Members , robbie and selfless funder of middle east programs here at the Atlantic Council john diblasio. And finally we welcome us governmentofficials , private companies and nonprofits. I did a rich substantive question and answer session following the discussion on the state. Open to everyone read this richness of the discussion will be enhanced by the absolutely superlative interviewer who will draw the kernels of wisdom out of no real today. Tom friedman needs no introduction but simply for fun i will remind you you can read toms analysis of Foreign Affairs in the New York Times and analysis for which he has rice won the pulitzer prize. Tom is the author of several books , several focus on the middle east and one of which from beirut to jerusalem was a textbook in my middle east coursework as an undergraduate area calms full bio is available and is printed out here. Now let us turn to our man of the hour doctor Nabeel Khoury, a senior fellow at the center for the middle east in addition to reading his book on our website you can read it on his own blog, middle east corner. He retired from 25 years in the Us Foreign Service in 2013 with the rank of minister counselor read no small feat. He taught at the National Defense university at Northwestern University in his last overseas posting, he served as deputy chief of mission at the us embassy in yemen. And in 2003 during the iraq war, he served as Department SpokespersonUs Central Command in baghdad. He earned his bachelor legally in Political Science on the American University beirut and his masters and phd in Political Science from the university of new york at albany. He has published articles on issues of leadership and development in the arab world , middle east journal, journal of south asia and middle Eastern Studies in International Journal of middle east studies, ill try to keep them all straight. When he was posted to yemen in 2004 i recall a conversation i had the time with a mutual friend , former ambassador to the United States dual area i held on the one that the us was lucky to be able to send him off as dcm because of his fluent arabic and his understanding of the culture with smooth the way for his work in country he corrected me. Oh no he said. The opposite is true. Arab american diplomats in the region have a much harder time because everyone in the country expects the diplomats to do favors for them and make exceptions for them and they dont get the same respect as another diplomat because they say we dont have to listen to him,he doesnt know any more than we do, is one of us. And in addition he said when your government does something the locals dont like a hold that era american diplomat responsible for not preventing. So we are your eager to hear your thoughts on being an era american diplomat in the middle east during an era of volatile and vacillating Us Middle East relationships. As a reminder the ground rules for our discussion are as follows, we are on the record. If you would like to join the twitter conversation about what we hear use thehashtag ac mideast. Tom and Nabeel Khoury come to the stage and tom, the floor is yours. Nabeel, this is a great audience and its a treat for me to be here with you, thank you for that great introduction and the Atlantic Council, okay. Buy this book. The first thing an author has to say for another author and nabeel will autograph it. Wehave known each other for a long time, resources together in class of lockout. In baghdad and in yemen. Over the years and i dont know much. Im not a connoisseur on many things but i am a connoisseur on people who know the difference between that garage and the oasis. Whoknow the real middle east. And i was always drawn to nabeel because of that. He really knows the region and its reflected here in this book and it is really for me a fascinating perspective of an american, era americans perspective on american diplomacy and his work as aus diplomat in the region and particularly in iraq. During what was a incredibly heated time so just for starters, forbecause everyone here doesnt know you as well as i do ,tell us your story , how did you get from lebanon to senior positions in the Us State Department . It wasall a mistake. First of all, thank you all for stopping in for lunch. And for some after lunch conversation and its really a very special thanks to tom for agreeing to engage me in conversation today. Something weve done several times over the years. Including stealing horses as he expressed in baghdad. He stopped by at least a couple of places where i was assigned and in baghdad, i usually take them around to meet some people, guys usually. In baghdad, i took him to meet a friend of mine, a very secular cleric shia by the name of jamal being. Secular as they come and he invited us to dinner at his place but what we didnt know was that he had the grandson of Imam Khomeini at dinner as well. So the four of us that their conversing for a good couple of hours. And tom came back and wrote inner with the mullahs. And expressed how optimistic he felt that there was such secular people. Really thought leaders and provokers in a country like iraq which back in 2003, was caught and is still hot. The book though, the occasion for this discussion today begins with a poetic verse from gibran called you have your lebanon and i have mine and he expresses in it the contrast between his vision of the beauty of lebanon and lebanon as a symbol of diversity, coexistence, harmony. And the reality back then hundred years ago or more of the audience of secularism, of sectarianism and feudalism and corruption. He might as well have written this yesterday. The session in situation in lebanon hasnot changed and in fact it has gotten worse. Because the correct political elites have not only ruined the economy, running to the ground but theyve run the country to the ground physically. The environment is in terrible shape and anyway, i think if you were alive today he would say all this time and nothing improved. The book also ends with a very short five palestinian poet, its called the post man and he talks about himself as a palestinian poet and he says hes like a post man who still has letters and messages to deliver but he no longer knows who they should go to and where. And something as a retired diplomat i identify with very much. I am still engaged. I still want to have an impact sometimes we wonder whether you can still save the world and with whom. So this is a long way of saying my coming from lebanon, i was born and raised in lebanon, give me a great feeling, not just for lebanon but for the entire region. And so whenever i work in any of these countries i deeply felt the issues and i deeply tried to bridge the differences no matter how the gap, how wide the gap and in baghdad, in 2003 it was certainly wide. So you were a bunker diplomacy, reflects this. You saw a transition. I lived through as well, and america whose presence in the middle east was deeply embedded, open and integrated with society. America that hid behind walls, basically as diplomats and embassies and i was actually there for the moment when it started. It was april 1983 and i was in my apartment, it was actually april 13 i believe that 1 06 pm and a glass and so powerful its not the transistor radio off my desk. The transistor radio kids was a radio about this day. And i also had to call it a typewriter, it was a role, you the keys that it created pressure. And i ran out of my apartment in marana and i saw smoke curling in the distance and i ran towards it and as i got closer i said it couldnt be. And i turned the corner around and there was the American Embassy blown apart in half and i remember, i dont know if it was ryan crocker who was a senior diplomat in the embassy or somebody else. What happened he said a man drove a truck up the front stairs of the embassy and blew it up in the lobby. Two things i always remember about the incidents, one is that my shock, i said you mean he killed himself mark it just seemed incredible to me that someone would commit suicide now that, but at that time how incredible it was and the other was there was no perimeter around the embassy. You could literally walk up to the front door. Ring the doorbell and there would be a marine inside the would let you in. I forward a few years later and thats why i so love the title of your book. I was in istanbul and i dont know any of you have seen the us embassy inistanbul today, us consulate. Think fort knox. Only more secure. So i was, i had gone out there interview and an old consul is to be in the heart of istanbul in the old building, open part of the marketplace and whatnot and i was interviewing a us diplomat and he said, i said look at this embassy, this is like a fortress and he said that when there was a terrorist who blew up the british consulate in istanbul, they captured some of them afterwards and interviewed them and they said we wanted to blow up the us consulate but its so secure they dont let birds fly here. And i wrote a column called where birds dont fly. Because where birds dont like people to me, commerce doesnt happen to you live transition. From the open, integrated , a bridge from america and the societies to working out of embassies that are brokers indistinguishable from military bunkers , what was that like mark what are the implications of it . Its so much of this book. My first assignment was in alexandria egypt. It was an open cultural facility, open doors. We no longer have those. We used to have them over the place and it was a nice beautiful villa. Its still there and we had just one sleepy egyptian policeman sitting in a kiosk by the door but nobody ever asked anybody, people walked in the head of the Muslim Brotherhood for alexandria that branch was supposed to be the tough branch came to my roundtable discussions at the center and he engaged a former congressman by the name of paul findley and after that, i visited him in his home and he would come by from time to time. The discussions were always intellectual, friendly. It was never any sense of hostility and the only thing was ambassador was near at the time was in a trip to alexandria and he said nabeel, i was with president mubarak and he said why is your culture in alexandria receiving these bad people. I said well, we are of course engaging in conversation and he said he want me to stop . He said keep doing what youre doing so this kind of openness this kind of atmosphere quickly changed. And it partly changes in the region, theisms shifting to radicalism instead of bothersome, arab nationalism, etc. And the turmoil that created and partly reactions, very popular reactions of still us policy which over the years never seemed to adjust or learn as person was saying. I remember because i was a spokesperson mainly with the media and thats the reason we opened an office of Media Outreach in london. I became a wellknown figure and i remember coming back from baghdad to london. In baghdad sometimes i literally had to carry guns because we would drive out of the green zone and people didnt have time to send a protective task force so my friend, colleague at the time working there work for dod and he was, he would put a gun in between us in the car and hed say this is for you dustin case. And in fact we had an iraq veteran here with us remembers al, hes an egyptian american heron so he took me to the shooting range with him to practice. And you feel the what happens is of course the policy has shifted. You feel the danger area i was at the almaty hotel when it was bombed, 27 office hit that building as i was hiding under my bed. You become a soldier and you say people dont understand the diplomats particularly american diplomats. Today its the same dangers that soldiers in the battlefield space. But they dont have the training. Theyre not soldiers that you dont have the protection usually. What are we missing out because of that. Because only diplomats, needed literally permission from security to go outdoors and have the media. Cant be spontaneous written you for coffee, comeon over. Cant come into the embassy to see you without an appointment and without turning them into Security First and you can go out in most places without having an armed guard. Yemen i used to have not only a bodyguard and driver and a hard car but also a Yemeni Security car with people with guns going behind us. I had my own personal car so i had to take my own security at times. And tell them i just want to go out. I want to meet people and dontworry, ill let you know where i am and we used to go out to the villages. I tell some stories about that and i used too, i had a british friend, a diplomat and i would go in her car because their cars were not stopped when you exited whether the american war cars were the story here is that there is Something Special if you want about american diplomats. Because the french and the brits and the chinese, they certainly dont take the kinds of precautions that we do and theyre not tax and surrounded and birds but our embassies are. So one has to add, partly it is the region but partly its something we do, partly its the image weproject. And its usually an image of superiority and arrogance that rubs people the wrong way that they feel lets go after the americanswhile the russians, why not the chinese, why not the french. So in reading the iraq section , i noticed this certain melancholy is the word, attention between so many things that went wrong. Something that went right but you ended on a note of saying the french revolution oscillated between these period and more democratic ones and do you think thats what were seeing . We are seeing an arab world in different ways andin different places, saudi arabia , tony has got a version of it, struggling to find its way towards perhaps pluralism. I used that line when i was a spokesperson in baghdad because i would face their angry journalists and personally, i didnt think the in invasion of iraq was a good idea but i did my job really but as a spokesperson, and i was lucky, i never went with official talking points. And i hear somebody wants to put that. I engaged them as a person, as a human being. I listened and i responded, the academic and me allowed me to go into broader areas. Not just say this is our policy for, and so to me as an era, the era in me detests the fact that most of the arab world is ruled by dictators. And they are having me identifies with the youth today that we see in the streets in beirut and in baghdad. What to get rid of this oppressive structure. But so i want to get rid of that. Identify with that at the same time i understand that american soldiers in baghdad rubbed arabs the wrong way all over the region from baghdad to morocco. Theres something about foreign groups marching into an arab capital. Thats is, you react viscerally toit. So to look on the Positive Side, as a spokesperson what could i say . We are villains . Number what i would say is think of it in the long term. The arab world needs to rebel against dictators like that. Many people friends in morocco would tell me that they didnt want to demonstrate against the us because part of them said good riddance saddam was gone. As i said lets think of revolutions, think of the french revolution goes to a very ugly period. And the french case it was the french. It wasnt the us coming on horseback. So whether its a force from outside work from inside getting rid of a bad dictator, ruler like that. It has to be a good thing in the long term. The short term youre going to go through hell probably. Whats the difference between the arab spring of 2010 and 2011 . And the kind of manifestations we are seeing in beirut and in baghdad right now because theyre quite similar and they seem to be more i would say, i felt like arab spring was more about get rid of the tyrants whoever that was or storm and area with this as real content, this is about what kind of pluralistic Secular Society we want to have. Isthat a life especially or is that me reading too much into it . I think tunisia was a cakewalk compared to syria, lebanon, iraq. Because of many regions. And partly they didnt have the same kind of diversity. But what you have in places like lebanon, we cant talk about syria because of the devastation that has been reached upon the Syrian People. But in places like lebanon and iraq, you have for the first time a genuine peoples revolt. This is not about nasser, this is not aboutisrael, not about the us. This is about eagle linking hands across religious sects. So you find them, sunni, shiite, christian. In fact the christians are more divided else right now in lebanon. With a genuine feeling that this corrupt elite, political elite, they want the whole thing changed. So the Positive Side of this is that this is genuinely felt across the spectrum. The negative side of it is lebanon doesnt have a single dictator like saddam did you just topple them and start fresh. We had 12 mafias their well armed militias area and you cant, at 1180 meeting all of them, get rid of all of them, how do you dothat . You put them on the love boat and ship them off to cyprus or somebody. And the problem is the various interests, political interests get in the middle. And settle what should be, could be a very serious, very thorough reform plan. That if somebody is wise enough and in the leadership in lebanon today, they could adopt a serious standard instead of wrangling the eye care and this ministry and that ministry, thatswhat theyre arguing about. I told friends of mine and government i said forget about the person, you could put a jackass in the position of prime minister. Thats not important rid of the important thing is for people with a serious land. This is how you changethe system. From carrying corrupt and dualistic. Do a proper democratic republic. That our plan. We heard you, thats our plan and were going to start implementing it tomorrow. Unfortunately theres there too wrapped up in frankly each side benefits. Materially from the system as is and they dont want to get rid of their advantages that i have read in bag