Peter Bergen:

Thank you. I come here as a sort of soi-disant expert on Al-Qaeda, and so that will be the focus of my presentation. Basically, how have we done on the War on Terrorism since 9/11? I would argue it has gone actually rather well in many ways. Al-Qaeda, as you know, means "the base" in Arabic. They lost their base in Afghanistan; that cannot be underestimated. After all, that base was essentially – we used to talk about state-sponsored terrorism; it was a country that was really almost run by Osama and Al-Qaeda. So it was a country actually run by terrorists with a dozen training camps at any given time. Thousands of people went through those training camps – recent estimates suggest 70,000-100,000. Those may be inflated, but those were the estimates that were in the recent congressional report on 9/11. But even assuming the low number of 70,000 and subtracting from that the 3,000 or 4,000 Al-Qaeda members that have been arrested around the world since 9/11, that's still an awful lot of people who may be interested in damaging Western interests and doing terrorism in places around the world.

But losing the base in Afghanistan was vital in the War on Terrorism. I think if you do some back-of-the-envelope calculations, albeit rather macabre ones, you add up all the number of people that Al-Qaeda has killed since 9/11, the number might be 300 or 400 people. Obviously, each of those deaths is an individual tragedy, but that's 300 or 400 people in the last two years, as opposed to 3,000 in one hour. Added to that, from a sort of American realist foreign policy perspective, the number of Americans killed by Al-Qaeda since 9/11 probably doesn't really clear more than a dozen or so. In any given year, 79 people die of lightning strikes in the United States. Obviously, we're not too concerned about lightning. If indeed this trend continued, it would be very easy to make an argument that Al-Qaeda was sort of more or less out of business.

However, obviously that's not the case. This weekend we saw an audiotape from Osama bin Laden, which I thought was interesting for several reasons. First of all, obviously it focused on Iraq, almost to the exclusion of any other issues. Secondly, the audiotape mentioned the federal budget deficit, $450 billion – bin Laden revealing for the first time that he's a deficit hawk. That deficit number came out on July 15 of this year. He also mentioned Mahmoud Abbas, who as you know stepped down as prime minister at the beginning of September. So that means this audiotape was made sometime between July and September, or even as late as early September of this year.

Obviously, the fact that bin Laden remains alive is a matter of considerable importance. If indeed bin Laden magically was disappeared off the face of the planet, that would be, I think, a significant blow to Al-Qaeda, at least in the short to medium term. Every time he releases one of these audiotapes, Al-Qaeda continues its sort of virtual existence.

I sort of call Al-Qaeda post-9/11 "Al-Qaeda 2.0," for a number of reasons. Obviously, it has a more virtual existence. It continues on the Internet. We also saw this weekend the release of another videotape from one of the Saudi bombers on May 12, one of the tapes they make before they commit suicide in these operations. So Al-Qaeda has morphed into a much more virtual organization than it was before 9/11. That might be making a virtue of necessity, but it's certainly a fact.

I think the other development which is important is that Al-Qaeda the organization took a tremendous hit during the Afghan War, but Al-Qaeda, “the organization” has sort of morphed into Al-Qaeda, “the ideology.” If you think about bin Laden's statements since 9/11, these are the most widely disseminated political statements in history, other than perhaps Mao's Little Red Book. The statements of "bin Ladenism," if you will, or "Al-Qaedism," the philosophy of bin Laden, if you want to call it that, now receives a very wide dissemination.

The question is how many people sign onto it.

Many of you may be aware of the Pew polls in the Muslim world, which one of the questions was, "In whom do you have more confidence, Osama bin Laden or President Bush?" In countries like Indonesia, Morocco, Turkey and Jordan, all of which are traditionally American allies, there were overwhelming numbers in favor of Osama bin Laden. Does that translate into actual terrorism, which after all is my concern? Obviously, dislike of American policies and even perhaps some kind of admiration for bin Laden's political ideas does not necessarily mean terrorism. However, certainly it has continued, despite the relatively low number of Al-Qaeda victims since 9/11.

There have been, I think, significant impacts. We have seen, particularly in Saudi Arabia on May 12, the attacks in Saudi Arabia – I think that changes quite a lot. When I talk to people investigating 9/11, before those attacks they used words like "despicable" and "obstructionist" to describe Saudi efforts in the investigation into 9/11. Obviously, with May 12, that's changed. On the narrow question of, "Have the Saudis been more cooperative in the actual investigation of 9/11?" – when I talk to people in counter-terrorism they say they've certainly been cracking down on Al-Qaeda in a very intense manner in the Kingdom since May 12. Has that translated into more help on the 9/11 investigation? That remains to be seen. It is passing strange that of the 15 hijackers, that none of them have had mentors or co-conspirators who, at least publicly, have been acknowledged by the Saudis, despite the fact that other countries like Germany have actually tried people since 9/11 for their part in the plot.

Going on to Iraq, clearly if the locus of Al-Qaeda activity and also sort of ideological – bin Laden's calls for jihad in Iraq – we've had several of them in the past year, the one most recently on the weekend. We've also heard from Ayman Al-Zawahiri, the number two, on the same subject. Clearly, I don't see there's a huge universe of people willing to die to bring back Saddam Hussein in a suicide attack. That doesn't really strike me – Ken Pollack is obviously much more expert in this area – but it doesn't seem to me the Saddam loyalists are going to commit suicide in these kinds of attacks. The attacks on the Jordanian Embassy, the attack on the UN building and other suicide attacks, appear to me to be – at least some of them must surely be – generated by Al-Qaeda.

If you look at what happened in Saudi Arabia after May 12, there's a push and a pull into Iraq. There's a push because the Saudis have actually cracked down on members of Al-Qaeda quite strongly. There's a pull obviously because here in Iraq, the crusaders are back and this jihad is so much easier to justify than flying passenger jets into buildings and killing civilians. Here an army appears to be occupying or is occupying a Muslim country, and the legal basis of that occupation is not particularly certain. These are armed soldiers; these are not civilians. So from a sort of jihadist perspective, this is a very easy thing to justify. When I talk to people who are familiar, either on the US side or on the jihadist side – on the US side they say that the jihadists are coming over the borders. This is sort of a relatively recent phenomenon. On the jihadist side, they say there are reports of 3,000 Saudis who are apparently missing or have been reported missing by their families, Saudi men – with the implication that 3,000 Saudis have gone over into Iraq to fight there.

In terms of looking forward into the future a little bit, I think that the threat from Al-Qaeda – the problem with Al-Qaeda as a general proposition is that their perspective is of course very long. The Mongolian invasion of Iraq in 1258 is a reasonably recent phenomenon for bin Laden; he refers to us as “crusaders.” The seventh-century life of the Prophet Muhammad is very much alive for bin Laden. Obviously, that's a very different kind of time scale than we have. Patience is obviously a hallmark of the organization. It took them five years to plan 9/11. It took them five years to plan the US embassy attacks. It took them two years to plan the USS. Cole attack. So, the fact that we're two years from 9/11 without a sort of significant riposte from Al-Qaeda doesn't necessarily mean anything – which seems contradictory from my previous point that they have been disrupted. I think they have been disrupted. They will remain a force to be contended with.

I think one of the more major wildcards remains weapons of mass destruction. We saw in December in London and also in Spain and Paris and Italy, a series of arrests. All the people who were arrested had one thing in common – they seemed to have an unhealthy preoccupation with chemical weapons attacks. Some of them were manufacturing ricin, which is an effective assassination tool. Other people arrested had chemical weapons suits. So I think it's fair to predict that they will attempt some kind of chemical weapons attack. Where that will be, who knows. It is, I think, also fair to assume that Iraq will become the center of their operations.

Robert Malley:

Good afternoon, and thank you for having me here.

I was asked to talk about what's happening on the Israeli-Palestinian front. I think I could spend the rest of the 20 minutes, if not more, going through the ups and downs – mainly the downs – of the last few months. We could talk for a long time about the wall and how it may soon become the first wall in history that actually prevents separation, as we move unfortunately toward the end of the viability of the two-state solution if we continue this way. We could talk for a long time about the suicide bombings and the other forms of violence that have taken the lives now of Americans, reminding us once again that what happens there has direct impact on our lives here. We could talk about the shortcomings, the flaws, the impasse of the roadmap, about how perhaps Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas didn't do enough on the security side, how Prime Minister Ariel Sharon may have done too much on the military side, how the United States sort of stood on the sidelines, and how Yasir Arafat may have stood in the way.

As I said, we could go on for a long time, and in some way this would be a refrain that we've heard now for many years about why the peace process in different ways hasn't advanced as we expected it to, as we wanted it to, from 1993 on. I'd remark that this month we're celebrating, if that's the word, ten years of the Oslo Accord.

But I think the fact is that if we've come to this point that all this time we're rehashing the same analysis about what's gone wrong and who hasn't done enough and who's done too much, at some time it may be better for us to stop questioning the motivations of the parties and the shortcomings or failures of the parties and try to question the failures and shortcomings of the process itself – a process that was initiated at Oslo and that's continued now in its latest diplomatic iteration, the roadmap, which whether it's dead or not, whether it's revived or not, will always be revived or will come back in the same shape, in the same format, as the Oslo agreements. My own view is that for all the good that's happened since 1993, the time is long past overdue for the United States and for the rest of the international community to think of another way forward. That may sound unrealistic, but in my view it's much more realistic – in fact, the only realistic, the only pragmatic and the only possibly successful way of moving forward.

So I want to quickly review what I consider the three deficits of the peace process up to now and propose an alternative and try to assess what chances it has of being implemented.

The first deficit is a deficit of vision. This has been said by many, certainly not by me alone, that the Oslo process never put forward a vision of what the endgame was going to be. That's important, not simply because people like to know where they're going, but because if you don't know where you're going, then each one takes their steps having in mind "How do I maximize my position at the end of the day unilaterally?" rather than "How do we get together to our common goal?" So both sides hold on to [their] assets.

It's absolutely no surprise that on the Israeli side they wanted to hold on to territory. Prime Minister Barak made it absolutely clear – why should we give up the territory before we know at the end of the day the Palestinians are going to say we want to have 4 million refugees back? The Palestinians wanted to hold on to at least the capacity to threaten Israel with some means – because they had no other means, frankly, they thought then – before they knew whether at the end of the day they would get an agreement that met their basic aspirations. So, yes indeed, they did not dismantle, they did not take action – either from '93 to 2000 or certainly since the beginning of the Intifada – against groups such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad and more recently the Al-Aqsa Brigades.

So, what happens is that throughout this period the parties were asked to do things that they did simply to appease the US rather than because they believed it was promoting their own goals. Each step became the focal point for the next dispute. We saw this over and over again, whether it's over Palestinian decisions vis-à-vis Hamas, whether it's over the release the prisoners. Each issue became much more important than what it actually represented, because it was viewed in the context of a continuing and undetermined struggle about what the endgame would be.

The second deficit I would call a deficit of trust and certainly a deficit in trust in the implementation of the agreements. Even when agreements were reached, neither side believed the other one was going to implement it. The world often stood by, and understandably so, and didn't do anything. Why would they invest the considerable energy of the international community, the United States, for the sake of an interim agreement, a few percentage points here or there? How many times did I hear it within the team – and I'm sure that I voiced that same opinion – why should we go to the mat for a small issue – what seemed like a small issue – if we could invest more profitably in the big picture, which never came as it turned out. Why should we alienate one or the other parties? So there was no mechanism to ensure implementation, no mechanism to ensure trust.

The third deficit is a deficit of legitimacy. The process that was undertaken to get Israelis and Palestinians to agree to a final status agreement relied very much on two leaderships – Israeli and Palestinian – that for political and historical reasons were not leaderships that were capable of taking the decisive step. On the Palestinian side, I think it has a lot to do with the fact that we're talking about a non-state entity in which militant groups have a political weight that is far disproportionate to their actual representation, political representation among the Palestinian public. On the Israeli side, it has a lot to do with the electoral system, with the weight that settlers have and that other radical far-right groups have. So neither side – again, related to the fact that there's no vision and no trust – neither side is prepared to take on constituents that have a disproportionate weight in the political system, because even though it's very easy to mobilize opposition to an agreement, it's very difficult to mobilize support when you don't know where you're going and you don't know what the payback is going to be. So in each case, lack of vision, lack of trust, lack of legitimacy – you have self-reinforcing processes that in my view have led to the collapse.

I said I think there's a way to remedy these three deficits. Let me quickly spell out what I think are the three steps that would have to be taken, in particular by the United States but together with a wide coalition.

The first is that the United States should show leadership, bring together other members of the international community, and put together the substance of a final status deal that would respond to the core aspirations of both sides. This wouldn't be imposing a solution. One of the arguments I hear often when I make this suggestion, people say you can't impose a solution on either side. This isn't imposing. First of all, it's a solution that's now coming from Israelis and Palestinians. David mentioned Track II exercises: regardless whether I or anyone else is involved, what's remarkable is how similar they are – Ami Ayalon-Sari Nusseibeh, the Geneva Accords – every single agreement you look at draws from the kinds of things that were discussed in Taba, that President Clinton put on the table on December 23, 2000. And for a simple reason – these proposals represent the only balance between the interests of the parties across issues and within issues that could form a sustainable peace. It's noteworthy that nobody who's attacked the Geneva Accords has actually come up with an alternative. They attack it on grounds of legitimacy. They attack it on grounds of treason, but nobody says, “This is actually a better agreement that we think both sides could live with.” It's because we know, as people have said, that we broke the genetic code of the conflict throughout the period that started at Camp David and afterwards. So, this would not be an imposition. This would actually be picking up what's already been decided but hasn't been able to be translated politically.

Once you put that solution on the ground – and we could go over what the components would be – as part of that, the international community should say, once this has been agreed, we will have an international trusteeship over the Palestinian territory. That would remedy the deficit in trust. If you have a trusteeship, if you have international troops, if you have a presence, you ensure implementation of the agreement. And perhaps most importantly today, and I think it's very important for Palestinians and Arabs to understand this – Israel has zero confidence in the capacity of the current Palestinian leadership – rightly or wrongly – to maintain security and to live up to its agreement. It has zero confidence in the capacity of the Palestinian leadership to actually govern a Palestinian state. So for a period of years, this international trusteeship would actually govern Palestinian territory – not 50% of it, not 60% of it, but the whole of the territory that under the substantive agreement that I just mentioned would fall under Palestinian sovereignty. So it's different from some of the other trusteeship ideas that one's heard, but it comes very much from the same desire: to ensure implementation and therefore to have a third party be the bridge of trust and to guarantee that Israel would trust that the partner it has on the other side is actually a partner it could rely on.

Third, to deal with the deficit of legitimacy, I've come to the conclusion after these ten years that the hope that Palestinian leaders and Israeli leaders, however progressive, however peace-minded – and we had quite a good pairing between 1999 and 2001 – won't be able on their own to reach an agreement, precisely for the reasons I said earlier. They don't have the political capacity right now to do so. So even though you have somewhere between 50 and 80% of Palestinians, 50 and 80% of Israelis, who are prepared – every poll has indicated – are prepared to embrace the kind of solutions that were mapped out in Taba and now in the Geneva Accords, that political majority can't be translated into political decision-making.

So, under the concept that I'm putting forward, the international community would not ask Sharon, Arafat, or whoever the leaders may be, to accept this plan but ask them to submit it to their own people for popular referendum – up or down, accept it or reject it. We're not imposing it: we're asking the people to accept it or reject it. On what grounds could you possibly say no to that simple request? Therefore, you're putting the decision-making – taking it out of the hands of an arena where the peace constituencies are actually at a disadvantage, and putting them in two constituencies in which the balance of forces actually reflects the real balance of forces on the ground.

I'm convinced that this is actually a realistic outcome, and I think the Geneva Accords, at least for me – which is an important event because of what it symbolizes, but it also buttresses the point I'm trying to make, which is we know the solution, we know there's no other way there. The substance is no longer the issue: it's the mechanics of getting there. The mechanics of getting there, one of the obstacles obviously is in this town. It's not simply a matter of this Administration, it's a matter of almost any administration – could it have the political will to do this?

This is an argument that I think has to be won day by day by trying to get as many constituencies – Jews, Arabs, and others – talking about why the US interest is involved in this and why if we continue to let things go the way they're going. Our national interest is at stake, not to mention obviously the lives of Israelis and Palestinians and others in the region. The United States has expended extraordinary resources – military, political, financial – to try to get the peace process going, to try to keep stability in the Middle East. Isn't it time for it to expend its resources for the sake of an enterprise that's worth the price?

I think this would be one that would not only enhance but dramatically change America's posture in the region. I'm sure that in the panels this morning you heard about that. It would isolate militant forces. It would mute anti-Americanism, and it would reassert the United States' position not only as a continued vital defender of Israel's interests but as a party that is also sensitive to Arab concerns. I think that the kind of trusteeship that would be set up in Palestine would be very different from what we're seeing in Iraq, where what's happening there is viewed as the beginning of an occupation. This would be viewed as the end of one.

I don't carry great hopes that this Administration is going to embrace this. I think we're actually moving in the other direction. But I think the public debate right now – and it's very important that organizations like this engage in that debate – should narrow down to two questions. Is the current process working? And is one along the lines of what I suggested have a greater chance of success?

I'm convinced that the answer to the former one is "no," and there's evidence that comes out every day as to that. I'm also convinced that the answer to the other one is at least a possible "yes." If that's the case, then broad pressure should build, not only in the United States but in the international community – and the Arab World in particular, which needs to send a signal to Israel that if such a solution were implemented, it would be prepared to normalize its relations with Israel and actually bring Israel into its own regional concerns.

So far, the War on Terrorism has had the impact – it may have had some positive developments, but I think one of its major negative impacts is that it's brought together all kinds of militants. The kinds of jihadists – I don't particularly like the word, but jihadists, terrorists – but also political violence and jihadist terrorism have come together in the region, and in particular in Palestine. When you have members of Fatah, members of Hamas and [Islamic] Jihad making common cause, you know that there's something going that's wrong, and that's because we have not been able to divorce the political from the rest. So people who are fighting Israel because they want to create a two-state solution are joining hands with those who are fighting Israel because they want to annihilate it.

What needs to be done now – and I do think that a solution along the lines I put forward – and even just putting it forward would have that effect – is to start divorcing, isolating. What I would call the nihilistic terrorists from those who actually have a positive agenda and would be prepared to lay down their arms if only they had the kind of future they aspire to.

Thank you.

Kenneth Pollack:

Good afternoon. David and I were talking before, and he and I agreed that since no one else was going to talk about it, I ought to talk about Iraq and Iran. Loathe the opportunity to talk about Iraq, but I can't get away from it. Glad to have the opportunity to talk a little bit about Iran, because in many ways it's a much more interesting set of problems. So let me start with Iraq and come to Iran in a little bit.

Let me start with a truism on Iraq, a cliché – pardon me for it. Iraq is not as bad as the media is making it out to be, and it is not as good as the Administration is making it out to be. As best I can tell – and I also need to start with the caveat that I don't think any of us has a truly good, objective perspective on everything that is going on inside of Iraq, because it is an extraordinarily complicated picture that varies from province to province, from town to town, from neighborhood to neighborhood, but as best I can tell, there are both good and very positive things that are going on, positive things which in many ways are getting better and better, and bad, negative things which in many ways, surprisingly, are getting worse and worse. In fact, to me it's one of the most interesting things about Iraq right now, is that you simultaneously have good things getting better and bad things getting worse.

What that sets up, of course, is the issue that Iraq's future is very much undecided at this moment.

The thrust of my remarks on Iraq is that perhaps for the first time ever, the United States really has the opportunity to control an Arab state's future. It is a position we have never found ourselves in before. For better or worse, it means that we are going to have through our own policy actions an enormous impact on the future of the Middle East, an impact that we've never had before – and we have always been one of the most important powers in the Middle East, ever since the end of the Second World War.

I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time talking about the good and the bad in Iraq, but I'll give a few examples, because I think they are worthwhile.

Let me start with the good. First, there is a lot of good going on at the local level. A few weeks ago I was in Europe. I spent a week with the US Army. In a way that only the US Army can do, they had a conference for 3,000 people. It was very well attended and there were a lot of soldiers who were there from Iraq. They came for a week for this conference and were going to head back. What I heard constantly from them were stories about all kinds of very positive local successes.

God bless the US military: for about the first six weeks after the fall of Baghdad, the US military kind of sat on its hands. The soldiers and Marines kind of sat on their hands because they assumed that the White House and the Washington bureaucracy had taken care of postwar reconstruction and were going to give them orders and were going to say to them, you guys do this and you guys do that. So like good soldiers and marines, they sat and waited for those orders to come. But after about six weeks, they realized there weren't going to be any orders coming.

Again, like good soldiers and marines, they realized – all right, if nobody's going to tell us what to do, we better do it for ourselves. They began getting out there and working with local populations and getting into towns and doing things like trying to rebuild schools and turn the power back on and purify the water to the extent they could, and setting up medical clinics and setting up local councils. There is one story after another like this.

Unfortunately, the press has been very slow to report it. You've seen it occasionally. There were wonderful pieces about David Petraeus and the stuff that his 101st Airborne Division have done up in the north – only an example of the kind of things that are going on all across Iraq. These are very positive developments and they're exactly the kind of things that need to happen, because they're the kind of things that affect people's lives on an immediate basis. They're also the right way to think about political redevelopment in Iraq, because if there is going to be some kind of a truly pluralist system, it has to start from the ground up. It can't be imposed from the top down.

Another very positive development in Iraq: there has been no civil war. I was really kind of surprised when about a month ago, after Bakr Al-Hakim's assassination, a number of my colleagues immediately jumped into the fray and started screaming, this is the start of civil war in Iraq, this is when the Shi'a and the Kurds and the Sunnis start going after each other, this is when the situation entirely comes apart. This, of course, was one of the great fears before the war – that we were going to have civil war inside of Iraq. It is a realistic concern, but the simple fact is, we haven't had a civil war. So far, the Shi'a and the Kurds and the majority of the Sunnis have been waiting. They have been very patient. By and large what we have found is they seem to recognize that trying to take matters into their own hands is not the right solution for them, that the best possible outcome is – whether they like the Americans or not – to help to make sure that the American reconstruction effort succeeds. At least for the moment, they continue to be patient and to hope that we are going to get our act together and make all of this work, and that's also a very positive development.

I will say to you that before the war, my expectation was that this is what would happen. I was hoping we'd have a honeymoon period, when – the way I would describe it – the Iraqi people would give us the opportunity to prove that we were both willing to help them rebuild their country and have the know-how, the knowledge, the ability to do it. But I didn't know how long that honeymoon period was going to last. So far it's lasted six months, and I don't know if before the war I would have said we have six months. So that's also a very positive development.

There have also been some very negative developments, and again, I'm just going to give you a few examples. Many of these are being reported in the press so you're probably a lot more familiar with them, but the problems I see that I'm going to talk about are some that you don't see as much in the press as you should.

One of the biggest problems is that we're not knitting together our various efforts. There's a lot of good things going on, and there is very little putting all of the pieces together to build something that is more than simply the sum of the parts. This has real ramifications, because a lot of what our military and what other civilians and NGOs are doing out there in the provinces and neighborhoods of Iraq is that they are jerry-rigging systems. They are coming up with ad hoc solutions to find ways to get fresh water and electricity to people, but they're not able to rebuild the power plant itself: they just come up with the baling wire and chewing-gum solution that keeps it going for a period of weeks or months. The problem is, unless you've got some kind of a larger effort that is coordinating things and directing resources and recognizing needs and pulling all this stuff together, all of this can start to come back apart in a matter of time.

Another problem out there is that the Sunnis are increasingly alienated. Yes, it is true, the Shi'a are the overwhelming majority of Iraq, and if you add the Shi'a and the Kurds, who seem very willing to cooperate both together and with the United States, you've got probably about 80% of Iraq's population. But the Sunnis remain an important element of Iraqi society. Right now, as I said, the majority of Sunnis don't seem to be opposed to the reconstruction effort.

There is a small group that is. They are painfully apparent, because they are the ones who are killing our troops. They are former Saddam loyalists. They are tribesmen. They don't necessarily represent the bulk of the Sunni population – but the simple problem is that no one does.

The vast majority of the Sunni leadership was co-opted by the regime. If you look at the Sunni population, there's probably about 5 million people, and you take out all the women, take out all the children, take out all the people who were so old they could no longer contribute, and you get a much smaller pool of kind of prime-of-life men. If you start looking at that and start then taking out of that everyone who served in the Republican Guard and the Special Republican Guard and Mukhabarat and Al-Amn Al-'Amm and Al-Amn Al-Khass and every one of the other security forces, you're not left with a whole lot. Just about every one of the Sunni elites, the people who you'd look to for leadership, were co-opted by the regime. Because of our rather draconian approach to de-Ba’thification, we have effectively alienated all of the available Sunni leadership. Now inevitably, new leaders will emerge, but the problem is, they haven't yet. Right now there are a lot of Sunnis who are feeling very alienated from this process, because they feel like the Sunnis who are representing them don't represent them, and they feel like they don't really know who to look to represent them. They don't really want their tribal leaders to represent them. They don't really want necessarily former Ba’thists, but they don't have anyone else. Because we are excluding these people, they have no voice. That's also a big potential problem out there.

As I said, there are lots more examples of positive developments, lots more examples of negative developments. I'm not going to go into them.

Instead, what I want to say is that when you start looking across the spectrum of both negative and positive developments happening simultaneously – and as I said before, the strange paradox of good things getting better while bad things get worse – I think that what you see is that Iraq can go in almost any direction. What is going to determine what direction Iraq goes in is most likely going to be what direction the United States takes them in. It is really down to us to decide which way Iraq is going to go.

I can imagine a best-case scenario for Iraq, a scenario where in five or ten years Iraq starts to develop like Poland. They put together a pluralist system. They get the oil back on line. It is able to pay for lots of reconstruction. They use that money to develop alternative economies. There are all kinds of wonderful resources within the Iraqi countryside and the Iraqi people. You could build quite a remarkable country inside Iraq. All of those things are open.

You can see all of the things going on and these small successes that could take you to that best-case scenario, but it will mean that the United States is going to have to do the right thing. It means we are going to have to bring security to the entire country. It means we're going to have to have a smoother functioning system for the occupation of Iraq, that we're going to have to coordinate our efforts, that we're going to have to find better ways to bring Iraqis into the process and to give them a feeling like A) they have a stake in the system and B) (the one that gets left unsaid) they know where we're taking them, which is another huge problem that we have. I'm not certain that we really know what our plan is for the reconstruction of Iraq, but I'm positive that the Iraqis don't know what our plan for the reconstruction of Iraq is. That makes a lot of them very anxious.

What I have heard from a whole variety of Iraqis is things like, my wife and my daughters can't leave my house tonight because it's simply too dangerous. They won't be able to leave the house tomorrow night. My hope is that at some point in the future, they will be able to. If you would tell me when you think they will be able to leave the house, that would be a great step forward for me, because then I could say, I only have to wait three more weeks or I only have to wait six more weeks. I won't hold you to the date, but just give me some expectation.

Tell me how you're going to do this. Tell me what you're going to do with my country, so that I can adjust my life accordingly. Don't just leave me in the dark, literally and figuratively, and when things get better you'll let me know, or when I can let my wife and children out of the house, you'll come and let me know. Give me some sense of where you're taking my country.

I could also imagine an absolute worst-case scenario for Iraq. I can imagine a scenario where Iraq does slide into civil war and chaos, and where Iraq becomes not Poland but Lebanon of the 1970s and 1980s, with tremendous intersectarian and ethnic clashes. I can also imagine a third scenario, one where it's not necessarily Lebanon, it's not necessarily Poland – maybe it looks more like Bosnia. Bosnia today is nobody's idea of a success story, but it is certainly better off than it was eight or nine years ago. It's kind of a muddle-through option.

I'll say that with regard to the worst-case and the muddle-through, for me – again, I can come with lots of scenarios that take you to either one of those cases – I think the most important one is whether or not the United States is willing to stick it out, and whether the US is willing to stay and make the effort. If we are, I think that the worst we're likely to get – and again, I can come up with scenarios that still get you to the worst case – but I think that if the United States is willing to stick it out, to make the effort and to stay there, the worst we'll get is Bosnia. As long as we're willing to keep 100,000 or more troops in Iraq, as long as we're willing to keep pumping several billion dollars a year into the Iraqi economy, we can keep the place afloat. We can keep it from falling into chaos. That's not terrible. As I said, it's certainly better than what it was, and it's certainly better than the alternative.

But the real problem is if we walk away. If we walk away from the problem of Iraq, it will slide very quickly into chaos. Walking away doesn't have to mean just we pick up our troops and go home tomorrow. Walking away could mean that we take this next year, which strangely, coincidentally, just happens to be the year before a US presidential election – but we take that year and we keep our troops there, and we pump $20 billion into the Iraqi economy – remember, this is an economy that had a GDP of $18 billion the year before the war. So you pump $20 billion into it and they're going to be fat and happy, at least for that year. But after that year, we could decide that we're going to turn it over to one group or one particular person and say, "Uruguay, run the country: call us if you need us." Under those circumstances, I think you will see a quick slide into chaos.

There's another important issue out there that I think will determine a lot of this question between the worst and muddle-through option. I think that is also hinging on the willingness of the United States to stick it out, and that is the question of the Shi'a. I said before that one of the biggest positives we've seen so far is that there has been no civil war inside of Iraq, that the Shi'a have basically stayed patient and been willing to try to cooperate with us to allow the reconstruction effort to succeed. One of the biggest question marks out there is how long that will obtain, and at what point in time will the Shi'a in particular decide that the United States can no longer take care of their needs for them, that we're never going to make it happen, and that therefore they need to take matters into their own hands. The moment that point comes, the moment that the Shi'a decide that they have to take matters into their own hands, all of a sudden we're going to have a tremendous problem. That could be the thing that sets us on that path to the worst-case scenario.

There are any numbers of ways that you can get there as well, but let me come back to this issue of security, because I think that it is critical. We've seen the assassination of Bakr Al-Hakim. We've seen the assassination of Al-Khoei. We've seen other deaths among Shi'a leadership. Again, so far they've been very calm, they've handled things very well. You have people screaming, demanding blood in the aftermath of each assassination, and nothing has really come of it. But it's unclear how long that will keep going on. And if Shi'a leaders continue to die, continue to be assassinated, I think you will increasingly see people saying, not joining up with Muqtada Al-Sadr and saying the Americans are evil, we've got to get rid of them, but rather moderate Shi'a leaders saying the Americans just can't do the job. They just can't protect us. They can't get the lights on, they can't get the water running, and they can't protect our leaders. If that's the case, we have to do it. As I said, that is the road to disaster in Iraq.

Final point on Iraq before I say just a few words about Iran: while you can say what you like about why we got into this war, [while] you can decide [whether] it was worth getting into or not worth getting into, I really think that that is irrelevant right now. It is not germane to the question of whether or not the United States remains in Iraq, because I think what we have – whether we got in for good reasons or bad – at the very least we have a tiger by the tail.

We cannot afford to allow Iraq to fail. Because if my worst-case scenario occurs, if we get the Lebanon of the 1970s and 1980s, it will destabilize the entire Middle East. Just as Lebanon destabilized Syria and Israel and to a lesser extent Jordan, just as Afghanistan destabilized Pakistan and eastern Iran and Central Asia, just as every failed state destabilizes all of its neighbors and spreads with ripple effects beyond them, so too will Iraq destabilize the entire Persian Gulf region and spread its instability throughout the region.

If it fails in Iraq, what's more, this whole experiment, this whole noble idea of helping the Arab World transform itself will go out the window, because everyone who opposes democratization and free-market economics will be able to point to Iraq and say, the Americans tried it there, they spent “x” billion dollars trying to make it work in Iraq, and it failed. Therefore, it can't possibly work here.

On the other hand, if it succeeds, well, then you've actually got something to work with. Because if it does succeed in Iraq, then for the first time we will be able to show the Arab World what a functional Arab pluralist society might look like.

Now, let me move quickly to Iran. I'm just going to say a few things about it, because my time has become very short. The first thing about Iran is we need to recognize the complexities of the Iranian situation as well. Iran is the farthest thing from black and white. I don't know that I'd even say Iran is gray. Iran is a kaleidoscope: it is every color in the rainbow, a whole bunch we've never seen before.

One of the things we need to look at in terms of Iran and one of the things we need to think about in thinking about our policy toward Iran is its role in Iraq, so far something that doesn't get mentioned enough. Iran has played an extremely positive role in Iraq. Iran has been a restraining influence on a number of the hotheads. Had it not been for the Iranians, I think that Muqtada Al-Sadr would have made a lot more trouble than he has so far. Had it not been for the Iranians, I think that you might have seen more Shi'a leaders resisting the US occupation much more than they have done so.

Because the Iranians may or may not like our presence in Iraq – and I think they generally don't like our presence in Iraq – but they too understand that chaos in Iraq is their greatest problem. They are willing, at least for the moment, to bite the bullet and allow us to see if we can build something constructive and positive in Iraq. Because, if we are true to our word in Iraq and we do build a truly independent democratic Iraq, that would probably be fine for the Iranians. I think that they could learn to live with that. Certainly I think it would be a lot better for them than any of the likely alternatives: chaos, some new Sunni dictator who is deeply in bed with the United States, some other situation like Saddam Hussein or any of Iraq's past systems of government, none of which have worked out very well for the Iranians.

With the Iranians, we obviously have some problems out there. There's the issue of Terrorism. There's also the issue of nuclear weapons, but I think we need to be very sober about dealing with those problems, assessing those problems. Those are problems for the United States, but they are not so grave and apocalyptic as we sometimes make them out to be.

On the Terrorism front, while I would never suggest that the Iranians are anything other than supporters of Terrorism and have done some truly horrible things in the last few years, nevertheless it is also the case that Iran's support for Terrorism has shifted in a very significant way since 1996. In particular, it is no longer as anti-US as it once was. Since Khobar Towers, since they overreached at Khobar Towers, the Iranians have very much reined in their horns. As best we can tell, the extent to which they maintain a terrorist capability against the United States, it is primarily as a deterrent, so that if the United States does something to them, they will respond with Terrorism – but gone are the days that we saw active Iranian harassment of US personnel, active Iranian casing and target-building against US forces, let alone the sponsorship of groups that are actively targeting American citizens.

On the nuclear side, again, I think that the evidence is pretty compelling that the Iranians have made more progress than anyone believed in the past. That said, I think the Iraqi case ought to give us a little bit of caution about leaning too heavily on evidence from intelligence in a closed society about just how far along the Iranians may or may not be.

Beyond that, there are two other caveats that I think we have to take into account when we think about Iran and where it's headed in the future with its nuclear program. One is that first of all, Iran is a very different country from Iraq and especially Iraq with Saddam Hussein. What we've seen of the Iranians since the death of the Ayatollah Khomeini is that they are much more responsive to traditional power politics and traditional deterrence thinking. They are not reckless the way that Saddam was. They are not suicidal. Saddam was never intentionally suicidal, but he was frequently – and in this last case monumentally – unintentionally suicidal. Iranians have never shown those things. That means that the Iranians by and large may be a country which even after they have a nuclear weapon can be dealt with in a very different way from Saddam Hussein. We don't have to have necessarily the same fears about Iran that we would have, say, with a Saddam Hussein.

Second, of course the other issue out there with the Iranians is that they are changing. Their society, their government, is changing even as we speak – something else we could not say about Iraq under Saddam Hussein. The real issue out there for us is twofold. One, does this regime acquire nuclear weapons or is it a successor regime, a regime which may be very friendly to the West and which may put it in a very different situation, a situation more along the lines of India, say, than Iraq? Secondarily, even if they do get them in the short term, is change going to happen under their feet and can that be managed progressively?

I will stop now, but I will leave by saying that on the issue of Iran, these are all interesting questions. They're all things that we need to debate. The biggest thing out there right now is that we simply don't have a policy. Iran is in ferment at the moment. There are all kinds of things going on there and I think that there are all kinds of signs of opportunities with the Iranians, that they themselves are unsure of their future direction, and they are looking to see if there are accommodations that might be reached with the United States. The biggest problem that we have right now is that the Bush Administration can't seem to make up its mind to be able to go back to the Iranians and say, all right, here's what we want, here's what we're willing to offer, are you interested?

Thank you very much.

John Voll:

It's a pleasure to be here. In thinking about what I would say today, I recalled one other time when I stood in this room and talked to an MEI annual meeting. It was the annual meeting of 1990, Robin Wright had been the keynoter, and Robin and I talked at lunch about the problem that we had, because we'd been invited and our topics were more or less assigned during the summer of 1990, which many of you may remember was a rather good summer. [It] looked like there was progress in the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Eastern bloc had collapsed. All the great communist threat was done. In the summer, as we were planning what we were going to say, Robin and I said we both had the same sort of reaction of, my goodness, won't it be fun to go to MEI at the annual meeting and really sound upbeat and positive? Then of course came August of 1990, and we all then talked about the Persian Gulf War and things like that.

All of that is a reminder of why David of course emphasized how many, many, many years I have been talking about this sort of thing. There aren't many people in the room who have memories of David as a young, innocent – or not necessarily so innocent – graduate student at Harvard.

I'm going to do a little simpler. I'm not going to be as marvelous and grandiose and prescriptive as my three colleagues have been. I'm going to be a little more simple because I think the kind of titles that we're operating with open the way for – if I'm a guru – for a guru to be a little more general. As we look at the subject matter from the program, it is the overall thing – "Perils of Engagement: America in the Middle East." Then this panel is "American Perspectives on the Middle East." When I got my e-mail asking if I would talk, it mentioned what the other people would be talking about, and then it said, "And you should discuss Islam's role in American foreign policy." Well, I think that sounds like an interesting subject. But I want to in fact take it literally for you, for a moment. We do have the option of dealing with the question, what is the impact of Islam upon American foreign policy? That's a very interesting subject, and to some extent that's what we've been talking about now: the interaction of Middle Eastern realities and American policy realities and so on.

But I would like to shift gears for just a moment and ask the question rather, what is the impact on American policy of the concept of Islam in the minds of American policymakers? Because in fact, the biggest impact that Islam has on American policy is not something out there that has an impact on policy, it's something in here. It doesn't make much difference what is the reality of Iran. What makes a real difference is, what do American policymakers think is the reality in Iran, or Iraq, or the world of Islam in general.

If we look at it this way for a moment, I think that we face the problem that we always face as we're looking at words: we're stuck. Maybe there are a few good Sufi mystics in the room or Buddhist types who could sit, and we could transfer all manner of enlightenment without words. But for the rest of us, we're stuck with words.

And we do have to talk about Islam. So I am not advocating that we don't use the word “Islam.” Sometimes if you listen to the critiques of the way people talk about Islam, you end up saying, gee, maybe we just shouldn't talk about it at all, sort of like in the old days a great scholar of Islam called Wilfred Cantwell Smith wrote a book called, The Meaning and End of Religion. In it, his conclusion was that religion was such a complicated word and people used it in so many different ways that we shouldn't use the word religion at all. Of course, that had a real impact: everybody stopped using the word religion for the last 30 years. In the same way, though, we have this problem with Islam as a term.

But having said that, policymakers and scholars and students having to take exams in my courses and things like that do have to use this word “Islam.” I think one of the big elements in the way that we use the word “Islam,” especially in policy contexts, is that Islam tends to be defined in a unitary way. I'm not necessarily saying – although I would say it, as everybody endlessly does – Islam is not monolithic. There is great diversity in Islam and all of that sort of thing. But rather, what I am saying is that very often when policymakers think about Islam, they tend to think about Islam in unitary ways.

I'd like to use an example from old history, back when I was a graduate student, even before David was a graduate student. In the old days of the early Cold War, there was a big debate about Islam in American foreign policy planning for Cold War conflict. There was one school of thought that said Islam is a bulwark against Communism. Communism is atheism and no Muslim is an atheist, and therefore no Muslim can be a communist. Islam a bulwark. Then there were the other scholars that said, no, Islam is an authoritarian ideology that prepares the groundwork for every other authoritarian ideology, and the biggest authoritarian ideology in the world of the 1950s was Communism, and therefore Islam was the precursor to the establishment of communist states.

Now, in both of those cases, when people thought about Islam in terms of American policy, what shaped the actual kinds of policy recommendations that people made was a very unitary sense of what Islam was. It was either a bulwark or a preparation for Totalitarianism. Somehow it tended not to occur to those people in those debates that it might be both and it might be something more. But by viewing Islam as a unitary concept, it became difficult to see the complexities that even in those days – people were saying there are lots of different kinds of Muslims and so on. But when it came down to coming to a conclusion, the debate was, is Islam a bulwark or not?

We see the same thing in that topic that David set, actually the second sentence, Islam in foreign policy, and to address particularly the question of Islam and Democracy, I want to suggest that we get ourselves wrapped up in the same kind of arguments now that we used to get in the bulwark-versus-preparation arguments. The question is simply asked: is Islam compatible with Democracy?

At the end of the morning's panel, there was some discussion that reminded us that we shouldn’t think in unitary terms about Democracy, that Democracy is a very complicated kind of concept and there are many different modes and meanings and definitions of Democracy. But the normal mode of operation when one asks the question, is Islam compatible with Democracy – the normal mode of operation is that people in the argument will say, “Well, Islam is... and Democracy is...” And so there's no debate at all; either because of its historic association with authoritarian caliphal traditions and so on, Islam is inherently anti-democratic and therefore of course Islam is not compatible with Democracy, or Islam by definition emphasizes justice, equality and so on, and therefore by definition it's compatible. One doesn't ever have to look at any realities to answer the question. The question of whether Islam is compatible with Democracy is basically answered most of the time not on the basis of analysis but on the basis of what definitions you start out with. You start then with this kind of chunk.

The answer, of course, to the question, at least from my point of view, is that Islam is a rich, broad heritage, tradition, repertoire of symbols and concepts, and one can, if one is of a mind, use authentically Islamic concepts, symbols, and arguments to articulate Islamic Democracy, and in that same world one can use authentically Islamic concepts, principles, symbols, and arguments to articulate an Islamic Authoritarianism.

So, it isn't a matter of having to look by definition at unitary definitions. It is a matter of looking at the specifics that my colleagues have been talking about, one way or another. If one is going to have a vision, you can't have a vision defined "by definition." The end of the roadmap can't just simply be this sort of definition of saying everybody loves peace, everybody loves justice and so on, and therefore we will have a just and peace solution. It's got to be concrete, like you were talking about. Or for the Iraqis – the vision at the end of the road can't just say, we're all going to have Democracy and it's all going to be lovely. It's got to be concrete.

Part, as we get to specific policies, is that within this unitary thinking, unitary definitions, is that the unitary definitions then have subsidiary unitary definitions. At the beginning of the American control of Iraq following the war, there was some recognition – lots of recognition – that the majority of the Iraqis were Shi'ite. There was then the observation putting forward that somehow this has to be recognized. But being Shi'ite means you are Islamic and therefore if you are going to have a state that recognizes an Islamic kind of definition, you might run the risk of having an Islamic state.

In the unitary definitions that were there, because Islam is one thing in a unitary definition, people then knew as well what an Islamic state was, and an Islamic state by definition was going to be a theocracy. This was something that Republicans and Democrats alike said we surely want a Democracy that recognizes the will of the majority, but of course it can't be a state that gives any recognition to Islam because we all know that an Islamic state is a theocracy and we don't want a theocracy.

What that meant was then, when Ayatollah Al-Hakim came back from Iran and when he was talking about needing a state that was Islamic and modern, that the new government should be a modern Islamic regime to go along with today's world – we do not want extremist Islam but an Islam of independence, justice and freedom – most of the commentators at that point essentially operated not within a framework of a non-unitary definition that said, yes, of course, there can be many different kinds of Islamic states. But rather they said, “Ah, this is just a cover for the Shi'ite ayatollah to integrate ‘ayatollah-ism’ and he wants to have an Islamic state. And we all know that an Islamic state is a theocracy, even though he may protest against it.”

Parallel to this, we have those sort of unitary definitions that we all now know, just taking it narrower and narrower and narrower. Most people – policymakers included – have a unitary definition of an “ayatollah.” Most people's definition of an ayatollah is defined by the Ayatollah Khomeini and the experience of American policymakers in 1979, 1980, and 1981, with the Ayatollah Khomeini. Everybody knows that an ayatollah is a political powerhouse and so on. So that someone like Ayatollah Al-Sistani, who essentially says that ayatollahs have no business in politics, becomes something that by definition we have difficulty in understanding.

So what I would suggest, in conclusion, is that if we are looking at this issue of American perspectives on the Middle East and the impact on our policy of our definitions, sometimes our definitions, our unitary-style definitions of things like Islam, Islamic state and ayatollah constrict the options that we are willing and able to implement within our policy.

I would simply close by reminding you of an observation that Abdullahi Al-Naim made a couple years ago in a book on the desecularization of the world. Some of you who know Abdullahi as a Sudanese person whose teacher was executed by the Numeiry regime for "heresy and apostasy" – you will know that Abdullahi is not a secret agent for fundamentalists. But Abdullahi said if you go to the Islamic world, to the world of Muslims, and you say there are only two choices, a purely European-style, secular, political regime and an absolutely fundamentalist regime, the overwhelming majority of Muslims in the world will have no choice at all, and they will opt for the fundamentalist option. But that is not necessary. That option is an option that is created by a unitary definition of Islam, a unitary definition of ayatollahs, a unitary definition of the Islamic state. What we need is to move beyond those to recognize the complexities that my colleagues have been recognizing in the rest of this panel.

Thank you.