The book and panel is certainly timely given the rising crisis with iran. We will get to that subject eventually but the book entitled seven pillars in the discussion is to look more broadly and more deeply at the drivers of instability in the middle east. From yemen to syria to iraq and now with iran, the region more than ever seems in a permanent state of turmoil and has become a land of endless wars. And tragically, despite decades of intense and often wellmeaning american intention in the expenditure of billions of dollars, u. S. Policy has more often than not in a failure. Maybe to caveat more often than not is too kind, and absolute failure that one except the basic lane was the stability and a better life for the people in the region. Of course once ultimately responsible for our country success for failure are the people who lived there but the catastrophe of todays middle east 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 editors of seven pillars, Michael Rubin and Brian Katulis and their cocontributors have given us a gift, they identify seven factors that affect stability or not and examine what they mean in the role that they play. The pillars that they identify our legitimacy, islam, arab ideology, the military, education, economy and governance. I personally found many of the authors perspective to be unique and a useful basis of looking all problems in new ways, whether conservative basis as a new bipartisan approach in the current poisonous political environment here is anyones guess. At least the authors are trying to provide some factbased reality and analysis to encourage debate. So with us today starting with my left is Michael Rubin who is a resident scholar at aei, a veteran of the Bush Administration, iraniraq team and has a phd in iranian history, he contributes to the chapter on legitimacy in the region. Next is Brian Katulis who is the Clinton Administration veteran now at the center for American Progress and would extensive experience in the arab world, not under prior to joining cap where he worked on governance issues in the National Democratic institute. He contributed the chapter on governance. And then we have the scholar for the middle east at the Baker Institute are rise university, he researches pluralism in the middle east and the interplay between religious authority and Foreign Policy. He contributed the chapter on islam. We will try to keep the conversation lively and i will interrupt from not going on and on. We will talk for a little while and open it up to questions from the audience. 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 require this kind of approach. If we look at the last half of the century of american interaction in the middle east by any metric in your introduction, the u. S. Has not been successful and is not a democratic or republican thing, number one we want to get from analysis based on the political calendar, that is too easy and it does not work. More broadly a fundamental rethink of the issues and drivers in the region and turn them legitimacy, there is core fronted in the United States thats all about good governance, thats what built legitimacy but when we are in iraq, people are willing to forgo in some cases, the governance so they can have a National Flag or prayer flag over a certain building, we also want to identify and look at the impact of things that we hardly ever talk about in the United States. Im sorry in the region, disruptive technology, how will that change things. How is foreign aid impacted if legitimacy is good governance, is foreign aid you to the right thing, another conclusion, a broad issue that was most surprising issu personally is wh brian i traveled across the region, many people if we asked the question, what represents the most legitimate government in the middle east, people tended to Say Something like lebanon and yet lebanon is often thought about in the United States and frankly in many parts of the middle east as an abject disaster. We were trained to grapple around these issues from a much more academic and less political partisan approach. What is legitimacy and why is lebanon seen as more legitimate than other places. First of all we need to abandon the motion that onesizefitsall. That is not easy for milley under american policymakers to do. But ultimately people wanted legitimacy for whatever they identify, they wanted representation for whatever their identity was, the problem of course is identity changes with time. What is clear is that people were increasingly finding themselves disenfranchised, this is not just an issue of the arab or an issue of the antiiranian protest but there seems to be a failure of the traditionalisms in the middle east which is why they wrote his chapter of reimagining or reconsidering all the ideology that play because take example of iraq, 40 of iraqis were born after the 2003 war, more than 60 of iraqis were born after the 1991 war which means no one has a functional memory of what life was like under Saddam Hussein under the swath of the youth, therefore no longer willing to accept that we might have our problems from some of the islamic for example but at least were not set on hussein. People are looking at this generation which defeated Saddam Hussein and the other ideologues and dictators in the region and saying these guys dont represent us. We have in the United States as much as we complain about politics, usually 90 95 encompassing rate in congress and places like iraq its around 12 but 60 in the fact of the matter is it makes it a very dangerous moment. He wrote about the governance. The form of governance that has evolved or been imposed on iraq since tsunam sued on hussein was overthrown, is it working, do you see it working, did iraqis have to come out with Something Else that the United States have to come up help with iraq come out with Something Else. I will in to that in a second, i want to highlight the subtitle of the book, what causes instability in the middle east in my simple answer after spending two years with Michael Rubin on this project is Michael Rubin. [laughter] its a joke. To your question on iraq, quite obviously, if you see what has happened in the last week and what is happening just a few months before that, young people in the streets of baghdad in major cities in iraq questioning the old order that is in iraq, protesting corruption, Poor Services and a bunch of things that quite frankly when you go around the region like we do and we did together and quite regularly are the sorts of things that impact every country in the middle east. The crushing demographic social economic pressures. And quite into your question, despite multiple elections, the Current System of the governance and government is not helping the people. One of the points of the book and its not a new point, if you go back to the arab 16 or 17 years ago, the structural factors that contribute to stability are quite weak and in those 15, 16, 17 years since theyve gotten weaker. I think in a place like iraq quite clearly, this is where he joked about, we have our differences, he was in favor of the iraq war, i was not. He was against the iran nuclear deal, i was. But the one thing that we agree upon is to dig deeper and why we wanted to do this book and in the chapter governance, i talked a bit about iraq but not about the national governance. I talk about the experiment in governance that emerged under the Islamic State which is been a couple of pages. It shows you the response of governance and discontent with a government that is not responding. It plants the seeds for the instability that we saw that happened in iraq under the previous Prime Minister that groups like the Islamic State exploited. I think we should have learned by now, many years after the iraq war that the United States cannot fix the factors but its important to factor the fundamental Building Blocks for stability in our analysis. The hot takes on what we will do next in the cycle of exclamation which is quite dangerous. Isis was a new phenomenon. And there has been failures of governance of leaders in the middle east for a long time so why at this moment did a group like isis have an opportunity to rise and have such a profound impact. I think multiplicity factors in some is tied to generational transition. You have a youth bubble that is crushing in the governance and places like iraq or not responding, people will rise up in various different forms. The isis model which was shortlived and has not much legitimacy in the long run was created in response to an ineffective government. There are more tools in a place like iraq under Saddam Hussein they were a dictatorship, there was not as much open space for people to produce change. I think the theory behind the iraq war in 2003, we dont want to go back a debate that but the theory was flawed and simply if we topple regimes and eliminate or decapitate the top then somehow freedom would spread and we know that to not happen and i think wide accelerated in the Islamic State particular is that you had a multiple fight going on inside of iraq, the civil war and then a system of governance that was not responding and that is the main point, those conditions are still there, i rockies are still looking at the National Government with a caretaker government. I would challenge the notion that the Islamic State was all that new, if we go back in history theres any number of millennial movements whether the seizure of the grand mosque in 1979 or go back a century before that but i want to draw out, theres any numbers of issues on governance, beyond simply this, the monarchy versus republicans and so forth, what does this mean for the nature of american diplomacy if we are still in many ways limiting ourselves to interactions with representatives of governance who are under siege whether those governance know it or not are we missing the picture in implement seat and intelligence in the middle east. Obviously we missed the broader picture a lot and what is the remedy to that. The United States has to deal with the government veteran power, to some extent. To some extent we have to deal with them in power but for example, how much time do diplomats spend outside of the walls of the embassies versus talking and interacting on the local market as opposed interacting with government and we dont want to bring in u. S. Policy too much but one of the aftermath of benghazi putting the root of the crisis aside is the lockdown and not to get about how we diversify the portfolio. I want to follow up on that, i went to bring into the conversation, is religion more important in the middle east than it was before. It is very much so but one of the fundamental conception about the middle east in terms of religion, politics into play, we tend to assume that this has been the case all the time. But if you go back 40 or 50 years ago, what we see is the dominance of sekulow government, sekulow ideology and how the parties and groups were existent but they were much smaller, much more influential in terms of policymaking and being able to affect other groups in the society and how governments were acting in terms of Foreign Policy or domestic policy but over the course of the last 40 or 50 years, things have changed dramatically, i think the iranian revolution was a big turning point, also more importantly something that brian has mentioned, secular ideologist have failed at the middle east and throughout 1960s and 70s an early 80s. Failed as leaders. In terms of policy, the fundamental issues were political and economic and they failed to deliver on their promises on what people were expecting and this is what precipitated the rising significant of these religious groups, islamics or later on the fundamentalist groups and later on more violent extremist groups throughout the region. And 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 or 40 but more important they were able to dictate the parameters of the discussion in terms of the policy issues that were ongoing, the rise influen influence, 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 policies and proposals so to speak, one good example is what is happening in turkey today, akp have come to power in 2002 and he is a massive politician but he has been so successful in terms of changing the political system in turkey in such a way that the secular parties are unable to determine the agenda, political agenda, they are unable to discuss issues in a way outside of the parameter. And one problem here, if you think about this in terms of religious competition from the framework of religious competition, that means political actors in religious or nonreligious try to cater to the religious demand because the world wants more of that they are curious and political debates. But he has not been uniformly successful, he was successful in growing the economy certainly in the early years but he has run into trouble now andys run into political pushback. Do you see him using islam in his religious beliefs more as a Political Tool to advance his political career or do you think that this is so indigenous to the people of turkey that every politician Going Forward is going to have to encompass religious beliefs more into their way i cannot speak to his personal belief beyond my focus as a political scientist. But what i can tell you, religion is an important element of his political discourse. And to look out over time it changes in terms of the intensity that he emphasizes is religion in his political discourse, if you look at the period until 2011, 12, 13, from 2001 when the party was first established, religion did not play as significant overall, once his political prospects were receding as a result of the Corruption Scandal and later on other issues that have came up like losing an election to some degree, then he started using more religion partly because he wanted to bring in the more conservative elements especially among the kurdish voters in turkey and some of the nationalist boats. So what we see, dependent on this time, his use of religious discourse our practice in the same way prethis is really important, not just for erdogan but other politicians of the region, going back to an issue that we mentioned about tunisia, i fully agree, the dollar spent in tunisia is going to go much further compared to other parts of the world in terms of the policy. Because it is a newly democratizing context and what is underlying overall support for a lot of these religious groups, political groups as economic and political issues, once those issues are addressed first and foremost, we are most likely going to see a decrease in the support. But i think thats really the key. Are the tunisians, presume you want to followup in tunisio say. Uses phrase repeatedly, using the religion, you talk about mostly in the domestic context of turkey which is spot on to understand that leaders use religion and islam in a way and the point i wanted to make, two points, this is about power is not about faith or the right interpretation of religion and if there is such a thing and secondly to the domestic use over the gin, what i see in the middle east is a multifaceted, multidimensional competition for power in influence. The use of islam by turkey say versus saudi arabia which has his own definition and how it uses islam as a birthplace. Then the country and the main point is the first point, this is about power not about the ancient hatred and essentialist interpretation of religion, it is about leaders trying to stay in power and also trying as what they see as their adversaries with the competitors in the region through the use that the most under analyzed and interesting aspect because the spills over into media fights in all sorts of things and something that the book does not cover itself but as part of the thing that america wants a better Foreign Policy and approach then needs to understand that this is in addition to military moves in the use of terrorism and other things, a key part of the struggle and for power. One thing i want to ask of the book, how rapidly things are changing, if we look 40 years in the future and you have a complete new set of the majority of each population has not even been born yet, is religion the major influence for religion going to be the mosque or social media . And will it be legitimate theological rulers for our leaders or is it going to be populist leaders, if so how are traditional muslims scholars looking at the rise of populism and you really think the way in which people consume religion is going to rapidly change putting aside whether the United States can keep up with that . Great question, some of my research directly is trying to address the question so a couple of years ago we started a project with the foundation to try to look into how religious authority is distributed across the middle east among religious leaders, primarily Muslim Leaders and what we found, there were a couple of major findings,