Iran fought a traditional u. S. Allies. Right now, the Obama Administration is waging a limited campaign against isis. Nd iraq the iraqis have named a new under iranian influence, as most of politics are being conducted under iraq these days, and these are just a few of the things we will touch on this afternoon. We will go for about, i guess an hour and 15 an hour and 10 or 15 minutes, and then we will open up the floor to some of your questions. In the meantime, i wanted to introduce the panelists here. Immediate to my left, a senior fellow at Brookings Institution center or middle east policy, where he specializes in the least security issues. He has held several academic. Ositions heres left is my colleague at hudson where he directs the center of islam, democracy, and the future of the muslim world current trend and islamist ideology. His articles have appeared in the wall street journal, the theal of democracy, weekly standard. Athis left, a senior fellow the center for American Progress where he focuses on the middle east and north africa and is coauthor of the prosperity agenda what the world wants from america and what we need in return. That, i will ask my colleague to begin with his short introduction and we will go along like that. Thank you. Its great to be here in hudson. Thank you, hudson, the audience here, and the hispanic audience the cspan audience. My simple answer to the question which thread is the great strategic threat before i go into my thinking, that we describe what i think to be the Obama Administrations answer. Although the question has not i think it them, and is pretty clear that the Obama Administration regards isis as or sunniry threat jihad is a writ large jihad writ large. Hadism i think every other president regarded countering iran in the vital u. S. Interest, and the Obama Administration continues to play Pay Lip Service to countering iran in it isgion as a goal, but really hard to point to any initiative that the administration has taken that you could say is really designed. O counter iran in particular, we had this very significant intervention in the Syrian Civil War by iran and by that elicited almost no response. I would say basically no response from the United States. Cleark that was the first sign we had that the Obama Administration no longer as aded carrying iran vital interest. If you look across the region, in every major arena, you will see increasingly, the u. S. And iran are marching in parallel. The most recent example being the new Prime Minister and iraq was welcomed both by the United States and by iran. Supporters of the administration will say it just happens that the United States and iran have the same interests and are walking in parallel like this. I personally do not believe that to be the case. I think there is a conscious toort to accommodate her ran arrive at a Modus Vivendi to. Ccommodate iran we have this problem of jihadistan now from baghdad to thepo or damascus, and administrations attitude, i its, is much the same attitude and private is much the same as what we have seen from ambassador pickering and a fastener crocker, who wrote an oped in the washington post, which said we have to band together with all of the likeminded states from the , so we should come to an accommodation with them. We hear it from many other significant figures in the policy world. That is how i think that they see the region. Personally, i think that this puts them in a very contradictory position. Lets just say for the sake of discussion that our number one goal at the moment is to counter isis. The administrations answer to that is what we need is a change of government, a change of prime iraq to have a government that is more inclusive of sunnis so that we can begin to separate out the sunnis the sunni tribes in iraq from isis. Because a lot of what one of the reasons why isis has been me sunni arabver portions of iraq is because it is benefiting from the tacit support of the tribes. In order to do that, we need an Iraqi Government that is more accommodating to sunni desires more broadly. I agree with that analysis in general terms, but not in specifics. We will need much more than just a change of the Prime Minister. You have to change the whole structure of the Security Services in iraq, which have become increasingly shiafied over time. Believeesmen in iraq that they are being targeted by ofroxy of iran in the form the Iraqi Government. We learned how to do this during whaturge, and we learned it takes. It takes a significant u. S. Security commitment. It takes direct relationships with the tribesmen on the ground. We have to offer them security, and we have to offer them a willical path forward that allow them to believe that if they go against isis, somebody will have their back. I just do not believe that the Iraqi Government under any prime as it is currently constituted, is going to succeed in that. But then we have a second. Roblem, which is syria the president said recently, when asked whether he should have supported the syrian said that thehe criticism of his policy is horse shit, which i take to be a rather strong statement that he is not about to reverse course in syria. In syria, we need exactly the same thing he is describing and. Raq we need a political horizon for the sunnis of syria. Until they have that, there will be no way to disconnect them from the most extreme jihad hes the president s attitude suggests he is not about to do anything. We are not about to have a kind awakening added to our policy towards syria. As long as we are treating iraq and syria as separate and hermetically sealed problems, we are not going to solve the problem. It is now a unified problem from baghdad to aleppo. We have to have a whole of which meanstrategy, basically an and bar awakening anbarmovement awakening Style Movement designed to pull the sunnis away from the jihad ease jihadis. Il the president the road approaches it in that paradigm, i think our policy is destined to fail. It actuallys what is. This is what has not been admitted, and i will stop here. The policy we have at the moment is an unstated policy of distan byg jiha aligning ourselves with iran and. Ssad we are trying to put a ring around the sting and hold it in place, and i think thats going to be a very, very big failure. Thanks. Thats terrific. Theres a lot to come back to shortly. Very much, and thanks to the audience and my fellow panelists. First, i want to start by is theg i think iran greatest strategic threat, although i think one has to say that both threats are considerable. But both the Islamic State and Islamic Republic of iran are fanatic, determined enemies. Enemies to onee another, but the one thing they can agree on is that we are the enemy. So first of all, theres that. There may be something to choose between them in the short term, general terms. Second, i also agree with mike this is not the conclusion , whichadministration feels there is some kind of alliance to be formed, whether it is just de facto or even more. Anaged between us and iran some of this comes, i think, from something that has been characteristic of the administration for a very can you speak up a little bit in the microphone . Thanks. Some of this is a result of what has been characteristic of or there are several characteristics of the Administration Policy for a long time. First of all, there has been a ofvileging of the issue terrorism. The president also lists a variety of National Security we might have defense of the gulf and so on and so forth, but if you look at any one of his statements, the vast majority is devoted to the terrorism issue. His one real responsibility is to protect the United States from a 9 11 type attack or other expressions of terrorism, so the whole policy has been built for a long, long time on prioritizing terrorism and addressing it. The only problem with that policy has been that it is now a failure. The situation we face with the Islamic State is much, much worse. As Administration Officials now admit thans have to was the case with al qaeda prior to 9 11. To focus oney have that because the administrations policy, legacy stands at whole with whether they have addressed that. The other factor in the approach of the administration has been this notion that it was stated with particular clarity in the interview that the president gave to tom friedman that he looks to a future in which various parties to conflict under thet with rubric, no victor, no vanquished , that there is a kind of solution to be had on the horizon in which inevitably, there are conflicts, but the conflict can be managed if everyone comes to understand that there are loselose situations and winwin situations. He has put this in different ways, and some of this was very helpfully elaborated by mike in a piece he recently wrote. He can give you the citation. This notion that there is an in therium to be had region, and the equilibrium has to be reached by the various parties to it. That means, among other things, we have to be more accommodating to our enemies who are former enemies, and less accommodating to our friends. We have seen this expressed in a variety of ways over time, most ,ecently in the gaza war, where practically speaking, no one in the region could figure out what we were trying to do by inviting qatar and turkey in as mediators. That follows if you are looking which involves this kind of equilibrium and compromise. The last thing i want to say is the president , especially several of his advisers, talk. Bout having long view that whatever may be the bumps , there was a clear view of where they should wind up. To stick with that, but the very question you posed as the question of this is a veryests that dubious proposition, that what we can see is a tremendous mess, in which wemess find ourselves faced with even if we agree that the Islamic State is the first priority, it has grown to be an enormous problem, which the president himself is not saying that we have much to do against in the near term. What we really need to do right now is hold the line. I will finish by saying the particular way in which the obviously become dubious, even to the administration, and that has to. O with the kurds it turns out, i think, as we are seeing over the last week, that the one thing we actually can do just that the moment, if we mean to stop the Islamic State, is arm the kurds, something we have resisted for months and years and even resisted a month ago when the kurdish high representation delegation was here to request heavy arms because they anticipated having to go up against the Islamic State, which would be heavily armed. At that time, i think it was just after the fourth of july. The president and his advisers said no. We andlooks like possibly everyone else will wind up begging the kurds to take our arms. I know the french want to give them arms. The british want to give them arms. Even the germans want to give them not arms, but nonlethal military material. That, i think, shows evidently a failure in the policy but also points in Something Like a direction in the short term that one of our principal assets right now in the region is the are not friends who were not enemies, but friends that we may really need to go back to a policy in which and to thefriends extent possible punish enemies. Thanks very much. If you would kick off our first round here. Great. Its really great to be here with you. Thanks for inviting me back here for what i think will be a very interesting discussion. First, at the outset, i wanted to make the points one, i want to respond to the question that is framing our discussion. Second, offer a diagnosis of what is going on in the region, and third, maybe suggest points about where we go from here as a country. Want to highlight as a country and together because i think that is important. What we are seeing in the middle east requires a much more unified National Response than i think we have seen at least for the last decade, and our own divisions sometimes hinder our ability to deal strategically with these challenges. First, to the question of the greater threat iran or the s. Nstay sunni jihadist when lee asked me the question earlier this summer, i said i would have to punch because i possiblyof these as representing tremendous threats, and you need only go back a few years when our military and intelligence officials found evidence that some elements in iran were supporting some elements of al qaeda in iraq. There is and has been instances of what i would classify as tactical cooperation between these entities. Here, too,e measured because when we use labels or talk about iran as a monolithic entity, i think that is incorrect. I think there are many different strands within iran, and as we have seen in our most recent history, sometimes some elements inside the iranian power structure will work with us on certain issues like afghanistan. R other places i think right now today, tactical cooperation in a certain sense, to if not planned, just as a matter of happenstance and change in the region. Answerson i refuse to the question is i actually think when you ask me that question i went back to my old college textbook, a study they are doing and read aboutty the concept of evil, which actually, i think, is very important to form the moral values, architecture, how we approach these problems. I do not think we should put it in our rhetoric forefront, but i think we should think about it. When you think about what the Islamic State is doing two different groups, members of their own faith, religious minorities, especially, it is evil. When you see what the Iranian Regime has done to repress the voices of individuals, it is evil, but i am a pragmatist, too, for an policy analyst. We need to deal with these challenges with that moral framework in mind but then practically move forward, which is the second point. I hope this is useful, but we did a report recently based on some extensive on the Ground Research throughout the middle east, and the report is available, at least a few copies, for those of you watching on tv. It is on the American Progress website. Trying toe diagnosis, be more clinical, as opposed to just talking about the moral challenge because there is a moral challenge is that the middle east at least for the last three years and perhaps longer has been fragmented and fractured. An intense competition for power amongst the Key Stakeholders within the region. A factor in that, but i think our policy debates necessarily overweight how much we matter. Sometimes i think if an asteroid hit a planet 100 million light years away from here, some on the right would blame president obama for that, and some on the left would say it is because of u. S. Imperialism. Things happen in the region in part because of demographic, social, and political changes. Our actions matter. Quite a lot. Thinkthink quite now i now, what we have seen, especially because of the arab uprising, has been this , firstceted competition within countries, who was actually leading these countries, whether it is egypt, tunisia, syria is the most vicious point. Theres a third layer, which is that comesecognized deeply into play, the interest sunni fight intrasunni fight. I know that sounds like a complicated sort of way of looking at it, but i think that is where the region is at and in a sense, many in the region have aren the apple, and they influence far greater in their region and affairs, and if those those that are wealthier, less internally divided, they are playing out their battles in their own proxy wars in the region. We have been by and large in willincidental, and i argue and i think michael and others will argue against me but i think also when we were in the region with 170,000 troops, that presence matters, but the politics and shaping a power dynamics, which i think some of our diplomats have helped guide and shape, and i think we are seeing that go on right now in iraq is an important part of the struggle, trying to figure how were we intervene, use our power in a way so that it does not lead to overreach, overreaction, or, as i think we have right now, a bit of under reach in this administration, which leads to the last point of what we do here, just some starting thoughts, because i hope this is a broader conversation. First, the other challenge i had with the question was that it framed rings very much in a threatbased scenario, and i think that is important. But i also think our Strategic Thinking often goes down that path without thinking about what are the opportunities, what we actually want to see achieved, and i think this tactical Crisis Management reactive mode we have seen on policy under president obama, but quite frankly, certain aspects also under the Bush Administration when it walked away from its own freedom agenda or its own doctrine on that. Is driven by tactical Crisis Management is driven by, again, real threats, but if we are not defining what it is we want to achieve in the long run, and i think it is a long battle, we need to think about what sort of middle east we want to see 20 or 30 years from now. Moving from that point, i think we have to support and this is where i might disagree with characterizes the sense, but i think it should be you have got to support your friends first, the most reliable and capable partners. We will get into what are largely tactical questions about this dispute between obama and netanyah