To look more broadly and more deeply at the drivers of instability in themiddle east. From yemen to syria to interact, and now with ran , the region more than ever seems in a permanent of turmoil if it cant become a land of endless wars and tragically despite decades of intense and often wellmeaning american attention and the expenditure of billions of dollars, jewish policy has more often than not been a failure. Maybe the caveat more often than not is to kind. Its been an absolute failure if one accepts the basic aim was to fosterstability and a better life for the people of the region. The ones ultimately responsible for a countrys success or failure are the people who live there but the catastrophe of todays middle raises a lot of questions about whether the United States should continue to be engaged in the region and if so, how . In this regard, the editor of seven pillars Michael Rubin and Brian Katulis and their cocontributors have given us and get. Identifies seven factors that affect the ability or not examine what they mean and the role they play. The pillars as i identified in our legitimacy, islam,arab ideology , the military, education, economy and governance. I personally found many of the authors perspectives to be unique and useful basis to begin looking at old problems in new ways. Whether its used as the basis for a new bipartisan approach in the current poisonous political environment here is anyones guess but at least the authors are trying to provide some basic reality and analysis to encourage debate. So with us today, starting with my left, is Michael Rubin who is a resident scholar here at aei was a veteran of the Bush Administrations iran and iraq team and has a phd in iranian history. He contributed the chapter on legitimacy in the region. Next is Brian Katulis whos a Clinton Administration veteran, not the center for American Progress but with extensive experience in the arab world. Prior to joining, he lived in egypt and palestine where he worked on governance issues for the National Democratic institute. He contributed a chapter on governance. Then we have the children, was a fellow for the middle east of the Baker Institute at rice university. He researches both pluralism in the middle east the interplay between religious authorities and Foreign Policy. He contributed the chapter on islam. Were going to try to keep the conversation lively and ill interrupt to keep everybody from not going on and on. We will talk for a whileand then open it up to questions from the audience. So to start, im going to start with michael. And ask you what is special about this book, what did you think was lacking in the scholarship or the analysis that required this kind of approach. If we look at the last halfcentury of american interaction in the middleeast any metric in your introduction , the us hasnt been successful and its not a democrat or republican thing really what we wanted to do with number one get away from analysis on the political us calendar, thats too easy and it doesnt work more broadly to a fundamental rethink of some of the issues and drivers in the region. In terms of legitimacy for example there common core assumptions in the United States are all about Good Governance. That fulfills legitimacy but in iraq for example people are willing to forgo in some cases Good Governance just so they can have akurdish National Flag or shiite prayer flag over certain buildings. And we also wanted to identify and look at the impact of things we hardly ever talk about in the United States. Im sorry, in the region. Disruptive technology, hows that going to changethings. How is aid impact legitimacy isnt Good Governance, then these is foreign aid gear to the right thing and another conclusion, just the broad issues was surprising to me personally and brian and i traveled across the region was that many people if we asked the question what represents the most legitimate government in the middle east, people tend to Say Something like lebanon and yet lebanon is often thought about in the United States and in many parts of the middle east as an abject disaster and so we were trying to grab around some of these issues from a much more academic and less political or partisan approach. So what is legitimacy and why is lebanon seen as more legitimate than otherplaces . We need to abandon this notion that onesizefitsall and thats not easy for american policymakers to do. But ultimately, people wanted legitimacy or whatever their, they wanted representation for whatever their identity was, the problem is of course identity change with time. What was clear however is that people were increasingly finding themselves disenfranchised. Is it just an issue of the arab spring, its not just an issue of the antiiranian protests, but there just seems to be a failure of the traditional isms in the middle east which is why asked him wrote his chapter reimagining or reconsidering all the ideologies play because this example of the rack, 40 percent of iraqis were born after the 2003 war. More than 60 percent of iraqis were born after the 1991 war which means no one has a functional memory of what life was like under Saddam Hussein, among the broad swath of the youth. Therefore they are no longer willing to accept what we might have our problems from some of the Islamic Group for example but at least were not Saddam Hussein. People are looking at his generation which succeeded, Saddam Hussein and many of these other ideologues saying these guys dont represent us. We have in the United States as much as we complain about politics, usually 890 to 95 percent incumbency rate in congress. In places like iraq is 12 to 16 percent in the fact of the matter is evil are adrift and that makes it a dangerous moment. Brian, you wrote about government. The formal governance that has evolved or been imposed on iraq since saddam was overthrown. Is it working . You see it working . Do the iraqis have to come up with Something Else, does the United States have to help direct come up with Something Else . Requesting and i want to highlight the subtitle of the book is what really causes instability in the middle east and my simple answer after spending two years with Michael Rubin on this project, and neocons who are warmongering, its a joke. To your question on iraq quite obviously before this latest episode if you see what happened in the last week and then what was happening just a few months before that, young people in the streets of baghdad and in major cities in iraq questioning the very old order, thepolitical order in iraq. Protesting corruption for services and a bunch of things that quite frankly when you go around the region like we do when we did together and quite regularly are the sorts of things that impact every country in the middle east. This crushing democratic social pressure and inside of iraq quite clearly despite multiple elections, the Current System of governance in government is not helping the people and one of the points of this book and its not a new point is if you go back to the r avenue and Human Development reports of 1617 years ago is that those structural factors that contribute to stability are quite weak and in those 15, 16, 17 years and gotten weaker. And i think in a place like iraq quite clearly this is where i joke about michael but we do have our differences. He was in favorof the iraq war, i wasnt. He was against the iran nuclear deal, i was but the reason why we wanted to do this book and on the chapter on governance i talked a bit about iraq butnot about its national governance. I talk about this experiment that emerged under the Islamic State and i spent a couple pages on it and it shows you responsive governance and discontent with a government thats not responding plants the seeds for the sorts of instability that we saw under, happen in iraq under the previous Prime Minister that groups like the Islamic State exploited and i think we should have learned by now many years after the iraq war that the United States cant fix these factors but important to factor these fundamental Building Blocks for stability in our analysis. As you see today the hot takes on what were doing next and the cycle of escalation i think is quite dangerous. I think its a new phenomenon and there have been failures, a failure of governance, failure of leaders in the middle east for a long time. So why this moments did a group like isis have an opportunity to rise and have such a profoundimpact . I think its multiplicity factors and some of it ties into this interracial transition where you simply have a youth trouble that is crushing and if the governments in places like iraq are responding to it, people will rise up in various different forms. The isis model which again was shortlived and i dont think much legitimacy in the long run was created in response to a ineffective government and there are more tools now in a place like iraq under saddamhussein , it was a dictatorship. There wasnt as much of an open space for people to produce change and i think the theory that was behind the iraq war that in 2003 and we dont want to go back and make that but the theory behind it was flawed and simply if we topple regimes and eliminate or decapitate the top, and somehow freedom will spread and we never, that didnt happen and i think why accelerated in the Islamic State in particular is that you had a multiple likes going on inside of you ran, civil war first and then the system of governance that simply wasnt responding and thats the main point is that those conditions are still there. Iraqis are still looking at their National Governments with a caretaker government red. I would challenge the notion the Islamic State was all that new because we go back in history, theres any number of millennial movements whether it was the grand mosque in 1979 or what you want to go back acentury before that. What i do want to draw out and what ryan is talking about and theres any number of issues on governance. Beyond simply the monarchy versus republic and so forth but what does this mean for the nature of american diplomacy if we are still in many ways limiting ourselves to interactions with representatives of government who are under siege, whether those governments know it or not . Are we missing the broader picture in terms of policy and intelligence when it comes to the middle east . I would say weve missed the broader picture alive so whats the remedy to that . The United States has to deal with the governments that are in power to some extent. To some extent we have to deal with the governmentin power for example , how much time you diplomats send outside the walls of the embassies. Versus talking and just interacting on the local market area as opposed to simply interacting with governments and we dont want to bring in us policy too much one of the after mass of ben ghazi, putting the roots of that crisis decide is just a lockdown upon which american diplomats find themselves when you go to beirut, both brian and i went to beirut, the us embassy is basically running under the same security parameters during the civil war. At an important point, take tactical point. As she point which i think for us policy in the middle east we are quite likely at the end of a fortyyear period began with the events in 1979. The islamic resolution in iran, soviet invasion of afghanistan and a number of things that led to the us having its engagements primarily be focused on what our military does and look at where we are today. Discussing and worrying about what the next move and what will our military do mark to me this point that michael makes it just tactical but its important is our diplomats and that Diplomatic Service has been decimated in the past couple of years. There are i our eyes and ears in understanding societal trendsand were flying a little bit more blind. More broadly in the last point is it opens up questions of whether the United States should actually be spending a lot of money and other things in countries simply lack the capacity to do this, but maybe theres a strategy for thinking more modestly about our engagement, thinking about those begins or outposts where there is relative progress in places like tunisia so maybe a dollar spent in tunisia and time spent in tunisia may ultimately be a lot better than in other parts of the middle east, but we dont even have that discussion because were reacting to sort of mostly military bulbs and military centric moves and not much about how we diversify the portfolio. I want to follow up on that but bring peter into the conversation. It is religion more important in the middle east today and it was for and mark. It is. It is very much so what we need to go i think one of the fundamental misconceptions about the middle east in terms of religion, politics interplay is that we tend to assume that this has been the case all the time. But if you go back 46 years ago, but we will see is the dominance of central secularized governments, secular ideologies and how islamist parties and groups were existed and many of them but they were much smaller, much less influential in terms of policymaking, in terms of the to affect other groups in the society or how governments were acting in terms of Foreign Policy or domestic policy over the course of the last 40, 50 years things have changed dramatically i think. The iranian revolution was, the armed revolution was a big turning point but more importantly something that brian has mentioned , secular ideology has failed throughout the middle east and throughout the 1960s and 70s or 80s. Held as leaders. In terms of policy, the fundamental issues were political and economic and they failed to deliver on their promises, on what people expected. This is what precipitated the rising i think significance of these religious groups, islamic or later on. These fundamentalist groups and later on more violent extremist groups throughout the region. The key problem here, their rise was not just in terms of their own popularity. Within their borders. The Muslim Brotherhood in 2011, 12, 30, 40 percent of the vote but more importantly i think they were able to dictate the parameters of the discussion in terms of the policy issues that were ongoing. Their rise influenced secular groups, nonreligious groups, political groups so much so that they felt the need to bring in religion to their own discussion, to their own sort of policy proposals, so to speak. One good example i thinkis whats happening in turkey today. Erdogan and akp have come to party in 2002 and hes a massive politician but hes been so successful in terms of changing the political sort of circuit system in turkey in such a way that the Secular Party are unable to determine the agenda, political agenda. They are unable to discuss issues in a way outside of the parameters set by erdogan himself and one problem here is that if you think about this in terms of religious composition and the framers of religious composition, that means political activists boast religious and nonreligious will try to cater to the demand, their religious demand because people will want more of this kind of currency in political debate. But erdogan has not been uniformly successful. He was successful in growing the economy during the early years but hes run into more trouble now and hes run in to politicalpushback. Do you see him using islam and his religious beliefsmore as a Political Tool to advance his political career . Or do you think that this is just so indigenous to the people of turkey that every politician Going Forward is going to have to encompass religious beliefs more into their plans . I cant his personal beliefs, thats beyond my focus as ascientist. A role but once his political process were receding as a result of the Corruption Scandal first and later and other issues that have come up, losing in elections to some degree, then he started actually using more religion partly because he wanted to bring in some of the more conservative elements, especially among that kurdish voters in turkey and some of the nationalist both. Depending on the time, his use of political discourse, it depends upon the time. This is really important and is the same for other policy issues. Going back to an issue brian mentioned about tunisia, all the sudden tunisia is going to go much further compared to other parts of the world in terms of policy. Because it is a newly democratized context. What is underlying overall support for a lot of these religious groups, political groups, economic and political issues. Once those issues are addressed first and foremost, we are most likely going to see a decrease in their support levels. I think thats key. So are the tunisians is there anything on a followup on tunisia . Say what you want to say and. Uses phrase repeatedly use it using that religion. You talk mostly about the domestic context of turkey which is spot on. To understand people, leaders, use religion and islam in their own way. The point i want to make is this is about power. Its not necessarily about faith and the right interpretation of religion, if there is such a thing. It is about power. And secondly what i see in the middle eas