iran because in Afghanistan, Iran is a natural ally, one. Secondly, one of the reasons why I would still say we do appear to be failing in the long term in Afghanistan in terms of economic development, is that we have tried, bizarrely, to develop Afghanistan as if it were a kind of island, whereas the only times in its history when Afghanistan has enjoyed even modest commercial prosperity have been when it has indeed been a trade route between the real economic centers of the region, notably Iran. I don't think we can develop Afghanistan successfully without Iran, but Iran has a strong national interest in actually helping us to do that. We also of course have the opportunity to talk of Iran seriously with regard to the drugs trade, which is a tremendous menace to Iranian society, and in fighting which they have lost a great many men in recent years. MR. FREEMAN: Pat? MR. LANG: I'd like to make it clear that one thing I'm really not interested in trying to affect in any of these places is a change of heart on anybody's part. I think that's ridiculous to think that. To try to change the content of people's souls about how they - whether or not they like you or not, or they think you ought to cease to exist or things like that is irrelevant in fact. I hear this quite often from various people, often from Israelis, you know, that we can't do this or we can't do that because they would still hate us. They would still want to destroy us. Well, you know, so what? What you're interested in is what they do. And so I think that with regard to the variety of issues all around the periphery and in the heart of the Islamic world that we're talking about here that what you need to do is not to depend on whether or not somebody can be trusted or not, or they won't be trying to sneak around and do something that you wouldn't like them to do, but when you make a deal on the basis of things you want and things they want and they feel about this and then you keep track of what they're doing all the time, we do have intelligence services - I know they have been in bad repute lately, but in fact we do - then you find out that they are in fact violating their agreement with you, then you take action against them, appropriate and proportionate to the violation of the deal they made with you until you get them back on the track. This is a kind of grown-up way to look at things, you know, rather than saying, well, mommy, Jimmy out there in the schoolyard, he really doesn't like me. Well, who cares, as long as he doesn't hit you? I mean, this is the main thing. That's my attitude. MR. FREEMAN: Sure. I simply wanted to add a footnote that I was once told by a very wise ruler in the region, that the best advice that he could give to Israel was that if Israel wanted to be loved, it should do something lovable. Anatol? MR. LIEVEN: Just another footnote. I'm half Irish and for many, many years, even to a degree today, if you asked people in southern Ireland, a majority, could you press a button and not exterminate the Protestants of northern Ireland but transfer them en masse to some far-away island - for example, not so far-away island - I think probably still, even today a large majority of southern Irish in Catholic nationalist background, would do that. Does that actually matter? No. No. Because over the years we have achieved a situation. And I mean, it took a long time, it took many casualties but we've achieved a situation in which this internal sentiment, which as Pat has just said, cannot be abolished and never will be abolished - I mean, it may vanish ultimately as a result of deep long-term historical changes, has become, practically speaking, irrelevant. That's all we can hope for in that region. MR. FREEMAN: Sir? Q: Steve Collins from the AP. Simple question - (inaudible) - on the remarks by Condoleezza Rice which she made most recently yesterday, that the Middle East - (inaudible) - Hezbollah or the violence in Iraq had reached a moment of clarity, that this situation would allow progress on these issues like the - (inaudible). Is this a realistic way of looking at what has happened, what is happening? Or is it simply a sort of political spin to kind of put some logic and sense on what seems to be a chaotic situation? MR. FREEMAN: Question is whether the panel agrees with the Secretary of State that in the murk there is a moment of clarity in the Middle East. I don't know who would like to comment. I know, Ken, you can't because you're determinedly non-political, but I bet Wayne will have a comment. MR. WHITE: Thanks so much, Chas, for passing. Oh, you'd like to start, Anatol? MR. LIEVEN: I just wanted to say that according to Condoleezza Rice, we're now having a moment of clarity in the middle of birth pangs, right? So things are getting a bit complicated here. I find this rhetoric is becoming almost Soviet in its distance from reality. MR. WHITE: My reaction is much the same. If there is a moment of clarity with respect to Iraq and the Arab-Palestinian issue, it is that the situation in Iraq could not be worse. The surge is even being attacked domestically in the United States, let alone having the prospects of not solving the situation out there, which grows ever more confused and violent. And on the Arab-Israeli front, even she went out, as I understand it, in the recent trip before her meetings with the GCC plus two on something else, mainly to wave the flag and (go) to a meeting which really did not have a firm goal. I strongly suspect because she thought that there was not probably much of a moment of clarity, except that there wasn't much that could be accomplished on this trip. So I found those remarks rather perplexing, to say the least. MR. FREEMAN: You do want to comment? MR. KATZMAN: I do want to comment, actually. It was interesting. I remember watching a hearing last year where Secretary Rice was appearing, and I think it was Mr. Hagel asked her, you know, is the Middle East - the region getting better or getting worse? And she said it was getting better and she - I think, you know, there needs to be, I think, a real critical re-evaluation of her tenure. I know she gets a lot of positive press in the United States and various people out in the provinces, so to speak, like her and all. But I think we need to examine her tenure, you know. I think she approached the Iraq situation as if democracy is a universal good and the Iraqis are going to accept democracy because it's a good thing and let's have elections and that will clarify the situation in Iraq. And the Sunni view is, that was just simply a device for formally transferring power to the Shiia. The Sunnis have never accepted it and I think we need to examine whether having the elections the way they were won in Iraq was indeed the right thing to do in the first place. MR. LANG: Well, it seems to me that there is a great deal of clarity in what's going on. At least you go around the region, you look at Iraq and this place and that place, all you have to do is look at what's happened, consider the evidence and try to not look at it through your own filter of ideas about universal values and the value of revolutionary change imposed on traditional society, which was already kind of unstable because of exposure to a lot of outside information. And if you stop thinking about it in terms of how, you know, just one more country, you know, one more campaign, one more surge plan and everything will fall into place, and actually consider what has happened, there's plenty of clarity around in the region. There's not a lack of clarity. Most of the lack of clarity is in the minds of the people who are trying to consider data that they don't like. That's where the lack of clarity is. MR. FREEMAN: I think rather than pursue the subject of Condoleezza Rice I would simply note that it is very striking to read the American major newspapers now on this subject. For the first time, the question that Ken Katzman posed of an evaluation of her tenure is actively and quite pejoratively discussed. So clearly something is going on about this issue, quite aside from the return of Mr. Negroponte to the Department of State, for whatever purpose that may serve. Q: My name is Paul Schwartz. I'm retired from the United States Army, currently unaffiliated - (inaudible) - any organization. My question has to do with the underlying theme of the entire discussion - (inaudible) - one way or the other, and that is the vital, the core interests of the United States. Assuming that - (inaudible) - I think it is an easy and correct assumption that one cannot disagree - (inaudible) - the interest of the United States to prevent an attack on - (inaudible) - or something like this from occurring. I don't think there's any debate on that being a core issue - (inaudible). Why has there not been an attack on - (inaudible)? As we fly around, it's hard to believe that going in and out of airports that it's because of the clearly effective - (inaudible). Why has there not been an attack, and if it's inevitable, if it is just a matter of monitoring, who are some of the candidates that might be - (inaudible). I think the scenario of what form it might take is pretty widely known. Of the several candidates, who might be - MR. FREEMAN: Paul, thank you for that very trenchant and relevant question, which begins by noting that clearly one of the vital interests of the United States in the region is to prevent or preclude attack on the United States, our homeland, and our installations abroad as well, I would think. And there has been no such attack, on the homeland at least, since 9/11. Why is that? And what are we to make of this situation? I wonder who would like to comment. MR. LANG: I would. MR. FREEMAN: Good. Pat. MR. LANG: Well, I would say that the answer to your first question is that the campaign waged by the United States government against the jihadi networks around the world has been in fact quite effective in a lot of ways. It has disrupted plans in various ways. Will that go on forever? You know as well as I do as a soldier that offense and defense are a contest all the time, and if they ever get themselves together enough and are secure enough in one place and determined enough that they might succeed in some instance in breaking through the layers of our counter-terrorist security and operations to do something like that. Is it inevitable? No, I don't think it's inevitable. No more than anything like that is intrinsically inevitable. But if the nature of the question is, is the war in Iraq preventing a terrorist attack on the United States, I think it's very difficult to make that kind of connection at all. That in fact - what has been happening in Iraq is a deterrent or a preventive to further attacks in the United States. I don't think that's true at all. If anything it may be encouraging the reverse in fact. And as to who the sponsors of such an attack might be, I think you have to look to the traditional actors in these things. There will always need a certain amount of money coughed up in the gulf and places like that for organizations like this, normally out of private purses, which are large. And then in fact, as I said before, the Iranian government has a long, long history of sponsoring such operations on both the Sunni and Shiia side, and this perhaps might be one more reason why it might be a good idea, not from fear of them or from weakness or anything else, to try to resolve differences with them in a way that doesn't further encourage such things. MR. FREEMAN: I'd call your attention to the last issue of Middle East Policy, which contains the transcript of a discussion of whether we're trapped in the war on terror or not. Much of that discussion bears directly on this question. Clearly we're piling up enemies at an alarming rate, which is the opposite from what we ought to be trying to do. Some elements of our policy clearly are effective, others are highly questionable. It doesn't appear, for example, that we have an effective ideological answer to extremism, and therefore extremists stand unrebutted in their places of worship and political activity. It does not appear that we have a method of causing significant defection or co-opting those who are on the road to becoming active terrorists. The one thing we do seem to be good at is disrupting existing networks and killing those who expose themselves. But that is not enough. That is a short-term rather than a long-term answer to the question of the defense of this country. So I think the question remains very pertinent. Does someone else want to comment? MR. WHITE: Well, yes, I'd like to just second what Pat said about the war in Iraq and it's important that we mention this connection, or lack thereof, because I think the administration has shamelessly exploited the notion that terrorists are being destroyed in Iraq who otherwise would attack the homeland. And in fact the vast majority of those opposing us in Iraq are opposing us just because we are present in Iraq. You know, there was this great PBS series, the Civil War, in which I believe now-deceased Civil War historian Shelby Foote recounted an anecdote from our own civil war in which a northern officer late in the war asked a Southern prisoner why the South was still fighting. And the answer was, because you're down here. And that basically describes the vast majority of opposition in Iraq. If we leave Iraq, the average Sunni Arab insurgent is not getting on a plane for New York. He probably never would have become an insurgent if we hadn't come near his village. There also is the other mantra, which is, if we withdraw from Iraq, Iraq is going to become a terror state. By a process of elimination one can knock down that. Exactly which portions of Shiia Iraq are going to play host to Sunni Arab extremists of the likes of al-Qaeda or al-Qaeda in Iraq? None. Kurdistan, is that going to become a base for the launching of terrorism? There may be a problem with a pocket or two, but as with the old Ansar al-Islam pocket that existed before the war - MR. FREEMAN: Well, the Turks might have a problem or two with that. MR. WHITE: The Turks may have a problem or two which they'll probably solve more aggressively, an unfortunate consequence of a civil war there. So then we're left with the Sunni Arab areas of Iraq, and that's worth thinking about. Except for the fact that there are a number of Sunni Arabs in many of the towns, cities and villages of the West who are quite sick of the foreign fighters, who one can consider actual international terrorists to some degree, and one can easily conceive a scenario where even there, where al-Qaeda and Iraq, Ansar al-Sunna and other groups have found fertile soil, even there where these groups would be hounded out of the country or destroyed once they are no longer of any real use to the people who have grown tired of being lorded over by them. So I think there are a lot of stereotypes that have been fostered related to Iraq and terrorism that need to be knocked down. One more comment with respect to who should we expect an attack from? One of them goes in a way to what both Pat and Chas. have talked about, and that is, to the extent that the United States stops creating more enemies, stops activities abroad which create more Muslim -- more generalized Muslim anger, the most successful efforts, perhaps in the homeland, could be launched by not al-Qaeda but what have been called those inspired by al-Qaeda, people already here who don't have links that can be picked up, you know, and dealt with and therefore become known networks, but who know enough to put together a bomb plot or whatever and deliver it here with virtually no support, merely because of their anger at the mistreatment of Muslims in -- or policies that end up mistreating Muslims abroad that the United States is associated with. Or even the mistreatment of Muslims in the United States here, in places of incarceration, or in Western Europe, where populations have not even been treated in many cases as well as they are here, Muslim ex-pat populations. So I would expect that if something happens, one place to look would be Muslim expatriate communities in which there are people inspired by actions taken abroad, either real or perceived, against the broader Muslim community. MR. FREEMAN: In these remarks you bring us full circle to Anatol Lieven's earlier concern about the consequences of failure in Afghanistan and Pakistan. I couldn't help thinking, having just gotten off a plane from Beijing, that life in the taxis from Dulles downtown could become quite exciting if this were to happen. Anatol, did you have a last comment on this? Then we have two final comments, finally Ambassador Nasser Al-Khalifa, but please. MR. LIEVEN: Just one thing. I'm glad somebody mentioned Europe because of course there haven't been any major attacks on the U.S. or any attacks at all, but certainly have been in Europe. And not just the ones that occurred. But you know, we had a couple of very narrow misses, including one in London. Well, in fact, the same thing in both cases, the detonators didn't work but there could have been a really terrible massacre on German railways as well. To some extent, why attack America, which is very difficult. One thing to consider is whether 9/11 wasn't maybe actually just a ghastly fluke. It's very difficult to get into the U.S. from many points of view. MR. FREEMAN: Even the people we want to get here we can't get here. MR. LIEVEN: Exactly. But I think from the point of view of Sunni terrorism, yes, Europe is the key because if the populations there become truly alienated, it's through Europe that people will be able to get to the U.S. And of course the problem in Europe has just been touched upon. I mean, the most worrying thing there is the way that in a classic fashion terrorism can whip up hostility to immigration or to immigrants or to people who aren't immigrants but are the children of immigrants, and hostility to them of course in turn increases terrorism. I've been profoundly worried, I must say, by some of the anti-Muslim tone now coming out of what used to be actually the quite moderate British press and from the lumpen British intelligentsia. The names will occur to you. As far as Shiia terrorism is concerned, which of course has not been unleashed against us yet outside the Middle East, Lebanon, that clearly depends, A, on whether we attack Iran, and B, whether at any point Israel really does set out once again and this time tries to go through with it in terms of actually destroying Hezbollah altogether, which will involve destroying a large part of the Shiia population in southern Lebanon. At that point if the U.S. supports this, and if Europe does not oppose it, then I think all bets are off as far as Shiia terrorism is concerned, and has often been said by the intelligence community, in many ways these people are far more sophisticated and able than their al-Qaeda equivalent. MR. FREEMAN: Sir? Q: Mike Howard, of the Christian Science Monitor. My question is something of a follow-up now but I did still want to pursue it. Mr. Katzman, you noted that four or five years were lost - (inaudible). And despite the question already asked, why do you think that - or what explains at this moment what is chosen by the administration, by Rice to go to the - (inaudible) - and to press for now this summit with Ohlmert and Abbas and press - (inaudible) - what explains that, what elements explain that? And then is there any - I mean, I've heard some - (inaudible). MR. FREEMAN: What is the explanation for Secretary Rice's sudden surprising interest in the region? (Laughter.) MR. KATZMAN: Well, I think, although it may have been planned before the Iraq Study Group, I think there may have been some element of wanting to show - you know, taking to heart the emphasis of the study group that that needs to be part of a solution to Iraq. I think that's a factor. I think another factor is Abbas' effort to form a unity government with Hamas and to try to move forward some of the Israeli overtures on their side. And I wouldn't dismiss, although Anatol could probably speak better to this than I can, but Mr. Blair and then the Brits -- the British, I think Blair has consistently pushed Bush, that, you know, Iraq is fine and I'm with you on Iraq, but we need to - I need, you know, because I'm under heavy criticism, I need you to really show that you're interested in the region and in progress in the region. I think Mr. Bush listens to Blair and I think that had an effect. MR. FREEMAN: Well, there's certainly one revolutionary aspect to this foray into the Middle East, namely the declared purpose was to listen. Which is something that we haven't done for a long time. And who knows what might come from actually listening to people. Your Excellency? Q: (Off mike.) MR. FREEMAN: Thank you very much. I don't know whether you were all able to hear that very eloquent set of remarks. It's difficult