63697_MEI_Panel1_audio 1 Gen. John H. Allen, Philip Gordon, Nancy Lindborg, Juan Zarate, Mary Louise Kelly, Questioners 1-6 Mary Louise Kelly: Thank you. Thank you, Wendy. Good morning, everybody. It is a great pleasure to be here. And I do indeed have a remarkable panel up here with me, so let’s get to work. I’m going to introduce the other four people up here with me and give you a sense of what we’re going to do in this first session. I’ll work my way right first. General John Allen, four star Marine Corps. General, now retired, who I first encountered, John, when you were the top NATO commander in Afghanistan. And, I should add, this month you have taken over as commander, or president as they say in civilian terms, of the Brookings Institution. So congratulations on that. Next, you, Phil Gordon, who was the White House and National Security Council Middle East Coordinator under President Obama, now at the Council on Foreign Relations. Welcome. Nancy Lindborg, who is president at the U.S. Institute of Peace, among the many past hats you have worn: leadership roles at USAID, Mercy Corps where you were president, and U.S. Global Leadership Coalition, among others. Welcome. And on the end here Juan Zarate, who was in the Bush White House as his counterterrorism chief. Worked on terror financing at Treasury before that. Now an advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and co-founder and chair of the Financial Integrity Network. Welcome to all four of you. So, one measure of how volatile and complex this region is, and hence our task this morning is, is that as I started thinking about preparing for this panel a couple weeks ago I thought we’re definitely going to lead with Raqqa, recapturing Raqqa. This is going to be the defining incident we’ll all be focused on. Then by last week I was thinking we’re definitely going to be leading with, “What the heck is going on in Riyadh and what the crown prince is up to there?” And by the time this weekend rolled around I was thinking, “Uh-huh, we’re definitely going to need to [talk about] Lebanon and what the heck is up with the prime minister of Lebanon, and where is he today?” And that is setting aside half a dozen other important and pivotal developments unfolding in this region as we speak. All of which is to say, I’m going to throw it to the panel to let us know where we should start. We will get to Iran, spoiler alert!; we will get to Syria; we will get to the Middle East peace process writ large in the 90 www.gmrtranscription.com 63697_MEI_Panel1_audio 2 Gen. John H. Allen, Philip Gordon, Nancy Lindborg, Juan Zarate, Mary Louise Kelly, Questioners 1-6 minutes before us. And I’m going to open the bidding by noting not only is this a remarkable panel, but we have here gathered people with deep expertise of the military aspects of the region, the diplomatic aspects, economic and sanctions in play, and then the role that international organizations and networks play. So what I’m going to do is let them start. I’m going to give you a minute each, guys. That’s, like, a few sentences. But just to lay the groundwork of what to you are the biggest challenges, the biggest questions in the region. And General Allen, I’ll give you the first word. In a few sentences a quick summary of the many challenges from the military point of view. John Allen: Well, Mary Louise, it’s great to be with you. And let me just make a very quick comment. In an era where we’re wondering about truth in our society and the advent of the post-truth theory of where we are today, I truly believe that NPR is one of the sources that we can be fully confident in, and I want to thank you for your contributions. It’s been my pleasure, really, to be in and out of the Middle East for more than 25 years and I don’t think I’ve ever seen it as unstable as it is today. And just to touch the key potential military flashpoints, because I think that’s where we are. And I’ll sort of [go] from north to south. Obviously the referendum in the KRG, the Kurdistan Regional Government, is a potential flashpoint in a variety of ways. And I won’t go into the details now. We can talk about that. Reconciliation between the Kurds and the Iraqis in the aftermath of the recovery of much of Iraq. Reconciliation within Iraq of the Sunna elements and the Shia elements. As we continue to the south, what’s going on in Saudi Arabia, I think, has a number of us scratching our heads. But I think the young prince, Mohammed bin Salman, may have violated one of the great strictures of great power politics, which is: don’t destabilize your base as you’re attempting to engage in broad overseas adventures, which would be in Lebanon and in Yemen still. But also, the other aspect of the region is that four party versus one party standoff that we see in the Gulf: Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Emirates, Egypt versus Qatar. That has, I think, permanently fractured the GCC, potentially. It has engaged Iran more deeply in the problems and has brought Turkey now back into the region. And of course, we have the four civil wars that are underway that Wendy talked about, any one of which has its own destabilizing www.gmrtranscription.com 63697_MEI_Panel1_audio 3 Gen. John H. Allen, Philip Gordon, Nancy Lindborg, Juan Zarate, Mary Louise Kelly, Questioners 1-6 quality to it. And of course, underlying most of it is the continued Iranian destabilization more broadly of the region. From the western third of Afghanistan all the way across through Lebanon and some relationship still with Hamas, obviously pointed towards, with Hezbollah, pointed towards Israel, our ally in the region. And then of course, beyond all that, if that doesn’t turn your stomach, the potential decertification of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action by the president with respect to Iran’s compliance with the negotiated outcome of that process. If we snap sanctions back on the Iranians, we could find ourselves in another level of conflict than we’ve had before. And having been one of the military planners to deal with Iran’s nuclear program, that isn’t a particularly appealing prospect. And then finally, my last gig, as they say in government, which is the Islamic State. We’re in a different place today than we were when we first confronted them in ’14. But the Islamic State today, while it has been in many respects decimated in the physical sense, in what we call core ISIL in Iraq and Syria, it became a three- headed monster a couple of years ago. Which means the Daesh, as it’s called, now has provincial holdings in many of the places around the Middle East. The periphery in Libya, in the Sinai, in the Khorasan, which is the “Khorasan” part of Pakistan. But it also has gone global, and so a very effective global network, which is riding on the internet of things. So many challenges. And they all are related in some form or other. Being able as an administration to figure out how they do, in fact, relate. And they all sort of end, or could begin, in the Middle East process, which is one of the most important aspects of the service that I’ve ever had. They all have an interrelationship that we should help the administration figure out as they seek, not to parcel out the different issues, but ultimately to find the common threads between them so we can have a comprehensive Middle Eastern policy, which we lack right now. Ms. Kelly: Thank you. Excellent starting point. Phil, let me let you pick up. How do U.S. diplomatic challenges and opportunities overlap with the military picture? Philip Gordon: Thanks, Mary Louise. Nice to be here. As you say, we face a bewildering number of diplomatic, military and other challenges across the region. I think if you gave us all a test and we all had 60 www.gmrtranscription.com 63697_MEI_Panel1_audio 4 Gen. John H. Allen, Philip Gordon, Nancy Lindborg, Juan Zarate, Mary Louise Kelly, Questioners 1-6 seconds to get them all in, John did about as well as possible. But at the end of it I think we’d say to ourselves, and you’d say to yourself, “Well, we didn’t even mention X, Y and Z,” because it may be unprecedented the number of hugely important things that we do face. So rather than try to pass that test I would make a comment about the region more broadly and where it fits into U.S. policy, which is to say that – this panel, I guess, is about priorities and what we focus on would sort of indicate priorities. My basic point to kick off would be that the Middle East itself must be a priority. And I say that as somebody who has, I think, learned appropriate skepticism about how the United States can deal with some of these challenges, some of which are literally impossible. And as someone who served in an administration who proclaimed a goal of pivoting away from the region, partly because it was too difficult.