Iraq, Iran, Israel and the eclipse of U.S. influence: what role for America now?

Lieven, Anatol ; White, Wayne ; Katzman, Kenneth 等

The following is an edited transcript of the forty-seventh in a series of Capitol Hill conferences convened by the Middle East Policy Council. The meeting was held on January 19, 2007, at the New America Foundation, with Chas. W. Freeman, Jr., presiding.

CHAS. W. FREEMAN, JR.: president, Middle East Policy Council

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. 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, 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 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: 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, and that 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 avoid humiliation rather than accomplish anything positive.

In the meantime, 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 now enjoys an unprecedented intimate relationship--but also in Lebanon, thanks to the Israeli intervention, which empowered Hizbollah as the dominant political force in that country, and to the continuation of Iran's relationship and alliance with Syria, which no one seems to be seriously attempting to undermine. The question of whether the United States is actually dividing or uniting our enemies in the region must be asked.

We finally seem to have begun to engage once again with the government in Riyadh, with the secretaries of state and defense having recently visited for consultations. 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, with regard to the loss of control and influence, the suspension of independent American judgment with respect to Israel and its policies over the past six years, which has 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, have simply deepened its isolation in the region and the world at large--alienated the world, in fact, to an unprecedented degree, as shown in votes of the UN General Assembly and elsewhere. And, as I mentioned earlier, its choices have handed Lebanon to the predominant influence of Hizbollah and the Iranians.

These policies have not aided the image of the United States or improved our influence. Instead, they've brought great discredit on us and further weakened our reach in the region and elsewhere. We now face a situation in which, as a result of our close association with Israeli policies that are deeply unpopular in the region and elsewhere, the results of democratic elections, were they to occur, 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, and not a full picture to be sure. Perhaps I'm completely mistaken in what I've said; perhaps the picture is too dark. I will 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?

ANATOL LIEVEN: Senior Research Fellow, New America Foundation

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 with doing that in America is, of course, the very grave lack of information 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. A situation in which the new head of the House Intelligence Committee thinks that al-Qaeda is a Shiia group is not terribly encouraging.

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 Iranian joke reported last month in The New York Times, not generally a paper to which I go for the humor columns. Former President Rafsanjani was 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.

This news out of Iran does reflect, it must be said, 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, if anything, have only united the Iranians. All the evidence suggests that it is a combination of America and Europe that has had this effect, along with Iran's isolation within the region to a considerable extent as a result of what is seen as Iran's over-ambitious and even menacing strategy within Iraq.

This is an example of how multilateralism, combined with a certain degree of toughness, can actually have an effect, but not of America working on its own. However, toughness of this kind--tough multilateralism--must be accompanied, if it's to work, by a willingness to seize the resulting opportunities when they occur. And if these reports out of Iran are accurate--about the desire of moderate conservative figures like Rafsanjani and Larijani to adopt a more conciliatory policy towards the United States--then it would be a crime not to try to seize this opportunity. It is, of course, a crime the Bush administration would almost certainly commit and, indeed, is already committing.

Assuming that we are going to miss this opportunity to talk directly to the Iranians, how in general should we think about the future of the region and U.S. strategy? In my view, we should proceed from the assumption that not just the present military surge in Iraq will fail, but that it has already failed. It cannot possibly work. I think this is the judgment of every sensible counterinsurgency analyst and expert that I have read.

One of the reasons it can't possibly work is that, at least in its declared intention, it is trying to strengthen the existing Iraqi government by attacking its principal support from the Shiia militias in general and the followers of Muqtada al-Sadr in particular. If one cuts through all the propaganda and the spin, that is the hard reality about what the Bush administration says it's trying to do there. This is self-evidently not just contradictory, but surreal.

If, in fact, whether consciously or unconsciously, the intention is not actually about Iraq as such or the situation on the ground, but is simply to stave off for a couple of years the humiliation for the Bush administration of presiding over actual withdrawal--with perhaps a view to the future status of the Republican Party within the United States--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 onto the lap of President Bush's successor.

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 be. I 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--three years, maximum, possibly four, not longer than that--with a situation in which American lives are continually being thrown away with not even the glimmerings of a light at the end of the tunnel. They may retain bases, preferably, no doubt, out in the desert where it would be difficult to attack them, but they will not be trying to maintain order in Iraq itself. That, I think, is a domestic American political reality. The other reality is that 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 situation after America does withdraw, what should we be concerned with most critically? The first is something that is too often not talked about in the context of the Middle East: 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, as happened in Vietnam in 1975. But we might get into a situation in which America, Britain, and whoever remains there--which won't be very many allies--suffer a continual stream of heavy casualties with no prospect of creating a halfway successful and stable Afghan state. This fits into the Middle East not just because of American strategy as a whole in the war on terror, but also because Iran is absolutely critical to the development of Afghanistan. And not just that. If, in the future, we ever face the situation in which we are going to withdraw from Afghanistan as well, 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 a Taliban conquest of the whole country. So, in all of our dealings from now on--and in my view it's not going to happen, but it should--we have to 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.

The whole question of compromise with the Iranians leads to my final point: how does America approach the indefinite future of serious conflict within Iraq? 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 various Sunni states on the other. There has been a great deal of speculation about this in private and to some extent in public. The second is an attempt at a regional consensus or concert of powers, at the very least, to contain or limit future violence in Iraq.

From a brutal realist perspective, from the point of view of America or Israel, the divide-and-rule scenario could look attractive, particularly because the attempt at creating a concert of powers in the region, given mutual anxieties and fears, is not an easy one. There are three critical objections. First, of course, it is obvious how this would contribute to greater instability in the region, with possibly disastrous effects for the world economy. Second and 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.

Third, and for me the most important point, we have heard for many years now that America is a force for good in the world--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 mark America's role in the Middle East for posterity, for history, as not just a politically, but also a morally, disastrous one.

AMB. FREEMAN: Thank you very much for such a thoughtful presentation delivered in such a timely and succinct manner. It's been said that optimism is to diplomats as courage is to soldiers. I suppose we should add: as pessimism is to scholars. That was not, Anatol, an uplifting set of choices that you posed at the end. 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 the consequences for Iraqis and others in the region--and thus for American interests--that needs to be put front and center? The answer in this city is not as obvious as it might appear elsewhere.

WAYNE WHITE: Former Deputy Director, Near East and South Asia Office, Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Department of State

America's ability to meaningfully affect the direction of events in Iraq is waning steadily. We all know the 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 positive impact on the violence on the ground. Second, the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra 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. midterm election and polling reveal 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 politically well-advised or not, confirmed that time has run out for the president's near-monopoly of U.S.-Iraq policy. And, reinforcing Anatol, the current surge is doomed to failure. A U.S. force in Iraq barely adequate to contain the Sunni Arab insurgency cannot take on and successfully suppress 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, and--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 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 increasingly beleaguered NATO mission in Afghanistan, to at least give that effort one more chance for success.

In a civil-war scenario in Iraq, the United States would likely try to persuade some Sunni Arab governments in the region to refrain from supporting Iraq's 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, Shia and Kurdish-dominated Iraqi security forces, and Kurdish Peshmerga drive Sunni Arabs out of practically every mixed area of the country, and quite possibly even more, and millions of 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, in 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 at large to encourage and pressure where possible all parties, both inside and outside Iraq, to help ratchet down the levels of violence and to seek a desperately needed political solution inside 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 are possible, like antiship missiles near the Strait of Hormuz, would likely leave Iraq as the most inviting Iranian venue for payback, an extremely dangerous scenario for Iraq as well as Iran and the region at large.

One final note, in various exchanges with observers across the political spectrum, those 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.

AMB. FREEMAN: Thank you very much for that encouraging presentation. I think it's fair to note, since we have been discussing Iran, that when one travels in the region and consults with people, 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 the extension of Iranian influence throughout the region is of much greater concern. In that respect, Wayne, I'm grateful to you for raising the specter of a punitive attack on Iran that could result in retaliation against U.S. forces inside Iraq, where many are pro-Iranian. 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 a completely amicable pose next to the ambassador of the Royal Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, His Royal Highness Prince Turki Al-Saud. So, obviously, peace is possible. Qatar, which has been a very loyal and dedicated backer of the United States in recent years in the region, also might suffer some consequences from such an action. This underscores the requirement for the United States to consult and not to take actions that are inconsistent with the interests of our friends in the region, as I'm afraid we did when we entered Iraq in the beginning.

KENNETH KATZMAN: Congressional Research Service (his views are his own) 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 the likely failure of the troop surge), as well as the summer fighting in Lebanon and related fronts such as Afghanistan. Some Arab leaders, including President Mubarak of Egypt and King Abdullah of Jordan, have seen the emergence of a pro-Iranian Shiite crescent, instigated and supported by Iran, which may be 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 eminently reversible, if we understand Iran's vulnerabilities and weaknesses, of which there are many. Iranian leaders have successfully propagandized the international community that Iran is a "great nation." They have successfully convinced many experts that Iran verges on superpower status, that the future belongs to Iran and that the international community needs to prostrate itself before Iran to incur its 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, Iran is a very weak nation. It meets almost no known criteria to be considered 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 woven 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.

Iran now exports about 2.7 million barrels of oil per day and earns from that $50 billion a year at current prices. However, it gives back about 30 percent of that in the form of imported gasoline because Iran does not have 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 declining, even though Iran opened itself to foreign investment in 1996. Foreign investment has remained minimal in Iran's energy sector, about $12 billion since 1996, 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, is far easier to deal with than Iran and has attracted several multiples of the foreign investment that Iran has, despite its small size.

Iranian leaders might not want to hear this, but in terms of conventional military power, Iran is a virtual nonentity. A week of U.S. bombing 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 tanks and armor 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. Iran knows that not only would its own oil-dependent 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 has a military that is so lacking in capability and confidence that it even shrank from taking on the lightly armed Taliban in September 1998 after the Yaliban killed nine Iranian diplomats in Mazar al-Sharif. This is one of the only episodes I can recall where official Washington was actually rooting for Iran to take military action, but they did not take it 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 much larger than Iraq's, yet it still lost.

Even fears of Iran's nuclear program are overblown, in my view. Iran would be easily susceptible to a nuclear-deterrence posture such as we had with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, which would prevent any foreseeable use of such a weapon. Yes, Iran has the options to activate Hizbollah, Iraq, and other movements. But, I would ask, to what end? Activating these movements could actually redound to Iran's disadvantage in many ways. In Iraq, for example, if Iran were to turn loose Sadr's Mahdi army, the U.S. response or other responses could even provoke a situation in which the Mahdi army is defeated. Hizbollah would be the same. Iran would not want to see Hizbollah defeated in any type of confrontation. So, even here Iran's options are more limited than is commonly portrayed.

What are the implications of this analysis? It is my view that the U.S. administration 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. 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 United States 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.

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 "dire consequences." Iran 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 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 is currently portrayed in the press and some of the analytic material that I've seen.

AMB. FREEMAN: That was 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 a bargaining process with Iran, that our position is vastly stronger than many of the opponents of engagement suggest. This is something 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 is a topic that was not mentioned in many previous sessions. There is a widespread sense that things are not going well in Afghanistan. There is also for the discussion period 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: 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, and I know of no one who has defined what victory in Afghanistan might look like.

W. PATRICK LANG: Former Defense Intelligence Officer, Middle East

I have been given the task today, which is always a fearful one, of commenting on the effects on American power and policy overseas of its relationship with Israel. In the state of the take-no-prisoners kind of debate that goes on now in Washington and New York, I expect 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. I think you can paraphrase that today and say that we should hope that the U.S.-Israeli de facto alliance is not a suicide pact. 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 that is very difficult to deal with because it is one of a sort of endless belligerence. It is an attitude in which the idea seems to be that to negotiate with people is a sissified, weak sort of thing to do, unless you are negotiating with them to dictate the terms of surrender. You sense this all the time, whether or not it is explicitly stated. One does not say this kind of thing openly in press conferences, but if you're asked, for example, "Why don't we talk to the Syrians," the answer is, "They know what we want." This is not exactly a call to the kind of 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 either. 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 we really resolve to do, we can do. We are strong enough really to do anything. We possess the means, the population, the materiel, the money; and if we really set our minds to do something, we can achieve anything.

That isn't really true. It's a kind of illusion that proceeds from the fact that we are so very rich, strong, and numerous. 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. A lot of people assume that we could easily reopen the Strait 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, that our supply situation in Iraq is extremely precarious.

Our forces are located in the central and northern parts of the country. And both internally, between our operating locations, and across the long, long supply route south to Kuwait, where our supply lines terminate, these lines of supply--revittled continuously by large fleets of trucks under minimal military escort--are extremely vulnerable to guerrilla action in all the villages and towns in southern Iraq, which are overwhelmingly Shia. For people to assume that, because we are stronger and have more tanks and aircraft, that we are not vulnerable to people who are determined to take action against us, is not correct at all.

I spent a long time in the army and Special Forces, where we knew a thing or two about guerrilla warfare. One man with one RPG launcher or two men with two AK-47s can sufficiently disrupt--put enough friction, as Clausewitz would have said, into the system and impede the process of resupply 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 lines open; and, if you could do that, you'd be very lucky. People ask, what about air power? The awful truth about this is that the U.S. Air Force knows very well that it now supplies 20 percent of the logistical needs of the U.S. forces in Iraq. It could conceivably do 35 percent--maybe--but not enough to keep the force supplied.

We shouldn't be deluded into thinking 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. That's one of the reasons you can't simply go around seeking to bully people all the time. You have to try to resolve your differences with them so that you don't get into situations such as the one I just sketched out.

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 in an attempt to resolve various issues that lie between us and them. They've gotten nowhere because we have relied upon this attitude of belligerence: take no prisoners, you know what we want you to do, and we're right.

We're doing exactly the same thing with the Iranians. Whether or not Iran will ever be a great power, I have no way of knowing, but we and the Israelis largely tend to reinforce each other in this kind of attitude of eternal belligerence. A good example is the war between Hizbollah and the Israelis in Lebanon last summer. Anybody who knows anything about what really goes on around here knows there was a good deal of prior discussion between the Israeli government and the United States, who agreed that if there were an opportunity to teach Hizbollah a lesson, it ought to be done. This ran into an inadvertent gesture on the part of Hizbollah and caused a tremendous explosion. The Israelis then assumed, based on their technology and superior skill in the military arts and the Westernized nature of their economy, et cetera, that they could crush Hizbollah and dictate the political result in Lebanon in a way that would be favorable to both the United States and to them.

There is a good deal of effort right now to rewrite history about last summer's war, but anybody who really thinks that the Israelis didn't fail in their endeavor there just isn't paying attention or is easily persuadable by propaganda of one kind or another. They did fail. They failed terribly. And as a result of that failure, their reliance on brute force rather than real negotiations with various groups, including Hizbollahis, greatly strengthened the position of Hizbollah, and the Iranians standing behind them in Lebanese politics. Are there any of us who don't know that it's true that their position was strengthened in this regard?

I don't see any indication so far that the Israelis have given up their intention in the long run of smashing Hizbollah, so I would imagine that somewhere down the road, after they think it over and decide that they didn't lose, they're going to have another go at it. I don't believe for a minute that the United States is not at least tacitly encouraging that kind of thinking. It's typical of what we're doing everywhere. But there isn't any reason to think that the Israelis will do very much better the next time around. What will be the further political catastrophe wrought upon all of us by something like that, as well as by the kind of Iranian adventure that might take place?

On a hopeful note, I too believe in the concert of the Middle East. I'm going to try anyway. I wrote an article some time ago in the National Interest Online entitled, "Toward a Concert of the Greater Middle East," in which I suggested it would be possible, using our force as a weight in diplomacy and using everything else we've got, to go around to the external actors and the internal actors in Iraq and throughout the region and in a series of negotiations seriously try to resolve a lot of the perceived conflicts of interest among the various groups that see themselves as contestants. If you persisted at that in the way that people did in Europe after the Napoleonic Wars and tried hard and didn't give up, you might see compromise. Compromise, imagine! If you really did that, you might succeed in getting the temperature low enough in the region so that these things don't keep exploding into fighting.

Everybody talks about the fact that there is a civil war in Islam between the progressives and the reactionaries. There are, of course, these conflicts, but the most dangerous of these is the ancient rivalry between the Sunni and the Shia, and we are beginning to encourage it by the actions of the American government. We should stop doing that. We should go around trying to help people resolve their differences enough so that they don't kill each other. 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.

AMB. FREEMAN: I'm left a little puzzled about whether the Ohlmert government has a strategy and, if so, what it is.

COL. LANG: They have an attitude.

AMB. FREEMAN: Seriously, one wonders whether this sort of policy of eternal belligerence that you describe is a path to acceptance in the region in any time frame and what the alternatives might be.

Q&A

Q: How can we talk about Afghanistan without addressing the issues confronting Pakistan, which are intimately connected with the problems in Afghanistan? The second question is the one that Pat Lang just mentioned: whether it is wise or even conceivably effective to get the United States involved between Sunni and Shia, given our lack of standing in that quarrel.

DR. LIEVEN: Of course, Pakistan is absolutely critical to Afghanistan. I would say the same thing in a different context than I said in my talk as a whole about Iran. We've got to do something that perhaps the American establishment is not good at: we have got to look two strategic moves ahead. 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. We 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 Inter-Services Intelligence. 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 means, but enough to create a genuine problem.

The second thing that stems from this is--and I hate to say this because it does risk turning this into a Gotterdammerung doomfest--that we have to recognize the fact that we could lose in Afghanistan as well. NATO commanders in Afghanistan said last year that the next six months will be crucial to success or failure in Afghanistan. If that was more than rhetoric intended to wake up people in the West, it implies that we have already lost, in terms of our ability to create a stable and halfway successful Afghan state. If you proceed from that assumption, you have to think about 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, most of all in my country, Britain, Pakistan has the capacity, if things go badly wrong, to spread terrorism and extremism in the West -and with nuclear weapons. What we mustn't do is put 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.

DR. KATZMAN: I do work on Afghanistan in my official responsibilities for the Congress, and I'm much more positive. I would like to inject a note of optimism in this discussion. I do not believe it as complete or 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. In fact, it went on the offensive and drove the Taliban back considerably. The Democratic Congress, by all indications, is actually committed to more aid to Afghanistan. General Eikenberry, 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 media make it out to be.

AMB. FREEMAN: Ken, I thank you for the more optimistic note, but 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? What is winning in Afghanistan?

DR. KATZMAN: It's sort of like art; you know it when you see it. Karzai was popularly elected. It was a fair election; he had competition from another major faction that did not win the election. I would say winning is if his government is stable and not challenged by insurgency.

COL. LANG: I'm pretty optimistic about Afghanistan as well. There is a fundamental difference between the situations in Iraq and in Afghanistan. In fact, if you take President Bush's criteria for what he refers to as victory in Iraq, it's unlikely we're going to achieve that. And we ought to start thinking about how to live with the aftermath, how to structure things in such a way as to restabilize the region without breaking any more china or throwing any more bricks through windows, things of that kind. This is a real catastrophe taking place in slow motion.

Afghanistan, I think, is quite different. This is a high, wild place of smallish towns and lots of tribesmen and villages where the sorts of skills that are implicit in a lot of our theories about how to do counterinsurgency apply very well. The trouble is that we abandoned the place when we decided to move on to Iraq. If we had had more troops, more people who were skilled at doing the kind of work that I'm familiar with, the right kinds of diplomats, and more foreign assistance, I think we could really still make something of Afghanistan. It probably wouldn't take a whole lot more in the way of troops. Sen. Hillary 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. This is quite a small reinforcement to ask for. I'd want to give them three or four more brigades, because that would make an enormous difference in a place like Afghanistan.

I have to believe that Pakistan, an actual nuclear-weapons state in the Islamic world, is going to be affected by the outcome next door in Afghanistan. People look across the border and they are either encouraged or discouraged. Some people are encouraged to do things they shouldn't and vice versa. So Afghanistan is a very important place, and it's a place where we still actually could win something and improve the lot of people in that part of the world.

AMB. FREEMAN: Regarding the quarrel between Sunni and Shia, the danger appears to be that within the Dar al-Islam there might be something resembling the Thirty Years' War, which destabilized the entire 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. Perhaps that's a model to ponder.

DR. LIEVEN: That's actually not entirely true, Chas. With the help of Richelieu, they played a diplomatic game. But what the Ottoman Empire largely got for itself from the Thirty Years' War was 30 years of Habsburg distraction. The Habsburg counteroffensive could have happened a lot earlier. While the Thirty Years' War was going on, fighting was raging between the Ottoman Empire and Shia Iran, with horrible consequences for populations on either side who were driven out.

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 doesn't exist. We are involved whether we like it or not. We simply have no choice. The question is what is the aim? As Chas. has said, do we aim at helping? We can't abolish this. It does go back a very, very long way. But do we aim at trying to damp it down for the sake of regional stability-and for the sake of the price of oil? Or do we, as to some extent we did in the 1980s, although not then explicitly a Shia-Sunni conflict but Iraqi-Iranian instead, try to whip this up? There is an obvious realist temptation to do that. The Iran-Iraq War was greatly welcomed by many people in this town and in Israel as well. But, as we see from the Iran-Iraq War, there were unintended consequences--this is the first law of war. We got things out of the Iran-Iraq War that we never expected and that were very bad for us and contributed to our present disastrous involvement in the region. The 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.

COL. LANG: 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 various ways, in Lebanon and Iraq and now in other places as well. What we should try to do is avoid exacerbating it further with our ham-handed interference, in our attempts to use one group or another to further some fairly minor goal of foreign policy without realizing that we are fanning the flames of something like the Thirty Years' War. I think that's a bad thing to do. It is likely to result in a very long, bloody mess across the Islamic world. And we should just stop doing anything that in any way tries to pit one of these groups against another.

Q: It's not clear to me that any of you really directly address the question of how the dynamics in the region would change if we changed our policy. I heard General William Odom say yesterday that if we announce that we're going to withdraw from Iraq, it would cause a polar shift, and then we would be able to do things that we cannot now do because of our commitment in Iraq.

MR. WHITE: I would caution against becoming too worried about some of these outcomes. It's amazing what the United States has weathered in the past when it's made mistakes. Some of the issues that come up as part of a grand bargain look out of reach to me--for example, trying to resolve the Arab-Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Syrian issues. These are issues that have remained unsolved for decades. And we currently have an increasingly weak Israeli government and a fractured Palestinian leadership. At least in the near term, it doesn't look like any of that is going to be solved. Even if the United States applied itself to trying to solve that issue at this juncture, it is not going to be able to effect a significant breakthrough.

Iraq, as I implied very strongly in my presentation, will probably have ramifications in the region because the United States is not going to prevail there. Things are just going to continue to get worse. One of the things that bemuses me continuously with respect to the national debate on Iraq is that the techniques of many of the defenders of current policy--I heard this from Tony Snow yesterday--include turing to the critic and saying, "what is your plan for a successful way forward in Iraq?" The way things are going, 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, which plan, what plan. But the only plan that may actually hold any water at this stage is to prepare for the United States to withdraw.

I mentioned a civil war in Iraq, and I recognize that there is some danger that if the United States pulled out, some of the more negative regional consequences--the 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, even if certain Sunni Arab states came to the aid of Sunni Arabs who would be very beleaguered in the initial stages because they do not have well-organized militias yet, there would be a tremendous initial disadvantage. But even in that scenario and with the Iranians supporting the Shia, my model would be more like the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s 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 with the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and fascist Italy in the Spanish Civil War--basically using it as a way to push and shove their way to a triumph for their particular ideology in another country.

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. I've seen some of the contingency planning, and we're not just probably talking about so-called surgical strikes against an array of targets inside Iran. We're talking about clearing a path to those targets by taking out much of the Iranian air force. We're talking about sinking the Kilo submarines, knocking out the anti-ship missiles that could attack commerce or the American fleet in the Persian Gulf. We're talking about probably trying to take out much of the speedboat capabilities--although that would be the hardest--and even ballistic missile capabilities.

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. That could rebound heavily into Iraq, but it also could hammer the region to some degree. Some of the planning that I've seen relates to 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 commercial targets in the Gulf and aren't going to try to launch missiles that haven't been taken out, think again. The Iranians are going to be fighting back very, very hard.

There will be very little ground dimension to this campaign. This will be an aerial assault. Some people might think the Israelis may do it, 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 might assume that the Untied States was well involved. So if the Israelis did not take out that array of retaliatory capability, it could provoke a far more dangerous scenario by doing it themselves than if the United States did it.

The worst part of going into 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 it's over now? 1 think not. You could open another can of worms that could destabilize the Gulf for years. So it has to be thought through very, very carefully. COL. LANG: The geometry of such an attack, if the Israelis were to make it, given problems with overflight, tanking aircraft and all kinds of things, would imply strongly that the United States would at least have to tacitly accept such an attack by the Israelis. That would be very obvious to everyone. All you just have to do is look at a map and you can see that.

But to go back to my point, I know how difficult it would be to try to take up a campaign of diplomacy of the kind that I described. 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 I think somebody has to state an alternative to the policy of rather permanent truculence that we are following at this point, encouraged by the Israeli government of the day. 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. Maybe you wouldn't succeed altogether; maybe you wouldn't succeed very much. But it would be different from what you're doing now. The direction we're going in leads at least to endless conflict in the region. It doesn't have to be war between organized armed bodies of people. Political murder, assassination, street fighting, unrest: all these things are possibilities in the spectrum of violence that we're so prone to. We ought to give serious thought to the fact that, even though the Bush administration is not going to go down this road, there is an alternative to the path that we're following.

DR. KATZMAN: 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--I think it would require a dramatic change in U.S. policy on all these fronts at once. 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 think President Bush's legacy lies in what happens with Iraq. If we were to diminish our commitment to Iraq, there is a fear that a conflagration might ensue. I tend to agree with Wayne that the conflict could remain limited within Iraq. It could easily go the other way. There was an article by Ken Pollack and Dan Byman a few months ago about a conflagration throughout the entire region if we pulled out. I disagreed with that piece, but you can't prove either hypothesis.

For this reason, I do not see the administration dramatically shifting on all these fronts at once. It would require making the Arab-Israeli dispute a much higher priority than it's been. While Arafat was alive, the administration's view was that we're not going to deal with him. He's not democratic; he's corrupt. They just didn't deal with him at all, and we lost four or five years. Then Hamas won the elections. The mistakes have been built up, and there's so much pressure in the system that to try to relieve some of it could cause an explosion.

DR. LIEVEN: On Iraq and the Spanish Civil War, 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. Iran, Saudi Arabia, and other states border directly on Iraq--much more difficult for them to remain aloof.

Secondly, the question of who is a great power and who isn't. Real power, to paraphrase Tip O'Neill, is always local. Russia, it's true, is no longer a superpower. It has no influence in Latin America as the Soviet Union did, or in Africa, or 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, guess what? Russia is a great power again, but only there, not anywhere else.

Thirdly, on Afghanistan, where I sounded gloomier than some of the other participants, I should clarify my position. When I talk about defeat in Afghanistan, I don't mean defeat in the field, being chased out directly. What I mean is a situation in which Western publics, starting with Europeans, see a war going on and on and on, not with very heavy casualties, but with too many casualties for the Germans to bear, with no prospect of this ever coming to an end, with no evidence that the Afghan state is becoming more successful and that real development is occurring. Gradually, the will to go on fighting evaporates.

It won't end with the Taliban ruling the whole country; that will never happen again. But what we end with is our pulling out and arming what used to be the Northern Alliance and the other nationalities. Then we have an endless civil war there--the 1990s 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.

Q: Wayne White mentioned that there's very little perhaps at this stage that the United States can do to affect the situation in Iraq, 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 said that there is emerging a consensus among Iraqi politicians and parties on a new coalition to replace Maliki. Sadr and his forces are talking actively with Sunni parties and others to replace this absurd Maliki government, and that what's left on the other side is Hakim and the Kurds, who want to split Iraq apart. You have a conflict emerging between people in Iraq who are nationalists and who want the United States to withdraw versus the parties that want to split Iraq into a Shiite region, a Kurdish region, and so on. So maybe we're making that worse or preventing this alliance from coming in. But it certainly goes against the conventional wisdom that the Iraqi Sunnis and Shiites can't work together. They certainly can, as witness these talks. Why don't we step back and allow this kind of natural consensus to emerge among the Iraqis about getting the United States out?

AMB. 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 split-ist, to use an old communist term, is not possible in Iraq. And if it is possible--because we overestimate the divisions, particularly at the religious level -why aren't we going after it?

MR. WHITE: There has been an effort to put together a government that would either supplant Maliki or align behind him a different collection of actors that would make him less dependent, or not dependent at all, on Moqtada al-Sadr. I don't see this lack of intense Sunni-Shia animosity in Iraq. I think 2006 vastly increased the levels of rage and hatred. And the great secular middle-class, and upper-middle-professionals in business and government among whom Sunni and Shia once intermarried commonly: these are Baghdadis primarily. A vast number of these people have given up and left. They're in Jordan, London, Damascus, Cairo. So what we are left with are more extremist elements. This makes me very, very concerned over the future of the situation there.

One thing connected with the formation of such a coalition is that at least one report indicated that Grand Ayatollah Sistani was uninterested in such a coalition, that he was more interested in maintaining a Shia front, the old Shia alliance. Some of the talks related to this have broken down as a result of that unexpected development. And my impression of the contacts that Moqtada al-Sadr has had on the Sunni Arab side is somewhat narrower than the ones you're talking about; 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 Shia continuing to square off. I was worried in the context of the surge, not only that the surge might fail -I'm very relieved--but 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 many of those neighborhoods before we got there, and that 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.

DR. KATZMAN: I think Sadr's "splitation" with the Sunnis is in many ways purely tactical. Sadr feels if he can get the United States out, he can prevail against the Supreme Council and the others, and those interests are the same as those of the Sunnis, who feel if they can get the United States out, they can either come back to power or win a larger share of power. I don't think there's really any substance to the flirtation between Sadr and the Sunni groups.

I also think that the press gives the impression that the alliance between Maliki and Sadr is tactical and temporary. I disagree with that because Mohammad Bakr al-Sadr, the uncle of Moqtada, founded the Dawa party, and Maliki is of the Dawa party. So Dawa and the Sadr family have organic historical linkages that are not easy to separate.

COL. LANG: In the old Iraq--Iraq before 2003--the population was well on its way toward becoming one people. They had progressed a long way. They had gotten to the point that they could live together; there was a lot of intermarriage, especially among more Westernized, modernized people. But this was a work in progress that had been going on since the foundation of the Iraqi state or the Ottoman tanzimat. Pick whatever you want as a start date. But I think we have reversed that process. We removed the impetus for people to cooperate, but we tried 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. We have reversed the process of assimilation in the communities in Iraq, and they are growing farther apart.

There are lots of people who look back to that earlier state of society with great fondness and a desire for it to be like that again. But there are some things that are gone with the wind, and I think this is probably one of them.

Q: Can the squeeze strategy have any value as a negotiating tool? Will it actually make Iran more amenable to negotiation?

DR. KATZMAN: I would have preferred to present my paper when we were not in Iraq and perhaps the U.S. government was more amenable toward negotiations with Iran. But, of course, we can't separate the two. We are in Iraq, next door to Iran, and the administration appears dead set against negotiating right now. The Iraq Study Group recommended engaging with Iran, and the Bush administration went deliberately in the opposite direction. This was quite puzzling in some ways. But I was trying to say that we have a lot of leverage on Iran, and in other circumstances Iran would be badly shaken up by the U.S. deployment of power. They are not all that powerful. This is not North Korea devastating Seoul. They just don't have that type of power.

I believe the Cuban missile crisis was mainly a function of the preponderance of U.S. conventional power in the Caribbean, rather than its nuclear power; and I think we have much the same situation vis-a-vis Iran. It is conventionally very weak, and we need to figure out how to use our leverage to get a grand bargain with Iran. If we are in the driver's seat in that negotiation, there can be an outcome beneficial to both sides.

MR. WHITE: As an adviser to the Iraq Study Group, I was somewhat skeptical of the issue of engagement with Iran, not because I did not wish a diplomatic solution, but because I couldn't see how that was going to be effected. Iran was not going to stop interfering in Iraq, and 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. Exactly what was the United States going to provide Iran in exchange? Was the United States prepared to lift sanctions? I think not. Was this administration prepared, in order to gain cooperation in Iraq, to ease off on the nuclear issue? I think not.

Another problem we have with the issue of Iran in Iraq--and I know this from being in the intelligence community until March 2005--is that almost everything we are rightly upset about with respect to Iran's connections to militias and our own activity inside Iraq is highly covert. You could easily have the Iranians agree to something and only find out six to nine months later that you'd been had, and that they were still doing it. The standard response would come back from such governments: "We didn't know that was going on. We'll get right on it." But, in fact, they knew very well it had been going on and didn't really have any intention of getting right on it.

So I just couldn't see how the specific talks were going to proceed, particularly the talks that were on the table, the talks tentatively scheduled between Zalmay Khalilzad and the Iranian negotiating team on Iraq only. The only way you get somewhere with Iran is the grand bargain: Everything is on the table. I see that even further out of reach, especially considering the tone of this administration with respect to Iran and even these other slices of negotiations that I've been to some degree getting a pessimistic read on. Obviously it would be much better to approach Iran than not to. What have we got to lose? In INR we were always urging negotiations. Sometimes the policy side wasn't, because if you have negotiations with another party, you cannot possibly come away with less information about their intentions, their bottom lines, and numerous other pieces of information of considerable value. I was always in favor of talks, but I was often rather bearish as to where they were going, especially considering the cards that the administration has to play in all of this.

It's a shame because only recently, for example, there's been a lot of publicity about an old story that was known to many of us a long time ago--the 2003 letter from Iran's former president, Muhammad Khatami, which was actually delivered out of fear that Iran was next. I didn't think it was a very productive line of thinking beyond the immediate months after the fall of Baghdad. But there are other interesting signs, like damage to Ahmadinejad as a result of local elections in Iran and even statements on the part of senior Iranian officials quite recently expressing some disquiet over Ahmadinejad's approach to international diplomacy, his rhetoric, and so on. There is a little bit of an opening. As far as getting a lot of these issues off the table, I'm rather skeptical, but talking itself is highly useful in many other ways.

COL. LANG: I think Iran is only weak militarily if you're thinking in terms of conventional forces. If you're thinking in terms of aircraft, naval vessels, tanks, infantry, brigades and artillery pieces, I absolutely would agree that they are not a strong power and are 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 twentieth 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 Shia jihadi activity across the world ever since the revolution, and they could simply increase that and encourage people to do things that 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. 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, would entail at least 1,500 sorties and take a long time to execute in a real attempt to put down the Iranian nuclear program. Even then, as long as you use conventional weapons, it would just slow them up for a few years. So they would survive and begin to take action against you in the spheres of strength that are appropriate to them, which are in a different paradigm than the ones that we normally operate in.

AMB. FREEMAN: If we posit such an assault on Iran, 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 and the like are required. 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. We have to take that into account because 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.

Q: Is Syria's position mutable? Is there a difference between Israel and the Bush administration on this question? Is President Asad better than the alternatives? And how are we to interpret the recent contacts between Israelis and Syrians, which appear to have been at least known to the Israeli government, if not authorized?

MR. WHITE: Syria could be of more interest than Iran, which, I think, is determined to retain its nuclear-enrichment capability. That would be very, very hard for them to give up, whereas Syria has long yearned for the grand deal. The problem I see on the Syrian front is that, with a very weak government in Israel, how do you address an issue like the Golan? Syria surely would not sign a grand deal without having that resolved. But if that could happen, I think Syria would be quite pragmatic and withdraw support to a number of the radical groups that it now assists.

When pressured to do something about security along the Iraqi border, the Syrians actually did take some action. People can say it was limited or ineffectual, but they bermed huge sections of the border to stop motor transport. During the period of setting up a much more thickly manned border-surveillance system, the Syrians noted one of the principal problems relating to that border with respect to infiltration: they saw no one on the other side of the border doing the same thing. The Syrians were being called upon to take care of the infiltration, with the U.S. armed forces badly understrength and not able to secure the border aside from occasional raids. 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.

DR. LIEVEN: Given Syria's isolation to break them away from their only ally in the region, Iran, we would have to give them everything they wanted on Golan. As has just been said, I don't think we're realistically in a position to do that.

I would just like to suggest, though, that we should look at Syria and Iran not just in terms of threats, but also in terms of opportunities, because of the historic hostility of these regimes to Sunni radicalism. We've come to see the Syrians and the Iranians almost as allies of al-Qaeda, which, objectively speaking, is lunatic. This is also, as I've repeatedly stressed, why you have to factor Afghanistan into everything that we do in the Middle East with regard to Iran. First, in Afghanistan, Iran is a natural ally. Secondly, one of the reasons I would still say we appear to be failing in Afghanistan in terms of economic development is that we have tried, bizarrely, to develop Afghanistan as if it were a kind of island. But the only times in its history when Afghanistan has enjoyed even modest commercial prosperity have been when it has 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 helping us to do that. We also have the opportunity to talk to Iran seriously with regard to the drug trade, which is a tremendous menace to Iranian society. They have lost a great many men fighting it in recent years.

COL. LANG: I'd like to make it clear that one thing I'm really not interested in trying to effect in any of these places is a change of heart on anybody's part. To try to change the content of people's souls, whether or not they like you or think you ought to cease to exist, is irrelevant. I hear this quite often from Israelis--that we can't do this or that because they would still hate us, they would still want to destroy us. Well, so what? What you're interested in is what they do.

With regard to the variety of issues around the periphery and in the heart of the Islamic world, what you need to do is not to depend on whether somebody can be trusted. What's important is that when you make a deal, you keep track of what they're doing all the time--and we do have intelligence services--and when you find out that they are in fact violating their agreement with you, you take action against them, appropriate and proportionate to the violation of the deal they made with you, until you get them back on track. This is a grown-up way to look at things, rather than saying, "Mommy, Jimmy out there in the schoolyard really doesn't like me." Who cares, as long as he doesn't hit you? This is the main thing.

AMB. FREEMAN: I was once told by a very wise ruler in the region that the best advice he could give to Israel was that if Israel wanted to be loved, it should do something lovable.

DR. LIEVEN: I'm half Irish, and for many years--even to a degree today--if you asked most people in southern Ireland, if you could press a button and transfer the Protestants of Northern Ireland en masse to some faraway island, even today a large majority of southern Irish of Catholic nationalist background would do that. Does that actually matter? No. 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--has become, practically speaking, irrelevant. That's all we can hope for in that region.

Q: Does the panel agree with Secretary of State Rice that, in the murk, there is a moment of clarity in the Middle East?

DR. LIEVEN: According to Condoleezza Rice, we're now having a moment of clarity in the middle of birth pangs, right? 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 Israeli-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 little prospect of solving the situation out there, which grows ever more confused and violent. On the Arab-Israeli front, she went out, as I understand it, before her meetings with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)-Plus-Two on something else, mainly to wave the flag and go to a meeting that did not have a firm goal. I strongly suspect that's because she thought that this was not a moment of clarity--except that there wasn't much that could be accomplished on this trip.

DR. KATZMAN: I remember watching a hearing last year where Secretary Rice appeared, and Senator Hagel asked her, "Is the Middle East region getting better or getting worse?" She said it was getting better. I think there needs to be a critical reevaluation of her tenure. She gets a lot of positive press in the United States, and various people out in the provinces like her. But she approached the Iraq situation as if democracy is a universal good that the Iraqis were going to accept; let's have elections, and that will clarify the situation in Iraq. The Sunni viewed that simply a device for formally transferring power to the Shia. The Sunnis have never accepted it, and I think we need to examine whether having elections the way they were conducted in Iraq was indeed the right thing to do in the first place.

COL. LANG: It seems to me that there is a great deal of clarity in what's going on. If you go around the region and look at Iraq and this place and that place, consider the evidence, and try to not look at it through your own filter of universal values and the value of revolutionary change imposed on a traditional society--which was already kind of unstable because of exposure to a lot of outside information--and if you stop thinking that just one more country, one more campaign, one more surge and everything will fall into place, there's plenty of clarity in the region. Most of the lack of clarity is in the minds of the people who are seeing data that they don't like.

AMB. FREEMAN: It is very striking to read the major American newspapers now on this subject. For the first time, the question that Ken Katzman posed--of an evaluation of Secretary Rice's tenure--is actively and quite pejoratively discussed. Clearly, something is going on on this issue, quite aside from the return of Mr. Negroponte to the Department of State, for whatever purpose that may serve.

Q: One of the vital interests of the United States in the region is to prevent or preclude an attack on the United States, our homeland, and on our installations abroad as well. 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?

COL. LANG: The campaign waged by the U.S. government against the jihadi networks around the world has been quite effective. It has disrupted plans in various ways. Will that go on forever? Offense and defense are a contest all the time, and if terrorists ever get themselves together enough, secure in one place and determined, they might succeed in some instance in breaking through the layers of our counterterrorist security and operations. Is it inevitable? No, I don't think it is, no more than anything like that is intrinsically inevitable. But if the nature of the question is whether the war in Iraq is preventing a terrorist attack on the United States, I think it's very difficult to make that kind of connection at all. I don't think that's true. If anything, it may be encouraging the reverse.

As to who the sponsors of such an attack might be, I think you have to look to the traditional actors. There will always need to be a certain amount of money coughed up in the Gulf and places like that for these organizations, normally out of private purses, which are large. The Iranian government has a long history of sponsoring such operations on both the Sunni and Shia sides, 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 in a way that doesn't further encourage such things.

AMB. FREEMAN: I'd call your attention to the last issue of Middle East Policy, which contains the transcript of a discussion of whether or not we're trapped in the war on terror, and 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 for 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.

MR. WHITE: I'd like to second what Pat said about the war in Iraq. It's important that we mention this connection, because I think the administration has shamelessly exploited the notion that terrorists are being destroyed in Iraq who otherwise would attack the homeland. The vast majority of those opposing us in Iraq are opposing us just because we are present in Iraq. 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: if we withdraw from Iraq, Iraq is going to become a terrorist state. By a process of elimination, one can knock that down. Exactly which portions of Shia Iraq are going to play host to Sunni Arab extremists of the likes of al-Qaeda or al-Qaeda in Iraq? None. Is Kurdistan going to become a base for the launching of terrorism? There may be a problem with a pocket or two, like the old Ansar al-Islam pocket that existed before the war, and 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. 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, whom one can consider actual international terrorists to some degree, and I can easily conceive of a scenario in which al-Qaeda in Iraq, Ansar al-Sunna and other groups, although having found fertile soil, even there, 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 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 whom we should expect an attack from. To the extent that the United States stops activities abroad that create more generalized Muslim anger, the most successful efforts in the homeland might be launched not by al-Qaeda but by those inspired by al-Qaeda--people already here who don't have links that can be picked up and dealt with and therefore become known networks, but who know enough to put together a bomb plot and deliver it here with virtually no support--merely because of their anger at policies associated with the United States that end up mistreating Muslims abroad. It could even be the mistreatment of Muslims in the United States in places of incarceration, or in Western Europe, where Muslim expatriate populations have not even been treated as well as they are here.

AMB. 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 Airport to downtown Washington could become quite exciting if this were to happen.

DR. LIEVEN: I'm glad somebody mentioned Europe because there haven't been any attacks on the United States at all, but certainly there have been in Europe--not just the ones that occurred but also a couple of very narrow misses, including one in London. In both cases, the detonators didn't work, but there could have been a terrible massacre on German railways as well. Why attack America, which is very difficult? One thing to consider is whether 9/11 wasn't perhaps actually a ghastly fluke. It's very difficult to get into the United States.

AMB. FREEMAN: Even the people we want to get here, we can't.

DR. LIEVEN: Exactly. But from the point of view of Sunni terrorism, Europe is the key. If the populations there become truly alienated, it's through Europe that people will be able to get to the United States. The most worrying thing there is the way that terrorism can whip up hostility to immigration or to immigrants or to people who aren't immigrants but the children of immigrants, and hostility to them in turn increases terrorism. I've been profoundly worried by some of the anti-Muslim tone now coming out of what used to be the quite moderate British press and from the "lumpen" British intelligentsia. The names will occur to you.

As far as Shia terrorism is concerned, which has not been unleashed against us yet outside Lebanon, that clearly depends on whether we attack Iran and whether at any point Israel really tries to actually destroy Hizbollah altogether, which will involve destroying a large part of the Shia population in southern Lebanon. At that point, if the United States supports this, and if Europe does not oppose it, then all bets are off as far as Shia terrorism is concerned. As has often been said by the intelligence community, in many ways these people are far more sophisticated and able than their al-Qaeda equivalents.

Q: What is the explanation for Secretary Rice's sudden surprising interest in the region?

DR. KATZMAN: Although her trip may have been planned before the Iraq Study Group report, I think there may have been some element of wanting to show that Israeli-Palestinian peace needs to be part of a solution to Iraq, as the ISG emphasized. I think that's a factor. I think another factor is Abbas's effort to form a unity government with Hamas and to try to move toward some of the Israeli overtures. And I wouldn't dismiss Mr. Blair and the Brits. Blair has consistently pushed Bush, saying "I'm with you on Iraq, but, because I'm under heavy criticism, I need you to really show that you're interested in progress in the region." I think Bush listens to Blair, and I think that had an effect.

AMB. FREEMAN: Well, there's certainly one revolutionary aspect to this foray into the Middle East, namely that the declared purpose was to listen. This is something we haven't done for a long time. And who knows what might come from actually listening to people?

COMMENT, H. E. NASSER AL-KHALIFA, ambassador of Qatar to the United States, Summarized by Amb. Freeman: All too often in Washington, you appear to adopt policies that are based on a failure to listen to those who are affected by those policies. In many ways, those who were most eager to take the United States into Iraq and who now are eager to get out of it seem to favor trying again in Iran without considering the consequences, which are bad for everybody. An illustration of this was the 34-day war this summer, which changed the entire region.

Americans need to recall that what we say here is heard instantly in every village throughout the world, and there are audiences beyond those who are present in the room.

It might yet be possible for us to succeed in Iraq if Iraq can have a government that is genuinely a government for all the people. Whether that government is headed by Mr. Maliki--changing his policies and approach--or a new government, that is the requirement. It is not impossible, given the national identity that all Iraqis share.

Finally, all too often the United States appears to mistake the attitudes and actions of people in the region for a displaying enmity toward the United States. There is no such enmity toward the United States on the part of Syria, for example; nor is Hizbollah, which is primarily concerned with events in Lebanon, necessarily an enemy of the United States

AMB. FREEMAN: As I was pondering what we had accomplished in this meeting I recalled the famous remarks of General Vernon Waiters, who was both a great soldier and a great diplomat. Someone once asked him the difference between the military and diplomats. He replied that they both do absolutely nothing, but the military get up very early in the morning and do it with great discipline, whereas the diplomats wait until the afternoon and do it in utter confusion. We have been trying to meld a diplomatic strategy with a military strategy, and I think we've achieved exactly what Dick Waiters suggested we would if we tried this, but I think it was worth the effort, and I would like to join Ambassador Nasser Al-Khalifa in thanking everyone on the panel for a very stimulating discussion.