AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE

THE SYKES-PICOT AGREEMENT AT 100: RETHINKING THE MAP OF THE MODERN MIDDLE EAST

PANEL I: IS COLONIALISM TO BLAME?

PANELISTS: SCOTT ANDERSON, AUTHOR OF “LAWRENCE IN ARABIA”; MARTIN INDYK, BROOKINGS INSTITUTION; ROBERT KAGAN, BROOKINGS INSTITUTION; DAN YERGIN, IHS

MODERATOR: MICHAEL RUBIN, AEI

PANEL II: THE SYKES-PICOT LEGACY, NOW AND IN THE FUTURE

PANELISTS: ELLIOTT ABRAMS, COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS; RYAN CROCKER, FORMER AMBASSADOR TO IRAQ AND SYRIA; ADEED DAWISHA, MIAMI UNIVERSITY; OLIVIER DECOTTIGNIES, THE WASHINGTON INSTITUTE FOR NEAR EAST POLICY

MODERATOR: DANIELLE PLETKA, AEI

2:00 PM – 4:30 PM MONDAY, MAY 16, 2016 EVENT PAGE: http://www.aei.org/events/the-sykes-picot-agreement-at-100- rethinking-the-map-of-the-modern-middle-east/

TRANSCRIPT PROVIDED BY WWW.DCTMR.COM

MICHAEL RUBIN: Welcome to the American Enterprise Institute and our panel on Sykes-Picot at 100. I want to thank you all for being here. Of course, anniversaries matter, and this is one of the most significant anniversaries at least in the crafting of the modern Middle East. Now, the Sykes-Picot Agreement may not have been implemented as it was originally designed, but few would doubt that it has had tremendous impact on the eventual shaping of the Middle East. And I’m thrilled that we have a two-panel conference. Danielle Pletka, the vice president for foreign policy and defense at AEI, will moderate the second panel, but I’ll be talking a little bit about the history panel.

My name is Michael Rubin. I’m a resident scholar here. I’m a historian by training, which means I get paid to predict the past. Admittedly, I only get that right about 50 percent of the time. But I have a very distinguished panel. Sitting next to me is Scott Anderson, who is a war correspondent and a New York-based author who has written a very recent book on Lawrence of Arabia and the shaping of the modern Middle East. Then we have Dan Yergin, who is probably the country’s top expert on oil and the impact of oil in the Middle East. Many of you know his various books on the history of oil, and there will be another one coming out shortly. And then two colleagues from Brookings, Martin Indyk, who is, of course, the vice president of Brookings and also an expert from both academically and a policy practice standpoint, the Arab-Israeli situation. And then last but not least is Robert Kagan, who is a tremendous historian of American strategy, American policy the world over but with a continued interest in the Middle East.

Now, you come to these events not to hear the moderator, but to hear the panel. We’re going to have a conversation — an extended conversation among our panelists and then I’ll open the floor to questions. But I’d like to start out by just asking our panel, let’s just cut to the chase, bottom line, upfront: was the Sykes-Picot Agreement the original sin when we look at all the problems which are confronting the Middle East today?

Arbitrarily, Scott, you’re the history here so let me start with you.

SCOTT ANDERSON: Yes. I mean, to a degree, I believe it was. I mean, it was — what you saw immediately after — Sykes-Picot, of course, is a bit of a metaphor. With the imperial carving up that happened in the Paris Peace Conference almost instantaneously, the entire Arab world went up in flames, riots or civil war, all the way from Morocco over to Iraq within a year. So I don’t think — I don’t think it’s the cause of everything that’s come. It’s not like without Sykes-Picot or without some imperial carving up by the British and the French that this would be a peaceful and vibrant land. I think it was always headed for deep problems. But, yes, I think that absolutely the way it was carved up, it sort of set the fuse.

DAN YERGIN: Just to — I mean, to say, I mean, obviously three empires collapsed in the First World War. Each one of them collapsed in a different way: one became the Soviet Union after civil war, one became all the states of Eastern Europe, and then you had this. And, you know, so they were confronting — obviously, this was during the battle of Gallipoli that they were actually working this out. The question was what was going to come next. And Sykes himself said, well, it could be partition. It could be spheres of influence. It could be what later became known as mandates or they could devolve into five provinces. The question was just what was going to come out of this. That was — there was no clarity.

MR. RUBIN: Let me ask just a very broad question. When we look at the Middle East —

MARTN INDYK: That was pretty broad.

MR. RUBIN: That was pretty broad. But when we look at the Middle East and we talk about carving it up into individual states, how disparate were the various identities at the time? And did Sykes-Picot largely conform with those disparate identities or was it completely arbitrary? And let’s face it — I mean, the Middle East has never been homogenous. So how different were we really talking from Sykes-Picot versus reality? And, again, we don’t need to go in any particular order, but —

MR. INDYK: Just a couple of points. First of all, what you were dealing with was the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the collapse of the order that existed there. In some ways we’re dealing with a similar collapse of the order in the same area. Let’s not forget, Sykes-Picot applied to the Levant, to that area from what was then kind of Palestine through Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, Mesopotamia. I mean, that was it. It didn’t deal with Saudi Arabia. It didn’t deal with Egypt. It didn’t deal with North Africa. But in that area, there was a collapse of the order, so the question then is what is going to replace the order. And that is necessarily a very messy process, as Scott has indicated.

But as a result of that, you know, the states that emerged were essentially more or less what you could have expected. I mean, it’s hard to imagine a counterfactual that would have — OK. So Lebanon would have been smaller. You know, Palestine — Israel might have been larger. They might have divided the Jewish state on the West Bank of the Jordan and the Arab state on the East Bank, I mean — but, you know, how exactly would have looked — would have been different? If King Faisal had managed to establish his reign, he would have ended up fighting with the Maronites, the Kemalists, the Turks and the Zionists one way or another.

So I think, in a sense, it’s a question that doesn’t have a good answer except in understanding that when empires come and go, when orders collapse, there is necessarily a great deal of chaos. And then the question is, who is able to establish order out of this chaos? And that is a similar kind of situation than what we face today.

MR. RUBIN: I’m actually going to try to bring Bob into this conversation. And when we talk about the political debate now, and that’s something we talk about in a second panel, I mean, of course, the American political debate in recent years has been consumed by various ideas with regard to foreign policy, whether it’s realism, whether it’s neo-conservatism or any number of other isms out there or philosophies, liberal interventionalism and so forth.

But if we want to go back to the aftermath of the Sykes-Picot agreement, we really have the United States asserting itself perhaps in a way in which it hadn’t asserted itself before. And, of course, I’m referring to Woodrow Wilson’s 14 points and issues with regard to national sovereignty. This is something which certainly the Iraqi Kurds have been putting forth most recently in terms of being the largest ethnic group, if you will, that didn’t have a state come out of the process — the lengthy process.

But when we look back at Woodrow Wilson and when we look back at the 14 points, is this really a fair reading that we have — the real interplay of ideology, and if we can just look at history as a lens, does this mean that — are there any parallels today that you see in terms of what might come next as various ideologies compete in the region, especially when it comes to freedom, national liberation, democracy and national sovereignty?

ROBERT KAGAN: I was getting ready to answer the first part of the question, then you got to the second part of the question. I’ll think about that for 10 minutes and then I’ll get back to you. I just want to say one word about the first question you asked originally, which is, you know, was our victory in World War II the original sin that led to the division of Europe? The answer is yes. And this is the problem of reading history backwards, you know. Every good deed you do, every success you have creates failures and disasters. Every solution creates another problem and we’re always looking for it. If you could just go back and like get everything right and you could have known what would happen 50 years later, et cetera, et cetera. So I just think it’s worth putting that in context.

On Wilson, I mean, this is — I don’t know how germane this is to what you’re — the idea of self-determination was not invented by Woodrow Wilson. In fact, the British were much more conscious of the issue of self-determination before Wilson had even started thinking about the problem. And, you know, it made sense in the context of Europe to say — they were talking about whether people who are basically French should live under French domination rather than German domination which was their number one concern. Most of what happened in Europe happened because holding together the Austro-Hungarian Empire was not an option. Those peoples wanted to be taken out from under them.

And, as far as I know, I mean maybe Dan knows better or Scott or Martin, Wilson was not very involved in how the Arab world got divided up because that just wasn’t his concern. His concern was trying to create a Europe that would not lead to another world war. So I hate blaming — I mean, I don’t love Woodrow Wilson, but I hate blaming him for every idea that led to difficult things. It seems to me if anybody was responsible for what happened in the region, it was the British and the French and not the United States at that time.

And, again, I’m sympathetic to the point that — what’s interesting to me as I go back – and maybe I haven’t read deeply enough in this, there’s very little discussion at least on the British side of Sunni-Shia. They’re just not thinking about that that much. The issue that we are consumed with, the issue that we say is the biggest problem in the region that’s causing much of the headache, they didn’t even think was an issue at that.

MR. YERGIN: Yet, there were some people who — a few people objected to putting the Sunnis, Shias and the Kurds into one country, but they were much overruled. And people said, it’s great. We’ve created this Iraq that’s brought all these people together.

MR. KAGAN: And also, I mean, as far as I understand, the Arab rebellion was Sunni and Shia fighting on the same side, I mean, not against each other. So you couldn’t even have anticipated, at least then, the problems that you — many of the problems we’re later facing.

MR. ANDERSON: I think with Wilson, when you talk about self-determination, what people are you talking about? Does that go to, you know, the Christian Maronites? I mean, just how far down do you take it? And I think that Wilson clearly hadn’t thought that through very far at all. And there’s the famous — Wilson, when he was being — when he talked about self-determination at Paris and the British and the French were very much wanting to create new spheres of influence, Wilson’s solution was to create a committee, a fact-finding mission, the King-Crane Commission that went off to the Middle East. And he spent about four months taking polls all through the Middle East. And when the commission came back, they’re finding that every county they’ve been to was — that people either wanted independence, or, barring that, they wanted American mandate. They wanted to fall in — nobody wanted the British. Nobody wanted the French. And, at that point, it was a done deal. It was a fait accompli at Versailles. So they just buried the commission report for three years, just went into a safe and no one saw it. So, I mean, I think that — and I think what it had the effect of doing, the King-Crane Commission and Wilson’s talk was raise expectations in the Arab world.

MR. KAGAN: That’s true. And all over the world actually.

MR. ANDERSON: And all over the world that were then — then just went by the wayside.

MR. YERGIN: One of his biggest critics was his secretary of state, Robert Lansing, who said a man who’s leader of public thought should be wary of intemperate or undigested declarations because he’s responsible for the consequences. Sounds relevant today? (Laughter.) If you think about. But Wilson had, you know, Trotsky as his first — taking over as commissar of foreign affairs, had published the secret treaties, particularly Sykes-Picot. And so the whole 14 points really was partly a reaction to that.

MR. RUBIN: Well, if I may, we mentioned the mandates. Now, today of course, imperialism, colonialism and so forth has a largely pejorative context. And, at the time, frankly, for many people did as well. But what I’m curious about and what I haven’t seen a lot of work on is in these formative periods of the mandates that did exist, what would be your assessment of the mandates and what is their legacy today? Is there any lasting legacy to these mandates in the way the states have transposed? And can you extend that to suggest, for those of you that have done deep dives in the Middle East, substantive differences in the way the French and the British mandates have transpired over time? Generally speaking. Sorry.

MR. INDYK: Well, you know, the British mandate in Palestine turned out pretty badly as mandates go. So, you know, judge on that basis. I mean, they had a difficult proposition which they made worse. I mean, the proposition was that they would create a homeland for the Jewish people, Balfour Declaration, they had the mandate so they had the power and that’s what they did. But, of course, then they carved off Trans-Jordan for the Hashemites, and that left a much smaller territory to divide up between Arab and Jews. And that became a kind of hopeless mission which they ended up giving up in the end. And, of course, that laid the seeds for an Arab-Israeli conflict that rages in some ways to this very day.

MR. RUBIN: We’re going to talk about the Arab-Israeli conflict. I’m sorry. I cut you off, Bob. But what I’m getting at in a way is, for example, when I was doing my Ph.D. work — more so on Iran — I noticed a lot of doctoral dissertations written by Iranians in the 1920s and 1930s, some of whom had gone off to Great Britain, some of whom had gone off to France, some of whom had gone off to Germany. And what was pretty amazing when I looked at the broad sweep of subsequent Iranian history is those who went off the England, many of them became Anglophiles. Those who went off to Germany, many of them became quite sympathetic to fascism over time. And those who went off to France, likewise, it was very clear became infatuated with French philosophy. The point I’m asking now is, when we look at the Middle East today, do you see significant fault lines or cultural fault lines between the Francophone countries and the Anglophone countries putting the native language, Arabic, aside?

MR. ANDERSON: I don’t. I have to say I don’t. No.

MR. RUBIN: An answer in and of itself. Yeah.

MR. KAGAN: Getting back to your mandate and the effect of — I mean, this is a general point but I think it may apply to this too, which is that everything that was set up at Versailles was completely gutted when the United States decided to absent itself from the implementation of the agreement. They built a house and the main — the sort of main pillar of that house was the United States. So when people talk about why Versailles was a failure here or this was a failure there, it was a failure because it never was supposed to work that way. And all the ways in which American steady involvement in Europe would have affected a lot of these other questions, we just can’t say. So if you — the lessons to be learned from any of the Versailles things I think need to be greeted skeptically.

MR. YERGIN: So I guess you’d add to that that in a sense, you could have said part of it was — I mean, part of the problem was Wilson’s personality, his inability to compromise with the Senate had a pretty high price.

MR. KAGAN: I actually blame Lodge more for that than Wilson but we can have separate — in the next panel we’ll have that discussion.

MR. YERGIN: Yeah.

MR. RUBIN: Well, I mean, when we go back — and going back to the first question about original sin and if we want to look at some of these mandates didn’t have lasting impact, for example, on the culture of society, that was the core behind the Francophone-Anglophone question, what competing influences would you identify at the time which really could create a parallel storyline if you will about what’s gone wrong in the Middle East over the last century? Again, a very broad question but —

MR. INDYK: I think the critical thing which we saw was the rise of the military in politics across this particular part of the region and then a whole series of military coups that — the kind of institutional framework that the British actually were able to establish in Hashemite Jordan is not the case anywhere else. I mean, Faisal was overthrown so quickly in Iraq. And, essentially, you had the military coming to power there. Syria, Iraq, of course, in Egypt as well. That’s a little bit beyond our scope but I think that’s what you saw as the most powerful influence. And that wasn’t British or French.

MR. RUBIN: Is that a symptom of a lack of legitimacy of these states or is this something else?

MR. ANDERSON: To my mind, it’s very — it goes very much to the question of legitimacy of the states. I mean, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that if you look at the countries that are utterly failed today in the Middle East — by utterly failed, that they don’t even have a territorial integrity left — they are the countries that were cobbled together, you know, out of Versailles. And they’re the only countries that meet that definition of the failed state — Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and Libya.

Talk about the legacy of — I’ve been covering war for about 30 years. And one thing I became very aware of in covering conflict in the Middle East was wherever else I — you know, if I was talking with FMLN guerilla in Salvador, an IRA guy in Belfast, or a Tamil Tiger, people can always articulate what they’re fighting for. It may be an utterly, you know, fantastic idea, and often is. But in the Middle East, talking to fighters, they invariably would talk about what they’re fighting against. And it might seem like almost a semantic difference, but I think it’s actually huge. And so when the Arab spring revolts came along, there was absolutely no consensus within the society of what was going to replace Mubarak or Gaddafi.

And I think this is the — talking about the original sin, I think this is – that this created this culture of grievance that has existed throughout the Arab world for the past 100 years, which military dictators used, you know, very much to their advantage. And we saw that happening in the early days of the Arab spring, that, you know, Bashar al- Assad’s first speech was he called the protesters — you know, they’re carrying out the Israeli agenda and it was trying to play that same anti-Zionist or anti-West or anti- imperialist card that stood these guys in very good stead for decades. And that was to my mind what was initially so optimistic about the Arab spring was that for the first time that old — you know, that play wasn’t working anymore.

But the problem was I think that after 100 years of having this — of not having a consensus of what is going to replace that, there’s very little to fall back to, including in a lot of places a very shallow, if existent, sense of national identity.

MR. INDYK: So that was compounded, I think, by the weakness of state institutions in part because of this diversionary strategy so to blame the West, to blame the colonialists, blame the Zionists. But it was also to use the legacy of Sykes-Picot in a different way, which was Arab unity. And because the Arab world had been divided in this way by the colonialists, Arab unity became the way in which you actually advanced a nationalist cause at the expense of the other leaders in the region, but it was also a diversionary tactic.

So, essentially, what went wrong — was only one of the things that went wrong, but what went wrong was that this desire to blame others, victimization and the uses of victimhood in terms of avoiding the hard work of building state institutions, building pluralist societies and being able to deliver the needs of the people I think is at heart of the, in the end, the collapse of these states.

MR. RUBIN: If we can go back 100 years, to what extent did the British — were they cognizant of — I mean, beyond Lawrence, and to what extent were the French cognizant of the rise of Arab nationalism and the true, if you will, the place in various people’s hearts that Arab unity had if at all? I mean, to what extent do you see that?

MR. YERGIN: Scott, you should answer.

MR. ANDERSON: Yeah. You know, something that Bob said earlier, you know, of this idea of going back in history and, you know, it’s obvious to see where things went wrong, but I think there is something very important to be said in this idea that what — what people say, like what T.E. Lawrence, were warning against was almost invariably tribalism. You know, it wasn’t the Shia-Sunni-Kurdish thing.

And I think that what anybody 100 years ago would have a hard time imagining was just how much smaller the whole world was going to become. It had become already very small in Europe, but the idea that — you know, 100 years ago, the only — there was Southern Iraqi Shia who were going into Sunni Iraq were a few merchants. I mean, there was virtually no interplay. And I think that was a very hard thing to figure out, that these — you know, the major religious sects were going to come into collision with each other. And now, of course, we’ve gone almost full circle that now what we’re seeing just below the Sunni-Shia schism is this explosion of tribes and clans and sub-tribes.

MR. YERGIN: And I think that, obviously, there was an effort to have, you know, the Sharif of Mecca, Hussein wanted to be the king of the Arabs but it seemed that a lot of other people, Arabs, didn’t want him to be their king, including Ibn Saud. But I noticed something in looking through some of our Sykes papers, he doesn’t refer to Arabs. He refers to the Arab-speaking peoples in a very plural sense. The other thing that the British were terrified of, of a jihad, an Islamic uprising in India in response to what was happening in the Middle East.

MR. KAGAN: But, I mean, again, I take the second and third place of the people in this panel on knowing this history particularly well, but it seems to me the British were deliberately playing on Arab nationalism as part of the war effort against the Ottomans so they — and they were — as far as I understand it, they envisioned creating an independent Arab state out of that.

MR. YERGIN: Some did.

MR. KAGAN: For some.

MR. YERGIN: But I think the preponderance did not, but some certainly did.

MR. KAGAN: Well, I think as far as — I mean, Sykes-Picot reflected that idea. They drew the outlines of an independent Arab state and they were very careful to say, well, Aleppo should be in there and — because that’s the way the Arabs feel about these things, which didn’t even turn out to be necessarily. They misread what that was. But, I mean, it doesn’t seem that you could say the British were not conscious of Arab nationalism because they were using it as a tool of warfare.

MR. RUBIN: I mean, just when it came to the Arabs first as Arab-speaking peoples, I think it was Rashid Khalidi, who’s now at Columbia University, that back in the late 1980s or early 1990s had an article, a historiographical essay in the Journal of the American Historical Association, in which he was looking at various concepts of ethnicity. And one of the issues was that in the Middle East, the idea of what is an Arab had a geographic context up until the 1920s, 1930s, and then it became a linguistic context. Today, in the Middle East, ethnicity is oftentimes determined by language, whereas in the United States, of course, we have a genetic basis. It’s just one of those differences.

But we often talk when we’re coming to an anniversary, the 100th anniversary of Sykes-Picot, and we simply begin the discussion with the British and the French divided up the region. That’s how it’s often portrayed. And so this question is actually coming to Dan because I know you’ve been doing some work on this but what were the interests that actually led the British and the French to divide up the region in the manner in which they divided up with the benefit of historical hindsight, how legitimate were the concerns that led both Paris and London to try to draw the lines the way they did? If we could delve deep into that?

MR. YERGIN: So let me answer it by saying two things about Sykes, one that answers your first question. Within two years of this Sykes-Picot agreement, Sykes himself said it was doing positive harm because it was spreading the idea of capitalist exploitation and imperialistic aggression and also was upsetting the Arab-speaking peoples.

The other thing, in 1905, well before World War I, Sykes had actually written a paper on – I’m not sure I’m going to pronounce it right, “The Petroliferous Regions of Mesopotamia,” and, i.e., the oil potential. So I think the French interest was, you know, the Christians in the region; commercial interests were quite extensive, and the church, and then their sense of mission.

MR. KAGAN: Prestige. Well, also prestige, right?

MR. YERGIN: Yeah. But the British obviously — everything often seemed to start in — of course, protecting India, passage to India, whether Suez or over Mesopotamia. But I think what you’re getting at is what was the role of oil. And oil came to — you know, World War I turned out to be much more of an oil war than anybody expected. Mobility — you know, the Wright Brothers’ plane was in 1903. It was already an instrument of war, the airplane, by World War I. Tanks, which were originally called cisterns, trucks, motorcycles — it was all oil. And so this, particularly when there was an oil shortage around 1917, and this all fed into it.

And I’ve just found a quote from the secretary of the war cabinet. He said, “Oil in the next war will occupy the place of coal in the present war, at least a parallel place. We need to get this oil under our control.” And he said, this is a first-class war aim. And it was thought that Mosul was the center of where the oil was going to be. And so that was a huge fight between the British and the French. Initially they seemed to agree, then at Versailles, they had what’s called a first-class dog fight over it between Clemenceau and Lloyd George, which the peacemaker, Woodrow Wilson, prevented from turning into a fistfight.

And so it was — they were constantly arguing over who would get Mosul and finally did a deal that the British would get it, but, of course, it’s also somehow tied to India, which may be a bit of a stretch, and that the French would get a share of the oil. So that loomed quite large as a very material strategic interest for the future.

MR. ANDERSON: And just — and you know this better than I, but the reason the British wanted Transjordan was because they wanted the pipeline from Mosul to the Mediterranean so that was — that kind of explained the future creation of Jordan.

MR. YERGIN: I mean, the British said, we only have — we have Persia, 1908 discovery, and Mesopotamia. That’s all we have. That’s our oil. And we don’t want to depend upon the Americans, particularly if there were conflicts with the Americans over what the postwar order would look like.

MR. KAGAN: I mean, it would have been a miracle if either France of Britain had given a crap about what was happening to the Arabs other than what — how it interested them. During the war, that it was a tool of war to defeat the Ottomans. After the war, they themselves were reengaged in a colonial competition. I mean, they weren’t allies anymore. Clemenceau says to Lloyd George at Versailles, how come you’re constantly treating us like an enemy? And Lloyd George jokes, well, hasn’t that always been our posture, you know? He meant it as a joke but Clemenceau didn’t take it as a joke. So, you know, there’s just — nobody’s sitting around thinking about how to deal with this Arab problem. They’re dealing with their great power competition which resumes almost immediately.

MR. RUBIN: I’m going to ask one final question before turning the floor over to the audience to ask questions of the panelists and to spark a conversation that way. But when we look back at 1916 and then the last years of World War I and the immediate aftermath, when we look at the sick of man of Europe, now certainly there was some national sentiment in the Levant and you had also an Egypt, of course, the rise of Muhammad Ali — you had the — I mean, the de facto separation of Egypt at that point under the wilayat from the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire was no longer so strong. But one of the things about the Ottoman Empire traditionally, they sought to govern in many ways on the basis of religion, through the millet system and so forth.

Now, could we look at the Sykes-Picot and the post-Sykes-Picot era really as the beginning of a system that is based not on religion, but on something else? We can look — you talked about the tribalism with the Sauds and the Rasheeds and so forth and how that played out with Lawrence of Arabia. And, of course, the Rasheeds would be perfectly happy to try to lay claim to dominance over all Arabs and so forth. But we’re talking about Arabness here as opposed to Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. Is this really the legacy?

And when people are talking about redoing Sykes-Picot — and this is just a theoretical discussion, I don’t know any policymaker that seriously wants to engage in imperialism 2.0 in that regard. But are we really talking about a recognition that perhaps some of the other isms beyond religion simply haven’t worked to grant states legitimacy?

MR. INDYK: Well, I think that, as Scott has already said, the legitimacy is at the heart of the problem here. And as leaders emerged from this cauldron, they’re always seeking to establish their legitimacy in one way or another, either through religion or through nationalism or through anti-colonialism or through anti-Zionism. So, yes. It’s part and parcel of the story. When you say nobody’s rushing to divide it up again, well, there are people who are out there saying, let’s divide Iraq.

MR. KAGAN: Vice president of the United States.

MR. INDYK: Yeah, before the collapse of the American-dominated order. But for all of the — we also have the prime minister of Israel suggesting that, you know, the Golan should be re-divided and given to Israel and he suggested some other kinds of swaps. But what’s interesting is none of these things seem to get any kind of traction and it’s one of the kind of ironies of this whole story is that notwithstanding all of the pressures to separate, somehow those borders that were established 100 years ago or so tend to have a coherence that an alternative doesn’t seem to take hold.

The one possibility that’s always out there as a possibility, but never seems to emerge is Kurdistan, an independent state of Kurdistan. But there are lots of reasons why it doesn’t emerge including the sense that the Kurds have as a result of their own history over the last 100 years that they’d better walk very — step very carefully here. In the attempt to achieve an independent Kurdistan, they could in fact destroy their chances for another 100 years.

So I think that what emerges now is not the redrawing of territory but the question of how different ethnic groups, tribes if you like, are going to co-exist within the states that were drawn up 100 years ago and whether federal arrangements or confederal arrangements can be worked out that will produce a new and more peaceful order.

MR. RUBIN: Or a region of Lebanons.

MR. ANDERSON: Yeah. I was just in — I think it goes to — I think as Martin was saying, that once you start dividing — or it goes back to the Woodrow Wilson thing, once you start doing self-determination, where does the process stop? You know, how far down you go? I was just in Libya. And Libya today is essentially divided between east and west. But I was talking to a Libyan there and he was saying, you know, if everything continues on the way it’s going, there’s not going to be two Libyas. And he counted at least six. And he said, even at six, it can just — the fraction can just continue on and on and on because then there is no — I mean, it gets down to local tribe. I mean, what is the cohesion, what’s the social order keeping any sort of unity in place? So I think that’s the Pandora’s Box that’s lurking down the — I mean, I personally do think you need some sort of trifurcation in Iraq, but much easier said than done. And then, once you’ve created that, what happens in Sunnistan?

I mean, you mentioned Kurdistan, Iraqi Kurdistan. Iraqi Kurdistan is this tiny area the size of West Virginia and, you know, a quasi-democracy. But there’s two warlord families at each other’s throats. And so you can take the Kurdistan regional government and cut it in two. And then that would probably open up other — you know, so I think the process of disintegration just doesn’t stop.

MR. INDYK: The irony of history is that the issue of Mosul looms large again in the question of creation of an independent Kurdistan.

MR. ANDERSON: Right.

MR. YERGIN: In fact, that was one of the questions that — no. It was after the — the second peace conference after St. Remaux (ph), where Ataturk claimed that Mosul should go back to Turkey because it was populated by Kurds; i.e., Turks. (Laughter.)

MR. KAGAN: We’re spilling into the next panel. I would just say as far as — you know, as I look across history, I can think of very few cases where changes of borders have occurred in any other way either as a result of a war or which then led to a war. There’s very few that I can think of simply peaceful reorganizations of this kind. And, as you say, I mean, just think of India and Pakistan, and you think about dividing Iraq up, but the populations are so intermingled it’s hard to imagine it happening without bloodshed. And so I think that, you know, as neat as you might want to draw things, I can’t think of a time – I can’t think of very few occasions where that wasn’t attended by violence.

MR. RUBIN: And just picking up on what Scott said about the disintegration, this isn’t just a Middle Eastern problem. In Europe, we have essentially two Albanias, an Albania in Kosovo, we have two Romanias, Romania and Moldova. And just picking up on what Bob said, when we think about recent divisions of countries, I mean, South Sudan, East Timor, Kosovo, Eritrea, and what we have as a legacy of failed states, there’s very few exceptions to that rule. So one needs to ask a question as we move forward and perhaps the next panel will take that question about how can you avoid this, how can you avoid the question of having four Kurdistans?

MR. KAGAN: And just one more. Since I did — as I said, I’d think of an example, I mean, you know, Czechoslovakia was supposed to be an entity and it peacefully divided, but it did so under a security structure and a stability that was sort of imposed from without. It’s one of the reasons people can think about Barcelona moving off and Scotland moving off because the security order they live in is so established that you can do that without that problem. But that is obviously not the case in the Middle East.

MR. YERGIN: Michael, we’d better go to the audience.

MR. RUBIN: I will. I was going to do that. At any rate, what I’m going to ask from the audience is to identify yourself. Everyone in Washington has an affiliation whether they wanted to admit it or not. And also, keep your questions brief. I mean, don’t give speeches. I will cut you off and go to the next question if you even try.

Here, sir. And Hisham, if you could just wait for the microphone.

Q: Hisham Melhem, Al Arabiya and An-Nahar in Lebanon. Is the issue the borders or what happened within the borders after these new states were born? I mean, I’m one of those Arabs who were told growing up in Beirut that this is the worst thing, you know, the divisions of the region, the machinations of the French and the Brits and whatever. But one could argue that the colonialists, whether at Versailles or at Sykes- Picot or Sevres, whatever, had an assumption that the new modern state of Iraq, the Kurds and the Arabs and the Sunnis and the Shia could live together, that the modern state of Syria that we know today, the Alawis and the Sunnis and the Christians and the Armenians could live together. And I think the failure came afterwards because these countries did not build the state institution, did not bring in other, you know, groups than the Sunnis and the Arabs. And one word about I think Martin or Bob —

MR. RUBIN: Phrase it in a question.

Q: No. It’s the legacy of the colonial powers or the mandate. I think the British mandate in Iraq and in Egypt began to build the good basis for a state, like India, parliamentary elections, parties, semi-free press, and the failures came with the militaries.

MR. RUBIN: Got it. I’m going to go to the panel now on Hisham’s question.

MR. YERGIN: Well, you know, if Faisal hadn’t died when he died and been succeeded by a weak successor, you know, it might have — those institutions might have continued to be built.

MR. RUBIN: Other panelists?

OK. Ariel.

Q: Good afternoon. Ariel Cohen, the Atlantic Council. Just to remind that it is not just in the Middle East that the post-colonial, post-World War I arrangements failed. Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan were guaranteed by the Versailles and they too were overrun by the then Russian Federation.

MR. RUBIN: Question.

Q: The question is what kind of lessons do we draw from Sykes-Picot and the Versailles arrangements towards what’s developing in front of our eyes today? Thank you.

MR. RUBIN: Let me take a few questions and then we’ll go. Sir, just wait for the mic please. Up front here and then we’re going to move back to one table.

Q: Thanks. I’m Garrett Mitchell. I write the Mitchell Report. And I think I want to piggyback on this question and put it in a different way. Instead of looking at Sykes-Picot 100 years later and asking did they get it right, did they get it wrong, I wonder if I could pose this question: what was they did, using two of today’s popular terms, an exercise in state building or nation building? And depending upon what the answer to that is, therefore, what do we learn that has some application to the implementation of either of those or some hybrid in the current circumstances?

MR. RUBIN: Some of that question is going to be addressed by the second panel. We have one more question over here.

Q: Hi. Mikhael Smits Princeton University. Kind of in the same trend, one of the big failures of Sykes-Picot was a question of legitimacy. I mean, if we were to try to reproduce something similar today, kind of a colonialist threat or invective would be launched against it, so if we talk about an effort in Kurdistan or any other new state, how might a great power like the United States try to provide legitimacy to that new state or support without it looking like a colonialist project?

MR. RUBIN: And if I may just combine Mikhael Smits and Ariel Cohen’s question in a way, when we have grand notions of freedom, of liberty, of creating states, of rewarding identities and so forth, is the situation really any much different today than it was 100 years ago, where you can have those who believe in — if you will, the ideologues and the components of some grant international system on one hand, and I’m thinking back to League of Nations and so forth versus those, and we saw this in Turkey, for example. We saw this elsewhere in the region. We saw this with regard to Russia who recognized that while people talk, they can simply establish facts on the ground and be rewarded for that.

So let me combine Mikhael and Ariel’s question in that regard with that. And then, of course, with Mr. Mitchell’s question, is it state building? Did we see state- building or did we see nation-building? And I’ll defer the rest of that question to the second panel.

MR. INDYK: Well, lessons for Sykes-Picot for today, the obvious lesson might be, well, it’s a bad idea for colonialists to come in with rulers and pencils and divide — draw lines on maps and create artificial states. But I think the lesson of Sykes-Picot is a little different than that because, as we’ve already discussed, it is not at all clear what boundaries could have been drawn up in the wake of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire that would have produced less conflict, more coherent nation-states — you know, it’s kind of counterfactual.

So I don’t think it’s about drawing lines, and I guess I’m picking up on what Bob Kagan said. It’s about understanding that this region of the world at least has gotten used to outside powers over more than 100 years dominating, ruling, dominating and establishing order. And now, there is no outside power that is willing to do the job. And so the lesson of Sykes-Picot is that there isn’t going to be another Sykes-Picot. And, therefore, the question it seems to me is whether leaders will emerge in the region that are capable of establishing their legitimacy, generating support from their people and meeting the needs of their people. And that, you know, is partly leadership and it’s partly institution building, and it’s partly tolerance of a pluralistic society. And all of those things are absent. And it may take a long time until they become present.

MR. KAGAN: I think part of the answer to Ariel’s question and some of the other questions is there’s either global order or there’s global disorder. And that has a big impact on even what happens in sub-regions. So what happened after World War I? Well, there was no order established. There was supposed to be. You know, there was supposed to be the United States and Britain and France chiefly establishing an order, establishing an order in Europe to fulfill the terms of the Versailles Agreement and presumably then, you know, establishing order in the areas where they had traditionally been colonial powers.

And what happened of course was that they became, A, either obsessed with what was happening on the continent, because they had no choice, or, B, they simply had lost the capacity to do that and the United State absented itself.

It seems to me that most regions that, you know, like — not that regions are like the Middle East, but the Middle East happens to be a place where either it’s a cockpit of competition among competing powers, giving everyone the opportunity to play off of that, or it’s dominated by a power or a group of powers which generally brings more stability and allows some of these things to take root, or the powers are absenting themselves and it’s just — and that’s — the parallel between where we are potentially today and where we were in the 1920s is we are seeing at least a receding of global order. And I think that to some extent, they’re paying the price for that.

MR. YERGIN: Well, I was going to say — I was thinking three things. One, again, I think one of the lessons of Sykes-Picot is what Robert Lansing said is — and really of Wilson as a leader of public thought should be wary of intemperate or undigested declarations. And I think it is something — you know, what people say does count.

I think the second thing is we’ve got to remember this when we’re talking about that period. They didn’t have a luxury of time. There was a terrible war going on on the Western Front. That was what was really preoccupying them. And even though there were a million British troops, as we discussed yesterday the other day, in the Middle East, this was a side show to that.

And I think the question about nation building and institutions is really very interesting. And, you know, first, Faisal was going to be king of Syria and that didn’t work out so, well, let’s make him king of Iraq, and of course he had no roots in it. And so, you know, without — you know, you had a very limited number of people, you know, on the British side trying to kind of — yes, but they were trying to build institutions I think. And the idea of the mandates did occur with Iraq that it would move on to become and independent nation but it turned out then and now it’s pretty hard.

MR. RUBIN: I think the figures — sorry — that you’re referring to is, well, there might have been a million British troops in the Middle East, the Arab Legion only had around 3,000, which puts things a bit in perspective if those numbers are accurate. Scott.

MR. YERGIN: And many of them were Indian actually, of those troops.

MR. ANDERSON: I just wanted to pick up on something Dan said about Faisal in Syria. You know, I think when you talk about the legacy of Sykes-Picot, it’s not just about the boundary lines. It’s also about this sort of governance they put in place. And what the British and the French did throughout the Middle East is what they had done all around the world was to empower a local tribe or religious group to act as their intermediaries. And so they bring in Faisal and Faisal is, you know, a smart and very moderate man, but he was a Sunni in a majority Shia country. The French empowered Alawites, a Shia sub-sect in a Sunni majority country. And in Lebanon, they create this incredibly complicated mathematical formula that’s going to blow up when the demographics no longer work.

And this is what — you know, the British and the French did this all over the world. And I think you’re seeing that play out today of, you know, the hatred that exists in Syria among a lot of Sunnis towards the Alawites. So I think this — you know, there’s a tripwire that the colonial powers set in place that has now gone off.

MR. RUBIN: As we go to the very back, we’re going to do one final round of questions. I see one, two three, four if we can. We’re going to ask all the questions together, one final round. I am still a bit intrigued by the notion — and this goes especially to the question that Mosul will lay out and what Ataturk had done consolidating Turkey and so forth in that there was a complete dissonance between what happened in the boardroom with some of the agreements and the ability of people to establish facts on the ground to impact that.

And as we have parallels today in Syria or perhaps one can argue with regard to the Arab-Israeli conflict or with regard to disputed territories in Iraq between Arabs and Kurds, whether the real lesson that people have drawn from the Sykes-Picot agreement is ignore the diplomats and just grab what you can. And this goes into what Bob was saying about disorder. But in the back, sir.

Q: Jordan McGillis, no affiliation whatsoever. Mr. Anderson, you called Sykes- Picot a metaphor earlier but that metaphor only implicates two of the three main players in the agreement, the third being Sergei Sazonov. What can you tell us about Russia’s role then and any continuity with what it’s doing today?

MR. RUBIN: Great question. We had some more questions over here.

Q: I’m Francis Brooke. I work with the Shia Coalition in Iraq. One of the facts that happened, military facts, was the British created the Iraqi army. They created it headquartered in Mosul and they created it almost with an entirely Sunni officer corps. My Shia fellows are out there fighting right now in a very similar kind of conflict. If you all could talk a little bit about the military dimension and how you see the development of the military side after Sykes-Picot and its outcome?

MR. RUBIN: OK. That’s a very good question. We have a question on Russia, a question on the military. And we can bring in John Bagot Glubb and so forth into this, the Arab Legion. One final question here and then I’ll turn the floor over.

Q: Thank you. Amal Mudallali with the Wilson Center. My question is concerning something that Mr. Indyk talked about. It’s about the absence of an outside power to impose — to establish order in the region now compared to 100 years ago. If you talk to anybody now, if you look at the region now and talk to anybody about Sykes- Picot, people say what’s happening now is worse than Sykes-Picot because at least Sykes-Picot drew borders and left people there to live their lives. Now the whole Arab order is collapsing. And there’s one power that’s helping this chaos, which is Iran.

Could you please tell us what do you think the role of Iran can be now with the Mr. Sykes who live in Washington who think of redrawing the region now? What do you think they would think about Iran’s role and isn’t letting Iran doing what they’re doing similar to drawing borders? Thank you.

MR. RUBIN: Thanks. I’m actually going to direct the second panel to answer the question about what Iran is doing today because I want to focus just on history here. So I do want to have the panel address both the Russian aspect of this because, after all, the Russians were clued into Sykes-Picot. They were the ones that exposed it. And we can think of this almost as like the WikiLeak scandal of the deal in which so many different diplomats had their inner working exposed.

MR. YERGIN: But wait, wait. Some Russians, not other Russians.

MR. RUBIN: Fine, but for the sake of not quibbling. And then the other question was the role of the military because, after all, it’s not like people just picked up and walked away after Sykes-Picot. Part of what the mandates did and part of what both the British and the French did for decades afterwards was — and the Americans subsequently was to provide advisers to these various militaries. So if we can address those two questions, first with regard to Russia.

MR. YERGIN: Well, I’ll just say one thing about Russia. Part of what — what we haven’t talked about, part of the reason for the British on Sykes-Picot was to create a buffer to prevent Russian imperial expansion southward, which was their constant fear, as you know from your work, because as well — everything seemed to always circle on back to India and the routes to India.

MR. RUBIN: OK. With regard to the militaries.

MR. ANDERSON: I think it’s a really good point. And, again, it goes to this idea that what the imperial powers did not just in the Middle East but throughout the world was, you know, in India, they used the Sikhs. They would choose a tribe to make the warrior caste. And I think you saw the result of that with the ISIS takeover in Iraq of two years ago that — you know, in Tikrit, I heard that there was 22,000 Iraqi soldiers and security forces in Tikrit. And 600 ISIS — between 600 and 800 ISIS came into town and just put everybody to flight. Why? Of course, corruption and incompetence is a huge factor but I think another huge factor, as the gentleman was saying, you know, almost all the leadership, the military officers were — they were Sunni — sorry. They were Shia commanders in Sunni cities. They didn’t trust even the populace that they were under. And so they just fled. And I think this goes a huge way of explaining Mosul, Tikrit, Ramadi — just the utter collapse of the Iraqi army. It is a legacy back to this time of the way that the colonial powers chose warrior castes.

MR. RUBIN: Well, I’m going to put both Martin and Bob on the spot with this second part of this question in that a couple of decades ago, a US military trainer named Colonel Norvell DeAtkine wrote a provocative article which I think he subsequently made into a book, “Why Arabs Lose Wars?” He had worked in Jordan. He had worked in Egypt.

And one of the arguments he made was that after years of training various Arab armies, that you had the social class system within the army, in that the officers were always from higher ranking families, if you will. The conscripts were from a poor caste. And then there was the notion of shame so that you couldn’t have a sergeant major or a chief chew out a recruit with the idea of making him a better soldier or sailor. Instead, it would become an affront to shame and, therefore, it was easier simply not to correct the mistakes. And this led to a broader problem.

The question here is for Martin, to what extend did the armies which existed in the wake of Sykes-Picot simply reflect the local culture rather than simply become a creation of the British and the French?

And to Bob, in your experience with Europe and with looking at the creation of European armies over time, what are the biggest differences that you see between why the European armies didn’t necessarily fill the same role, destructive, that often occurred in the Middle East? Martin. And do you see the armies as a reflection of the culture of the societies or do you see that as a creation of the Arabs and the Brits? And this, of course, has questions for the current day given that the United States recently has become as part of nation building involved in military training. But we’ll leave that part to the second panel.

MR. INDYK: Well, look, culture and society are bound to play a role. How could they not? But I think the larger point here is that not that there is some cultural flaw which makes Arabs bad soldiers or Arab armies incapable of doing the job. But in the cauldron of the time in which you had weak governing institutions and leaders who lacked legitimacy, the way it was open for this officer class, you call them a warrior caste, but for the officer class to take power, which is what they did. And, you know, that is also a legacy of Sykes-Picot. And the consequences in terms of the way in which that arrested state building and institution building and replaced by military dictatorships and coup after coup after coup, you know, it really infected the whole system. I don’t think that was cultural. I think that was political.

MR. RUBIN: Bob, just from a comparative perspective, do you see any difference in the way new European states that emerged crafted their national institutions, specifically the militaries?

MR. KAGAN: Well, it just seems like it’s — you know, it’s apples and oranges. I mean, you know, the only — I mean, the Western European powers even in the late 19th century, the militaries were clearly subordinated to civilian authority. In Germany, the problem was — and it was a class thing because it was also a Prussian-Junker nexus with the military which was subordinated to the Kaiser but because of the constitution, it was — but that was then vanquished, right? So by the time the United States gets into the game after World War II, Europe has already been through all these horrors. And the problem is not militaries out of control. The problem is having any militaries at all, at least in Germany, which is understandable, and other places where, you know, because of the United States umbrella. So it’s a very difficult — their historical experiences are so vastly different that it’s hard to make a comparison.

MR. RUBIN: Fair enough. What I want to do is thank this panel. I think we’ve laid a good basis looking at the historical legacy of Sykes-Picot before we head into our second panel, which is going to explore the modern day, the contemporary ramifications as we look forward. So with that, I want to thank everyone on the panel. A round of applause for them. We’re going to take a moment to mic-up the second panel and then we’ll get going. Thank you. (Applause.)

DANIELLE PLETKA: Thank you for staying. Sorry. Make yourselves comfortable again. I apologize. Let me thank Michael and our panel for setting us up to solve all of the problems of the Middle East and punting every single difficult question to us, all of which we are going to answer very capably, I promise you.

I’m Dani Pletka. I run the foreign and defense policy work here at the American Enterprise Institute. To my right is Olivier Decottignies. He is a diplomat in residence at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He is in the — he is a French diplomat, but not speaking — he underscores not speaking for the government of France. He most recently served in the French Embassy in Teheran.

To his right is Elliott Abrams, who’s a former deputy national security adviser and the —

ELLIOTT ABRAMS: Not speaking for the —

MS. PLETKA: Not speaking for the former — not speaking for the former Bush administration, who’s now at the Council on Foreign Relations.

To his right, Ambassador Ryan Crocker. Ryan is the dean of the Bush School at Texas A&M University and the ambassador — I don’t think I can do this off the top of my head. And former ambassador to Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Lebanon? No? Lebanon? Kuwait? Wait. What did I miss? There are two more.

RYAN CROCKER: Pakistan.

MS. PLETKA: Pakistan, that’s right. Did I miss one?

MR. CROKER: No. That’s it.

MR. ABRAMS: Only six?

MS. PLETKA: So in case you wondered why everything was wrong in those places, who was always there? (Laughter.)

And, finally, Adeed Dawisha, who is a professor, soon to be emeritus professor at Miami University in Ohio, a native of Iraq. And so we are now here to talk about this.

It absolutely fascinates me to hear that the conventional wisdom is that Sykes- Picot sowed the seeds of all of the problems of the Middle East and yet you have a panel of distinguished members of what has fondly been called “The Blob” in Washington, of very diverse views, none of whom made a single — you’re the only one but we’ll have you soon. You know, we spread. But none of whom made any clear connection. And yet, if Sykes-Picot was such a bad idea, an example of imperialism at its worse, colonialism at its worst, it is amazing that we are constantly hearing again and again how the region should be divided up. And that’s where really where I wanted to start and then talk about some of the larger conclusions that come from it 100 years after Sykes-Picot.

So, as Michael did, I’m going to start with a very broad question, which is would a re-division of the Middle East in some way, whether ordered by outside powers or by the residents of the Middle East themselves, would that begin to potentially solve some of the problems of the Middle East? You can argue for who’s going first.

MR. CROCKER: Probably not — just going back to Sykes-Picot and is it the explanation for everything that went wrong afterwards, in my view, and I am obviously not an academic, it’s way more complicated than that. Martin Indyk said it quite well. An empire collapsed, things were going to get messy — another empire, maybe part of an empire and Britain and France stepped in. They were doing something I think fairly consistent or thematically consistent with what the Ottomans have done setting up and modifying their empire. I’m not sure there were any better approaches at the time, quite frankly. We took a run at it with the King-Crane Commission. That was really a version of Sykes-Picot. So it was very much the zeitgeist of the moment.

So what do we do 100 years later, well, I would suggest that we, as the West, not think we can draw better lines this time around. I think we have got to be engaged in the region, and I hope we’ll talk about that as we go ahead. We were a little narrower, the United States. Assessing and where we can do so without doing too much damage, possibly trying to influence, but to realize that what happens in the region, if it going to lead to any sustainable outcome better than what we’ve got now, is going to have to be driven by the region.

ADEED DAWISHA: Yeah. Can I just — take it back to the first panel and then move here. To kind of talk about dividing the countries or the region and so on. Now, possibly would be informed by — if you look at the kind of the history of the area in the last 100 years, if we’d had this meeting say 50 years ago, the demi-centennial group, then we would be talking about something very, very different. There was no talk about dividing the countries.

In fact, the states would be — if we were to think of the states as being weak, it’s because — not because of the — of sub-state divisions, but because of this kind of much larger, supranational force of Arab nationalism that was weakening the state at the time. If we look at it say 75 years from Sykes-Picot, we still actually very — I mean, 91 years, we begin to be faced with sectarianism because of the war with Kuwait and the Shiite rebellion and the Kurdish rebellion and so on and so forth. That was ’91. Even the 1980s, before that the most interesting aspect of that decade was the Iraqi Shiite soldiers fighting for Iraq against the Ayatollah Khomeini and Shiite Iran.

And, therefore, we need to be very careful about finding this particular point in history and looking and saying, oh, my God, look at what’s happening, all the sectarianism, the Shiites and Sunnis are against each other and so on and so forth and draw conclusions from that. It wasn’t the case 25 years ago, and it may very well be a very different set of circumstances that will face us 25 years from now. I just want to kind of put that first before we go on to talk about, you know, policy implications and so on.

MR. ABRAMS: The last panel used the word legitimacy. And I think it’s a useful term to bring into this discussion, too. There has been a view, I mean, over time including from, say, Woodrow Wilson, that you need to draw lines that will allow for the establishment of legitimate governments; for example, Shia government, the Sunni government or Kurdish government. And there is something to that, I would say. We see it in Kurdistan today. But the real question is whether you can establish a legitimate government at all. I mean, if you look at, say, Tunisia, you know, a 100-percent Sunni country really with no tribal divisions but it cannot establish a legitimate government, and so it overthrows Ben Ali.

So I would see that one can see how the problem of religious or geographical or tribal differences — I mean, Libya, again, 100-percent Sunni country, can’t establish a legitimate government. One can see how those large differences, religious, ethnic make it more difficult to establish a legitimate government, but they don’t make it impossible. And the lack of them does not make it possible or inevitable that there be a legitimate government established.

So I would say that we should turn away from the question of trying to draw borders, if you will, better and look at the question of why it has been impossible to establish governments that are viewed by the citizens as legitimate.

OLIVIER DECOTTIGNIES: And then also divisions tend to lead to more divisions. I mean, during World War I, there were — in the region, we — (inaudible) — know, there were three fronts basically. There was the front of the Arab revolt, there was another front in Iraq and there was front in Gallipoli, right? Now — and this came out during the Geneva discussions about a ceasefire, in Syria alone there are hundreds of fronts so the potential for division is just huge and not at all compatible with the wellbeing of the local people and the stabilization of the region.

MR. CROCKER: If I could just jump in on that because there were several very interesting points made here. I like Elliott’s in particular — the critical question of legitimacy here or the lack thereof. One of my tropes on the Middle East over the last 100 years is that it is a history of failed isms. You start with imperialism, monarchism, and its — particularly in its Iraqi and Egyptian variants, Arab nationalism, authoritarianism, communism, Arab socialism. They all basically have failed. And they all failed because they failed to establish basic legitimacy in the sense of governments that actually serve their people. So if you buy into that, the good news is the latest ism is going to fail, too. That would be Islamism. The bad news is that something perfectly dreadful will probably come after it. (Laughter.)

MS. PLETKA: That’s very optimistic. So there are sort of any number of – any number of directions we can go in right here. Let me just sort of pick at one of them, this question of legitimacy, which so many of us come back to. OK. So there’s one notion that seems to be very popular in certain circles in Washington, but I’d say in Europe as well, and that is that the only leader who can have any legitimacy from his people in the region is somebody who looks just like them, so a Shiite has to have a Shiite and a Kurd has to have a Kurd, but then, you know, there are — as Olivier rightly says, there are endless numbers of subdivisions to this. That in and of itself to me is extraordinarily offensive, frankly.

But the reality is if we look backwards, there are certain regimes that have more legitimacy and they’re not substantially better than some of the previous ones. So let’s talk about the monarchies for a second of the region. So why is Morocco, why is Saudi Arabia, why is Jordan, why are they seemingly resting on a more stable foundation?

MR. ABRAMS: Well, one reason I would postulate particular today is that the other places are in such disarray that by comparison they seem — I mean, if you were a Jordanian, I think you do look around at Syria and Iraq and Libya and say, at least we have social peace here and we have a government which though highly imperfect is not — what should we say — feral and vicious in a way that Ben Ali was or Gaddafi was or the Iraqi government was, Saddam Hussein was, or Assad is. So that, you know —

MS. PLETKA: But Mubarak wasn’t.

MR. ABRAMS: No. That’s true. No, no. That’s true. He wasn’t vicious in that — in quite that way. So part of it is I think as some fail, the ones that are still standing benefit by comparison. I think the monarchies — I mean, come back to this, there are exceptions, but the monarchies have an element of legitimacy that the fake republics did not have. Now, which is a monarchy that has least legitimacy today? Bahrain. Why? Because of religious division. But even there, you know, I wouldn’t have said that 25 years ago. I would have said there is a deal between the Sunni royal family and the Shia majority of the population where they share the wealth and it works, and it looks like it’s probably better than — to the people of Bahrain, better than any likely alternative. But I would say that the royal family has blown it by stupidity and corruption.

MS. PLETKA: Well said.

MR. DAWISHA: Can I say also that if you look back at the monarchies, one of the bigger tragedies in my opinion, for somebody who’s written on Arab nationalism and written glowingly earlier on the role of Nasr and so on, one of the tragedies in fact is the demise of the monarchies in the 1950s, particularly in Iraq. And the whole — and that ties in with the kind of idea of legitimacy is that the — I mean, the idea of legitimacy now, which has now gone out of fashion is that it has something to do with democracy, has something to do with people’s representation, it has something to do with a semblance of a rule of law.

You know, if you look at the Iraqi monarchy up to 1958, actually it had a lot of these things. Was it perfect? Of course not. But certainly, given the era, had it been allowed to continue I would have thought there was a very good possibility that we will have something resembling what we would consider to be a true democracy. And, therefore, this kind of monarchy had a certain — that kind of certain — a semblance of legitimacy, which, of course, none of the other countries that followed it and certainly none of the other regimes in Iraq that followed even approximated to that.

In many ways, for some reason that probably I need to think about more deeply, monarchies have tended to be traditionally — and I’m not talking about the Saudi monarchy here, but even the Iraqi monarchy and certainly the Moroccan monarchy throughout, I would say the Jordanian monarchy throughout, they had been more – not more liberal. I would say less illiberal than the republics that were and continue to be in the country — in the Arab world. Now, you add to that the certain legitimacy of the kings. All of them tend to kind of argue that they are somehow descendants of the prophet and so on.

And you put the two together and that gives you a kind of a legitimacy that’s much stronger than some military officer — going back to Hisham Melhem’s point — coming in the 1960s, jumping on a — you know, on a tank and taking over power.

MR. CROCKER: I’d just like to jump in quickly because you raise a great point, and it takes me back to my earlier point. We’d better be pretty humble as Westerners in thinking what the new state structure of the Middle East should be. As you point to the traditional monarchies, it’s the so-called republics that are going down this time, not the traditional monarchies. You asked about the foundation. Well, if your foundation is built on oil, that’s always good, but that’s not the case in Jordan or Morocco. They have their challenges but they’re hanging in there.

And I make the point, just, again, by way of saying, let’s be careful what we think we really know. I came of age in the Foreign Service back in the ’70s when the prevailing wisdom was it was just a question of time before Saudi Arabia and all the rest of those petrified old artifacts of history were swept away by the forces of leftist revolution. Well, the forces of leftist revolution have now been swept away and the monarchies are still there. So, again, just to caution about how well we think we understand this.

MR. ABRAMS: I was just going to say that — to follow up on this point, next year will be the 50th anniversary of the, quote, “unsustainable,” close quote, Israeli occupation of the West Bank. Who would have predicted 50 years ago this is going to last 50 years? Impossible, unsustainable. So I agree with this. Our track record on predicting the future has been really poor.

MS. PLETKA: You must all stop apologizing.

MR. ABRAMS: Maybe we should have the panel — yes.

MS. PLETKA: Right. Yes. You must all stop apologizing for interrupting. That’s what I want you to do. So I want you — I want to then bring us back a little bit to this, this historical underpinning. So OK. These were illegitimate borders that were drawn as if somehow there are places where there are legitimate borders, which I don’t quite understand, but still these are illegitimate borders. They were drawn. They were created by outsiders who were not informed by a local — by the preferences of the local government or the local tribes or the local sects or whatever. But they’ve been there for a long time.

OK, so are these now countries? In other words, when you ask — you know, when you ask a Jordanian or a Lebanese or an Iraqi, are they — and, of course, you alluded to this in the Iran-Iraq war especially. Are these now countries and should that weigh on our thinking?

MR. DAWISHA: Well, let’s — I am, for example, not convinced that the national identity has been eroded completely by sub-state — you know, Shiism, Sunnism, whatever. I mean, I’m not convinced that if you went today to somebody who — you know, who comes from Iraq or you go and interview someone in Iraq and ask him what his identity is, that he would say, I’m first a Shiite, I’m first a Sunni, and second only Iraqi.

It is palpably surprising how strong these — still these kind of national identities are even when you have long civil wars going on. I mean, the notion of being, you know — (Arabic phrase) — is a very powerful notion that I doubt very much whether it’s going to disappear very quickly because it happens to belong to one group or the other.

And that is again why I return to what I was saying earlier. That’s why we’ve got to be very careful before we start advocating, dividing these countries as though there were simply kind of words written on a paper and I just tear the paper and everything will go away, with a proviso, if I may enter, and that is the Kurdish question. I think that if you are talking about dividing countries or the possibility of divisions or the possibility of a sub-identity being more important than the national one, I think it works much more strongly with the — in the ethnic domain with the Kurds than in the sectarian domain.

And within the Arab community in Iraq or Syria, I am convinced that these people are still Iraqis rather than Shiites or Sunnis. And, you know, of course within that there are these affiliations but the concept of Iraq is not something that has been eroded. But I think when it comes to the Kurds, my feeling is that that’s much more problematic if you’re thinking in terms of national identity. The Kurds have been waging a war against the government of Iraq in fact since the 1920s. It’s not new.

But the Sunnis and the Shiites did, you know, live pretty reasonably together right through until Saddam Hussein and 1990s. So I think that there is a kind of a difference between the two. Yes, the ethnic one, Kurds and Arabs in Iraq and probably now increasingly in Syria is much stronger. It’s something that we — you know, that needs to be worried about. But Sunnis and Shiites I think I’d give it more than, you know, another maybe two decades before you can come to a conclusion about that.

MR. DECOTTIGNIES: And even then, I mean, the Kurds of Northern Iraq, when they talk about referendum on independence or self-determination, when they talk about a Kurdistan, it’s actually Kurdistan in one country, it’s an Iraqi Kurdistan still. So even then, you have that framework of reference which somehow is maintained.

MR. CROCKER: Now, I was in Erbil and Sulaymaniyah about six weeks ago. There’s a broad range of views as to whether or when, under what circumstances, with what continuing relations with Baghdad. These are complex, maybe close to existential questions. You’re going to be seeing a theme here in what I’m saying. I think we kind of let the Kurds figure this out, what they want to do, it’s their future.

MS. PLETKA: But it’s not just their game, is it? I mean, there is a great game going on with the Kurds. There are other outside powers who are egging them on.

MR. CROCKER: Yes, including us. (Laughter.) But —

MR. DAWISHA: Also called the mountain Turks, for example.

MR. CROCKER: Well, and, boy, you get into complexities here. Yeah. That was the old famed phrase, mountain Turks, the successive Turkish government talked about the Kurds. When I was up in Sulaymaniyah, I heard another very interesting phrase: Yazidi Kurds. So, boy, is this complicated. And Elliott, in an e-mail exchange last week, said he hoped we would get into the question of the minorities.

MR. DECOTTIGNIES: These are the plain Kurds.

MR. CROCKER: Yeah. You know, again, before we think that maybe the Biden plan is the right way forward, what are the consequences? And, again, I just urge a real restraint in modesty in how the West proposed to deal with this.

MS. PLETKA: So I want to talk about the minorities but I want to just stay with this Kurdish question and cheat a little bit by using it to talk about the question that I brought up before, which is this ethnic and sectarian determinism, because, of course, you know, when you ask — you know, Americans have become vastly more knowledgeable about all of these things and so, you know, the Shia and the Sunni, as the president told us, they’ve been at it for millennia. I don’t know which millennia the president’s been living in but not the ones I know.

But, you know, I brought for everybody — I printed out a bunch of maps and they’re not meant for you to use as a reference because it’s tiny but I think the colors will be illustrative. This is the Middle East and that’s the breakdown of ethnic and sectarian groups. Yes. That’s a really attractive national set of arrangements that you could have right there.

But yet if somebody said, hey, you know, you, other, somebody other than Donald Trump said, hey, you, Mexican, you know, what you ought to do is you ought just, you know, move over there to one of those states that we don’t care about, you know, somewhere in the middle, and you all ought to live there. And then you could elect your Mexican president and that would be great, and he’d be a Catholic Mexican guy.

And then, you know, you other people — you know, you people of other colors and – you guys go over there because this is essentially the argument that people and I — I don’t want to pick on Joe Biden exclusively, although he often has bad ideas but Bob Blackwill wrote a very big piece suggesting that we divide up I think Iraq but also Afghanistan and a couple of other countries. So where does this come from? And it is hubristic. Where does this all come from?

MR. ABRAMS: Partly the hubris, that is, we can do this. I mean, give me a map and we’ll just — you know, we’ll fix this. Same hubris that you hear from Americans in saying, you know, Arab-Israeli-Palestinian — 15 minutes, we can settle this. We know where the lines ought to be. We know — they’re an — we can do it. So you get I think a lot of — you get a lot of the sense that if these people are only like us, then, you know, we’d settle this much more quickly.

I think it’s also a sense — the question I would ask, I’m getting into minorities here, but, for example, what do you do about this mixture, your map. Where are the Christians here? Now, once upon a time, the French said, OK, Lebanon, Christians, which to a certain extent has worked for the Maronites to a certain extent for decades. But what about the other Christians who were being driven out of the Middle East because people — because, in fact, you can’t do it. You cannot look at that map and make that division except maybe, OK, Kurdistan. You know, the lines are not there to be drawn.

To a certain extent, what Sykes and Picot were doing I think is fair to say was not drawing lines. They were respecting lines. I mean, there’s a large overlap with the way the Ottomans divided up the area. I think it’s simply impossible. So the effort to — whether it’s Bob Blackwill or Vice President Biden, it’s an effort to make problems disappear by drawing a line rather than solving the underlying problem.

MS. PLETKA: So, Ryan — yes.

MR. DAWISHA: Can I say also, if you look at, for example, Iraq today and — I mean, I agree with you that there is a sense that everybody now — the word Sunni and the word Shiite and sometimes they write the word Shiite without an E at the end, which is rather unfortunate, but everybody knows that there is something called Sunnis and Shiites and they becomes instant experts on what’s happening.

You know what’s interesting about Iraq today is that if there is a kind of a mini- insurrection going on in Baghdad. It’s actually perpetrated by the Shiites, not by the Sunnis. I mean, the people who actually have crossed the — broken the wall and went into the green zone demanding a kind of a technocratic government and so on are actually all Shiites. Now, yes, it’s Muqtada al-Sadr who kind of told them, but Muqtada al-Sadr is — he actually rode on the bus rather than kind of drove the bus. I mean, there were demonstrations against the government and so and he kind of — he’s a great political opportunist so he kind of produced this idea that we have to — we insist that you people have to get rid of all these proportionments of positions and so on and so forth.

The point is, it is the Shiites now demanding a technocratic government? It is the Shiites who are demanding people who are no longer corrupt. That is a very small kind of example that shows that the notion that there is this kind of unbreakable division, line between Sunnis and Shiites and the Sunnis demand this and the Shiites demand that really it’s something that needs to be reconsidered and that the idea of — I’m sorry — a technocratic government that, in fact, works on behalf of Iraq, which, by the way, is a position that now the Ayatollah Sistani, the most senior of the ayatollahs is demanding. It should give us pause thinking as to what we should be doing in terms of dividing these countries into various groups. Sorry, Ryan.

MR. CROCKER: Just to add one more layer of complexity here. And when I was out in Iraq, I was struck in Baghdad that the preoccupation was not so much on taking on an Islamic state. There is almost a general assumption that the Islamic state is going to go. It was, then what?

One set of fears was that it’s going to be Afghanistan 1992, that after the unifying, quasi-unifying element of the Soviets was no longer there, mujahideen all turned on each other. A subset of that was a very pronounced fear of a potential Shia civil war that with the so-called popular mobilization forces against Islamic state, in some cases more coherent and better organized than the Iraqi armed forces, well, they’re still going to be there with all those weapons. Then what?

So even if, Dani, you could wave your magic wand over those maps and somehow get them into coherent sects and ethnicities, you might have a huge problem within sects and ethnicities.

MR. DECOTTIGNIES: Actually picking up on what the ambassador just said, I mean, it’s — that reminds me of that joke about Trotskyites, you know, when you have 10 Trotskyites in the room, you have the potential for nine opinions. I mean, that’s a little bit of that. And also, the only actor on the ground which is adamant about the fact that the Sykes-Picot borders should be amended is the Islamic State.

MR. CROCKER: And they’re the one force who’s actually physically tried to eradicate it. Hezbollah is doing a pretty good job too between Lebanon and Syria.

MS. PLETKA: Yes. And what about — I’m sorry — thinking about what you said and lost my train of thought. So what about this question of Iran that came up in the earlier — we keep talking about — we’re talking about the Arabs, well, not the Kurds but the Arabs, the Arabs, the Arabs. But the Iranians — let me digress for a second and tell a little story. We’ve had an event which I’m sure some of you have heard — (inaudible) — but we had an event must be about 10, 12 years ago. One of our former scholars wanted to do an event on the different ethnic and national groups in Iran. And I got an irate call from one of the Iranian anti-regime activists that was living in Texas. And he said, you can’t possibly do this outrageous event, talking about different groups inside Persia. And I said, what are you talking about? Why not? And he said, this is just an affront, you know, to all Iranians everywhere. And I said, why don’t you focus a little bit more on the regime? And he said, I can’t because I’m busy pulling together a petition to get you to stop this event. (Laughter.) And we wonder why the ayatollahs are still in power.

But, you know, that being said, Iran is also a country made up of only 50 plus or minus percent Persians and the rest, you know, Arabs, Baloch, a whole mishmash of other groups. Is any of this question relevant for Iran as well, especially as Iran has been taking the role of, you know, paternalistic, protector of the Shia, the Arab-Shia and other countries, whether it’s the Houthies or it’s in Bahrain or it’s in Iraq or elsewhere?

MR. ABRAMS: How do you know? I mean, Azeris or Armenians in Iran, how do you know how much nationalism they have and what they would do if they were free? And that’s really the question. It doesn’t look like we’re going to find out very soon but I think in a situation like that, it’s like, you know, the Soviet Union, I mean, in a sense that there’s no way of testing how loyal to the Islamic Republic of Iran, how loyal to this regime, Vilayat-e Faqih, what do non-Persians think about all of this? I think, you know, if the regime falls someday and there’s a greater element of — well, I was going to say of freedom, they want freedom, openness, then maybe we’ll find out and maybe it will turn out that maybe turns into another Iraq 2016. But I just — it seems to me, you know, to say it today is to go to prison or be killed.

MS. PLETKA: Do these conversations happen in Tehran at all?

MR. DECOTTIGNIES: Not that much actually. One element is that the Iranian regime’s elite is not purely Persian Shia. I mean, the leader himself is half-Farsi half- Turkish basically, and the Faqih himself in the Vilayat-e Faqih is. So somehow, the advantage of defining power on that base is that it’s not ethnically divisive.

MR. ABRAMS: Stalin was a Georgian. I mean, yes. You get to share power in the capital but it doesn’t — but, you know, now there’s independent Georgia. You get to share power if — or you get to have it if you’re Stalin but it doesn’t mean that people — the people’s national desires are not still existing.

MR. DECOTTIGNIES: It’s not, frankly, the main trend in Iranian domestic politics. I mean, there’s been some nominations, for instance, that could have been symbolic at some points of time like choosing an Arab, Shia Arab. An Arab is the national security adviser, et cetera. But I don’t think it’s a defining thing in general debates as it is now. But an interesting thing is that having more stability domestically on those fronts enables you to play a role in the region more confidently.

And the three countries, regional countries that are actually now the major players in the region were three countries not concerned by — not implied in Sykes-Picot. I mean, Iran was out of the picture because Sykes-Picot was about former Ottoman lands. Turkey managed to fight its way out of the consequences of Sykes-Picot with Ataturk. And Saudi Arabia was not a state as we know it today. It was only finalized in the form that we know in the 1930s. So these three countries, which happen to be out of the Sykes- Picot circle, are now the major players in the region.

MS. PLETKA: So we’ll get finally to this question of minorities. So theoretically, if we’re comfortable or if the people of the region are comfortable with the borders as they are more or less and if ultimately we agree that without all of the pot stirring that there’s a certain national identity that is not in fact based on being a Shia or a Sunni or even a Kurd or — then is there — then maybe there’s hope for minorities in the region but I think — you don’t think there is much hope for minorities in the region.

MR. ABRAMS: Which minorities I guess is the question. I mean, you know, you have people fleeing to Kurdistan, where they think they won’t be killed. As we look at this today, it doesn’t look as if most of the Christian communities are dying, will never be restored. I mean, that’s really quite amazing. And it’s also interesting, when you think of the French intervention in Lebanon, yes, prestige, empire — Christians. We are French Catholics, we need to defend the Maronite Catholics. It’s interesting to me that, you know, flash forward in 2010, 2016, nobody has that feeling about Christian minorities in Iraq.

MS. PLETKA: Well, the suggestion was taken with great offense when it was made by one of the presidential candidates.

MR. ABRAMS: Almost viewed as racist to think that — and we don’t even take Christian refugees, I mean, which is really even more startling. And I think it’s generally true to say that the Europeans haven’t done much to help Christian refugees either. So we’ve gone — you know, we’ve progressed by 2016 to the view that we — that being enlightened means we must be indifferent to the plight of these communities. Now, we did — we did bomb to rescue the Yazidis.

But even there — I mean, I was — I had a conversation with the Gulf Arab who — because I supported the president’s bombing of ISIS to save the Yazidis around Mount Sinjar. I had a conversation with a Gulf Arab who said to me, yeah, there weren’t 50 people in the United States of America who knew what an Yazidi was but you had to bomb to save the Yazidis, but 200,000 at that point — 200,000 of us Sunnis have been slaughtered in Syria and you don’t care. So it’s kind of you can’t win here, who is a minority, where, how are they being treated.

But I am really struck by the — I was going to say indifference — hostility to the notion that anything should be done for Christian minorities in the Middle East.

MR. CROCKER: Elliott, what would you do?

MR. ABRAMS: Well, what — you know, I’d ask you that about the minimum — I mean, I think there are things one can do. In the case of the Yazidis, there was a military option. The one thing that we could do in the United States is to say that, look, under international and American law, the refugee is a persecuted person. You have a well- founded fear of persecution, makes you a refugee. Is anybody being persecuted more than the Iraqi Christians? Does anybody have a more well-founded fear? They can’t even go to UNCHR camps safely and we are doing nothing about that. We don’t even take a representative percentage of Iraqi Christians. The numbers, the percentages are lower than the percentages of Iraqi Muslims. It’s as if the intervention even to help refugees who are Christians is viewed somehow are vile prejudice. It’s strange to me.

MR. DECOTTIGNIES: There was a similar debate in Europe. And at the time when ISIS progressed in Northern Iraq and especially in the Nineveh Plain, which was home to a large proportion of Iraq’s Christians, the French government decided to grant preferential asylum to the Iraqi Christians at the time. And there was a debate back home about that for several reasons. The principle of choosing religious affiliation as a ground for asylum just like I think similar to the American debate, but also the idea that it was kind of approval to the liquidation of Christians in the Middle East. So you had two types of critics.

But coming back to that, one thing is for sure is those minorities and a large number of them would rather go to Europe than stay anywhere in the region right now.

MR. ABRAMS: Is there nothing to be done?

MR. CROCKER: It’s a great point and a critical issue really. I’m with you on the refugees, all sorts of refugees but, you know, if we have to do a triage by degree of probability of death, I’m for that too. Whatever are we going to do to get people out of harm’s way, the way we have not led on the refugee issue at any level is, frankly, I think appalling.

But Olivier raises a very important question. Would that be tantamount to saying — or would it be interpreted as saying that Christians outside of certain areas in the Middle East, like Lebanon and possibly in Egypt, that Christianity is finished and we are evacuating the survivors? And maybe that’s where we’re at, that we should probably have the conversation.

MR. ABRAMS: Yes. But, I mean, this is like — this would be — it’s not your position here — it would be like saying, there is a — in 1940 surely, you know, 1,000 years of Jewish history in Germany and Poland and Hungary, we don’t want to kill it by taking those people as refugees. They died. The Christians will die or many of them will die. So I think we don’t have the right to say, stay there and maintain your churches, when they’re being killed.

MS. PLETKA: And, of course, you know, we all remember — we all remember Baghdad, I mean, the original constitution, the original Iraqi Constitution which was written by Christians, Jews and Muslims, and Baghdad was a very heavily Jewish city for a long time, and now, the Arab world is largely a Jewish free zone, and we have, in fact, accepted that.

I think we’ve gone a little bit further afield. Before I turn things over to questions, I want to come back to the Kurds because I actually think this is the thread, an interesting thread that ties us back to the original question about whether it is we can draw borders and whether we should help people to redraw borders, which is perhaps a more relevant 21st century question.

So I guess the $64,000 question for me is, OK. The Kurds have started lobbying pretty aggressively for some form of — for some form of something more than autonomy. And they’ve been joined in part by the Syrian Kurds who have managed to lop off some safe havens and some zones inside Northern Syria. So there are obviously Kurds also in Iran and then, of course, there’s a very substantial southwestern portion of Turkey that is Kurdish. So it Kurdistan — is the Kurdistan that we’re going to help them build going to be a Kurdistan in Northern Iraq or is it going to be a Kurdistan of all the Kurds?

MR. CROCKER: That’s why the Kurds have to be the one to, you know, lay out the elements of the issue and then debate it. Just, again, in a brief visit, I was struck by the very close relationship between the Kurdish Democratic Party and the Turkish government.

MS. PLETKA: Recent.

MR. CROCKER: At a time when the KDP is kind of leading the rhetorical charge for an independent Kurdish state, they’re doing just fine with Ankara. They’re not doing just fine with – well, not with Baghdad but with the Syrian Kurds. There are some pretty profound political divisions between the KRG, particularly the KDP, and Syrian Kurds. And then there is the question of Baghdad. Now, the position I heard from the Kurds, the Kurdish leadership, was any move to independence is going to have to be very carefully coordinated with the Baghdad government. We’ve got to have them as a trading partner. There’s got to be a free flow of goods and people. We cannot exist in terms of hostility. Well, that’s a great position. You know, let’s see if they can get there.

But, finally, as I said, there are divisions among the Kurds themselves. The PUK doesn’t see it the way the KDP does, doesn’t see it the way Gorran does. I think we’ve got to be careful not to try to push this argument one way or the other until they have really gone deeper into it than I perceive they have now. If you ask about plans for a referendum on independence, like when do you want to have it, how are you going to organize it, how are the questions going to be framed, you don’t get answers.

MS. PLETKA: No, but they do have a strategy to outline their cause. I mean, you know, they’ve come a long way from 1919, where they were at Versailles and they got – they basically got screwed. I mean, so what are they doing? If they’re doing it by piecemeal, first of all, they’ve got the outside power. Erdogan is looking to stick it to Baghdad so he’s supporting the Kurds despite the fact that he’s not for Kurdish independence. Then they’ve gone to the US Congress and they’re trying to get a separate arms deal. And, again, these are the accoutrements of sovereignty. And so while we can tell them that they need to figure it out, the real question is should we be helping them?

MR. DAWISHA: Can you tell me what the definition of a state — here’s an area — let’s not call it a state yet — that has its own president, that has its own cabinet, that has its own economy. They’re selling their oil independently. That has its own army, the Peshmerga. That has its own constitution, which, by the way, supersedes that of the Iraqi constitution when it comes to Kurdistan. I mean, if that is not a state, I don’t know what is a state, to be quite honest with you. Yes, what they want is probably global legitimacy, a seat in the United Nations. But on every other part of these indices, this is — to me, it’s a state. They behave like a state and we should probably see them as a state.

MR. DECOTTIGNIES: Facts on the ground matter, yes. But it’s also — I mean, you have two things. You have the relationship between the Kurdish space in Baghdad, on the one hand, which you describe, but you also have the relationship between the Kurdish space and the neighbors who have sizeable Kurdish minorities, too.

And in economic terms, I mean, I was also in Kurdistan a few weeks ago, Kurdistan is flooded with Turkish products. It’s very much integrated with Turkey’s economy. And, to a certain extent, in Sulaymaniyah, with Iran’s economy too. So you can’t antagonize those big neighboring states, and I think that’s why the Kurds are treading very carefully too.

MS. PLETKA: See? It is still relevant. Let me open things up to questions. If you’ll be kind enough to wait for me to call on you, put your statement in the form of a question, and identify yourself. The gentleman with the very persuasive arm right there.

Q: My name is Namo Abdulla. I’m with Rudaw, which is Kurdistan’s news agency. Yes. So, as you can imagine, my question would be about Kurdish independence. So Barzani today published a statement saying that – calling on Baghdad for “serious dialogue,” quote, unquote, and saying if the partnership fails, let’s become friends. That’s what he told Baghdad. So I wonder, given the current circumstances and the role the Kurds play against ISIS, what are the chances that the United States will support Kurdish independence? Thank you.

MR. CROCKER: I would simply say the obvious. We should not get out in front of the Kurds. And there’s a whole lot of discussion to be had. What Mr. Barzani said today is exactly what I heard when I was out there and it’s exactly the right thing to say. But the question emerges, given the current state of conditions, political conditions in Baghdad, can the Baghdad government have an effective dialogue on this issue with the Kurds. I just don’t know.

I just think that we as a government have to be very, very careful in how we handle this, what we say, what we do. And it’s — you know, I spent a lot of my life living in very crunchy parts of the world. It’s really easy to sit here in Washington and say, this should happen or that should happen without realizing the impact it can have on literally the lives of people who have to live with it. So we’ve just got to be careful here.

MS. PLETKA: This young man here.

Q: Thank you. My name is Jacob Chereskin and I am part of the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University. And I’m going off of what Professor Dawisha said when he was talking about Kurdish independence. So you were talking about how Iraqi Kurdistan is essentially a self-sufficient region in the country itself and you might say that that’s the closest thing we have now to an independent Kurdistan. But we also have areas of what is known as the greater Kurdistan occupied by three other countries with small pockets like Rojava in Syria becoming more self- sufficient and autonomous. I was wondering what would your predictions be about if there would be a unified Kurdish state within the next 20 to 25 years, do you think it would just be of Iraqi Kurdistan or would it be one of these greater territorial acquisitions that might come out of the border chaos that’s ensuing nowadays?

MR. DAWISHA: Well, of all of these regions that you talk about, the one that is most developed in terms of statehood is Iraqi Kurdistan. And I kind of — my belief is that what the Iraqi Kurdistan — you know, what Barzani, for example, wants is independence for Iraqi Kurdistan. And one of the reasons why Ambassador Crocker says that there is a strong relationship today between them and Ankara is probably because of that is that they want to make sure that the Turks realize that the Iraqi Kurds are not in any way supporting the other Kurds, right? There is certainly no revolutionary movement within Turks and so on.

So from all of these regions that we know of, Iraqi Kurdistan is the one that is ripest for statehood, for kind of — you know. The rest is very problematic. And I can’t see it happening very soon. If the Kurds can convince the Turks that they don’t harbor any harm towards the Turks, that they’re actually going to cooperate with the Turks, if they can be partners, then they’re going to be friends with the Turks, I think that there is a possibility that, you know, Ankara will sort of say, OK, go ahead.

And that happens, I am convinced that almost certainly independence will be declared. I don’t think the Iraqi Kurds are worried about Baghdad in any way, to be quite honest. They’re worried about the Turks. And if the Turks say yes, I don’t see — do we think that we, the Americans or the Europeans will stand against the Iraqi Kurds gaining independence if Turkey says, fine, it’s fine with us?

MR. CROCKER: If the Kurds decide it’s fine with them, no. But that’s got to be the determinant.

MR. DAWISHA: Yeah.

MR. CROCKER: You know, what is a Kurdish position?

MR. ABRAMS: And we can decide whether Kurdistan gets in the EU. (Laughter.)

MR. DECOTTIGNIES: Or would actually include Berlin in Kurdistan.

MS. PLETKA: There are plenty of Kurds there. You’re right.

Yes. This gentleman here.

Q: Talal Alabsi from the Embassy of Bahrain. Don’t you think you dealt pretty in a kind of abstract fashion when you talked about Bahrain, specifically when you dismissed the fact that we have a big neighbor and they keep radicalizing the Shiites not only in Bahrain but throughout the region, especially, I mean, considering it’s being a theocratic regime and in its constitution, they have to export the revolution? So I’m not saying there’s no corruption in Bahrain. There’s corruption everywhere. And if you look into our living standards, up to international indices, they’re pretty high. So I don’t know. I’d like to see your take on that.

MR. ABRAMS: First, I respect what you’re doing here, which is defending your government and your country, which is admirable. I think if you go back 15 years, you had a kind of modus vivendi between the royal family and the majority which was Shia. And I think it’s mostly the royal family’s doing that — because they have the power — that this modus vivendi has broken down. If you go back that 15 years ago, there was some nasty Iranian broadcasting. There was no subversion. I think there is now, but there wasn’t then.

I think you have an extremely intelligent and extremely effective prime minister who has been prime minister for decades and who, I mean, I’d be candid, who I think has used the power of prime minister to build a huge private fortune doing things like taking real estate that belongs to the people of Bahrain. I think the BICI, the international commission report, exposed a good deal of nasty repression which I think if one looks at the period since then has really not been cured. If anything, it’s become a bit worse.

So there’s blame to go around, and you can point to — one can point rightly to some leaders in the Shia community who have made this worse. But they don’t rule Bahrain. The royal family rules Bahrain. And I think that, ultimately, the responsibility for blowing this, to put it that way, really lies with them.

MS. PLETKA: This young lady over here.

Q: My name is Olivia Griffin and I’m with the Middle East Bureau at USAID. Just in light of your all’s discussions of both minorities and Christians of all sorts in the Middle East, I was wondering if you all had any comments on the declaration of the Yazidi genocide and how that reflected the US’s standpoint when it came to minorities and Christians in the region.

MR. ABRAMS: I generally think that if the facts are there, one should follow them. I would even say that with respect to the Armenian genocide. I don’t think we should be in a position of saying the facts are in, here’s the conclusion we draw but we’re not going to say anything. The problem, of course, is how does that impact policy?

Does it — excuse me for using impact as a verb, which I really hate — how does that affect policy? And I’m not sure it affected policy — is affecting policy all that much since the declaration was made. That would be the question. I understand the reluctance to make the declaration if you were not planning to do anything. It should be easier in a sense in the Armenian case because you don’t have to do anything. It’s 100 years ago.

I do think that the president opened himself up to criticism when he went to the Holocaust Museum and made a big fancy speech about the establishment of the Atrocities Prevention Board. And, you know, that was about five year ago, and since then, there’s what, 300,000, 400,000 dead Syrian Sunnis. That’s an atrocity. Some of them killed by chemical weapons in the last couple of months, that’s an atrocity but we’re not doing anything about it and I don’t think the — I don’t think the formation of the board constitutes adequate action.

MR. CROCKER: I just — I would echo that. And it goes back to the last panel, that wonderful quotation of almost 100 years ago, watch what you say. Words count and words from the government of what is still the greatest power on earth count much more so. So it would be really great to have your policy lined up when you make your declaration because the conversation we had earlier, you know, has the time come basically to say, Christian life is no longer sustainable in much of the Middle East? People’s lives are at stake and we have to do something. So we are going to take in as many as can get or as we can.

So I kind of think if you’re going to declare genocides, contemporary ones, you want to have worked out what your policy is. As far as I am aware, having made a statement on a Yazidi genocide, we have not exactly opened our gates to Yazidi refugees.

MS. PLETKA: So there’s such a thing as doing too much which some would argue is what Sykes-Picot was and then there’s such a thing as doing too little.

MR. ABRAMS: And talking too much.

MR. CROCKER: And talking too much. Yeah.

MS. PLETKA: This gentleman here. And then we’re going to only have time for one more question after that.

Q: Yeah. Hi. My name is Andy Stewart, StayFaster.com. I’ve heard a lot of talk about, you know, playing it safe, words matter and all that. But at the end of the day, hasn’t the train left, if you will? There’s not a whole lot of will in the world to really impact on what’s happening, that two countries have become five to seven. Where are we going to be in five years? What’s going to happen to other Sunni Arabs who don’t seem to have any friends in there in terms of — you know, maybe ISIL is the best way for them, I hate to say that, but, you know, we offer division to the Sunni Arabs. So hasn’t the train left? Isn’t self-determination prevailing?

MS. PLETKA: You guys try this. I’m not quite sure what the question is exactly but go ahead.

MR. DAWISHA: Yeah. I’m not sure.

MS. PLETKA: All right. Let me try and translate your question and you tell me if I’m wrong. So you’re basically saying, you know, we can no longer have an impact. The people on the ground are voting whether with their feet or with their guns about what the shape of the region is, whether it’s the Kurds in Northern Iraq or in Syria or it’s the Alawites and — or in any of these cases, that basically there are forces in motion that we can no longer impact so why?

Q: Why? And the global forces.

MS. PLETKA: OK. Is that true?

MR. DAWISHA: You know, it’s very difficult. I’m not used to predicting things. I did once or twice before and I was very embarrassed as a result of that. So I make sure that I don’t make any grand predictions. The point is that one thing I kind of learned in the Syrian case, for example. When we say that the train has left the station, the train has left the station as a result of the infusion of new forces that we did not know about before, whether it’s ISIS or ISIL or whatever. Yes, the beginning was probably in Iraq at some point, in 2005, 2006, which, by the way, when we defeated those guys in Iraq, they were living in the desert basically. They had absolutely no power. Only when things began to go wrong in Syria that they began to migrate and establish a base.

But when you look at these guys, the Islamists, and you see where they come from, they’re not — many of them are not indigenous. I don’t know what is the percentage of, say, Syrian Islamists as opposed to Chechens, and Tunisians, and Bengalis, and, I don’t know, Balochis, and all of these guys. The train has left the station if you think that this is what sort of happened. As a result of the infusion of forces that are actually in some way, in some significant way alien to the area itself.

Now, do we want to get involved with that? I don’t know. The Russians seem to be very happy at deciding the train has not left the station yet, that they have a role to play. Do we want to confront these forces? I don’t know. I mean, you know, I think my two colleagues on my left are probably more attuned to answering these kind of questions.

But there is still a conflict going on and there are still legitimate rights, whether you framed them in terms of Sunnis that are being, I don’t know, certainly by the Alawites or whatever, but there are people who feel that their own rights have been trampled upon. And all I can say is that you’re right in that sense and I regret that because I think if we had originally, very early on, realized what was going on and helped these people whom we believed had legitimate rights, maybe we would not have gotten to a stage were now we can stay the station — the train has left the station.

MR. CROCKER: Can I take a quick run at that?

MS. PLETKA: Of course. Go ahead.

MR. CROCKER: Because it’s something we’ve touched on thus far in both panels only obliquely, it’s the role of the US and the question of US leadership. In my almost 40 years in the Foreign Service, I learned approximately two things. I found one thing every couple of decades, a pace I could sustain. The first is be careful what you get into – that actions have consequences to the 30th and 40th order. I lived through it in Lebanon in the early ’80s with the Israeli invasion, the deployment of the Marines and the subsequent bombing of the embassy and the Marine barracks. I’ve lived through it in Iraq. But there’s a corollary which is be just as careful what you propose to get out of — that disengagement can have consequences as grave or graver than your original engagement. And I would suggest we didn’t do brilliantly on either with respect to Iraq.

So now, where are we? Much has been made of the Atlantic Peace, the Obama doctrine, which is a fascinating read. But there’s something — there’s something going on out there. Presidents since Truman have had doctrines centered on the Middle East. So from World War II up until the current time, these always have been doctrines of engagement. The US has vital interests, interests of our national security, those of our allies, and we must lead and be engaged. You can argue about how we did it but that’s what we always did.

Now, I think you have the makings of a different doctrine that is a fundamental shift from where we’ve been since World War II. And it is a doctrine of disengagement, that the world has moved to a point where the US should no longer try to lead. And, incidentally, you see this in Europe and in East Asia as well, a doctrine of disengagement. So I’d like to see that be the subject of our presidential debate going on now rather than the stuff they are dealing with.

MR. DECOTTIGNIES: I think there’s one important point that — linked the questions. The facts are not only local anymore. I mean, I quipped that joke on — whether or not to include Berlin in Kurdistan. I mean, the biggest Kurdish city — and you have Kurds in Europe. You have Kurds in regions of Turkey, of Iran, which are not the traditional Kurdish populated regions basically in the large cities. So it’s much more complex than it looks on the map. And the map, as you saw, is already rather complicated.

And from a European perspective, discussion whether you can or cannot disengage sounds like a luxury. You have terror attacks linked to the situation in the Middle East happening in Europe, you have a major refugee wave which Europe has to deal with. All that is shaking the very foundations of the EU as an institution and as a political project. So it’s —

MS. PLETKA: And what are you doing about that exactly?

MR. DECOTTIGNIES: The Europeans —

MS. PLETKA: What did you invite me to talk about today? Not this, but don’t hesitate to assault him afterwards. I promised Garrett the last question, but let me have both of you, perhaps Hisham and Garrett ask each a question and then we’ll wrap up.

Q: Since you’re talking about the minorities. Is it a moral responsibility for the United States, specifically when you talk about the Christians in Iraq and maybe in Syria, Yazidis, Syrians and others? Now, surely, sectarianism in Iraq preceded the invasion. Sectarianism in Syria, you know, especially after the Baath came and the guys of, you know, the Alawites in the early ’80s and all that. As I remember, many, many — I mean, a large percentage of the Christians in Iraq left when we were there — and this is for you, Elliott — when churches were burned, bishops were assassinated and we had tens of thousands of American soldiers there and we couldn’t stop it or we wouldn’t stop it.

Also, now, today, when you ask Christians in Syria, who hate Bashar al-Assad, they say, look, we have to stick to them, and you say look, a new arrangement will protect you, say, look at the Christians in Iraq what happened to them when your friends, the Americans, were there. So what we did and what we did not do in Syria also is affecting the plight of these minorities, including in the future the Alawites.

MS. PLETKA: Garrett, would you ask your question too?

Q: Thanks very much again. Garrett Mitchell, and I write the Mitchell Report. And I want to borrow the train leaving the station metaphor and go right to what Ambassador Crocker was talking about because I was thinking about a different set of trains that are leaving the station. The 44th president is leaving the station pretty soon and we will I think have a 45th president.

MS. PLETKA: As horrible as that might be.

Q: And the question that comes up for me from this — and I also just want to say to Dany and our colleagues here that putting together this session today, these two panels are really stunning and very, very important and helpful, and thank you. We’re not going to be in the business of drawing the lines if I think we’ve figured that out in a couple of panel sessions. There are some things we’re not going to be doing. But the question for the 45th president and hopefully congressional leaders who might work with whoever that happens to be is what does a policy of engagement in this region look like going forward? What is the nature of American leadership going to look like in that region going forward?

MS. PLETKA: OK. Thank you. That was not an easy valedictory question. Can I just synthesize for a second for our panelists and maybe cheat a little bit and make it easier. I mean, Hisham asked a question which feeds into what Garrett says, which is, what is easy is exactly what John Kerry seems to be thinking about, which is, gee, it seemed kind of nice under Assad. You know, he wasn’t so bad, right? You know, those guys — he seems a lot better than ISIS. The Christians did better, the — we know what this — you know, the strong man seems like a good guy. This is what underpins the thinking about Sisi, this is what — you know.

So, you know, how does that challenge work? And then at the same time, if in fact – you know, if in fact we’ve swung – the pendulum has swung too far to the other side and we are too disengaged, what does swinging back look like, because I don’t envy whoever president is going to sit there on January 20th, 2017, and is going to have to say, yeah, here’s what we’re going to have to do. So this is it. This is your chance to shine in the wake of a failure that was Sykes-Picot. What are we going to do? (Laughter.)

MR. CROCKER: Well, I’ll just toss out a thing or two to get it rolling with my colleagues. Probably you correctly inferred from my last statement that I favor the more traditional doctrine of US engagement in the world — that we certainly are not the world’s determinant but we affect what things happen. And when we are absent, other forces step forward, and Syria’s a great example. We’re largely absent. Iran and Russia, as you pointed out, are very much there. The train may have left the station, but the Russians and the Iranians are still pulling the switches.

So engage. That does not mean sending in the 101st Airborne, but it does mean sitting down with our traditional allies, particularly in Europe and in the Middle East, many of whom we have real issues with, but we have traditional relationships that have worked towards stability — Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the other Gulf States. You start by saying how do you see this region? What’s your assessment? What are the threats? What are the opportunities? What are the challenges? What do you think we collectively should do about it?

And to do the same thing with the Europeans not just on the Middle East, obviously; on the refugee question, where, again, we have been completely missing in some pretty horrific action but vis-à-vis Russia, because what we’ve seen — and I defer to Olivier on this completely — is that faced with a mega-crisis, which the refugee crisis certainly has been and is, it has strained the whole concept of the European Union as a political construct to the breaking point. And we seem to think it’s not our problem. So I would encourage the next administration — there will be one. There will be one, really. It’s not the end of the republic — to do one thing: engage and engage first in just consulting, genuinely consulting with our traditional allies in the Middle East and elsewhere.

MR. ABRAMS: Let me say I agree completely with that. I think one of the —

MS. PLETKA: Don’t forget to answer Hisham’s questions.

MR. ABRAMS: Yes. Yes. One of the unfortunate things about the famous Atlantic interview is the president’s deprecation of alliance relationships, which he really doesn’t seem to value in Asia, in Europe or in the Middle East. And as one talks to, you know, Israelis, Jordanians, Saudis, Poles, Czechs, South Koreans, Australians, that’s what I think we hear an awful lot — this sense of don’t you care anymore about the alliances? This is after all what in a sense separates us most importantly from the Chinese or the Russians globally. They don’t really have these alliances. We do. So blowing them up or paying them no attention or viewing them as a pain, a burden —

MS. PLETKA: Free rider.

MR. ABRAMS: Free riders, terrible. And it’s a formula for more and more —

MR. CROCKER: You’re part of “The Blob,” aren’t you?

MR. ABRAMS: I am. What can I do? You know, look, my Maronite friends in Lebanon, when the Syria war began in 2012 were angry at the Syrian Christians because the Syrian Christians, as you say, were all saying, better stick with Assad, you’ll be safer.

Of course, the Lebanese Christians were anti-Assad because they were Lebanese. You know, Ryan is the person to ask, how was it that the Christian communities fared so badly? Were there things we could have done and that we didn’t do? Clearly, one of – I would say clearly, one of the reasons is small defenseless minorities always fare badly when there’s chaos, when there’s a total breakdown of law and order. And there was a pretty total breakdown of law and order. And I think we have something to answer for in Iraq on that and also in Syria because it didn’t happen overnight.

This situation in Syria began in 2012, and it was foreseen — there actually in a sense was a prediction by Petraeus, Panetta, and Clinton who said this is coming, we’d better do something. The president said no. And I think in that case, it was foreseen, it was understood, and unfortunately we just sat back and let it happen.

MR. DECOTTIGNIES: I agree very much with the ambassador on the need to connect European policy and Middle Eastern policy for the next president, whoever the next president is. The train has left the station, but unfortunately it’s not riding in a tunnel, and that’s the challenge.

MS. PLETKA: Any final words?

MR. DAWISHA: No. I actually agree with what has been said. That’s fine.

MS. PLETKA: Thank God. That analogy got beaten to death. (Laughter.) Let me thank our panelists on our first panel, Michael, our panelists today, and, as always, our audience. Now, wait a minute. Before you stand up, in order to keep you talking about the issues, we do have some wine and cheese outside. So come and swill with us and continue to ask the questions and beat that analogy to death. (Applause.)

(END)