Using the Military in the War on Terror

Welcome to Plenary 2, the subject is military solutions and I again want to ask you to be sure that your cell phones are off and pass up your cards to the council person who is walking by so that we have questions by the way we have plenty of questions to start with so it's not a problem. This is being taped by KQED and I am going to introduce our two eminent speakers, the invasion of Afghanistan in the fall of the Taliban were intended to destroy Al Qaeda at the source, five years later Osama Bin Laden is still at large and the Taliban are resurfacing as a political and military force in Afghanistan mean while the US government and our military become preoccupied with Iraq. In this Plenary we will discuss whether America military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq have done more to combat terrorism or to increase the amount of terrorism both in the region and beyond. If direct assaults on regimes known to support terrorists are ineffective, what kinds of military actions might be more appropriate and do we have the capacity to undertake those actions? Our first speaker to your right is Daniel Benjamin, director of the center on the United States in Europe and senior fellow of foreign policy studies at the Brookings institution. Mr. Benjamin is also the author of the 'Next attack: The Failure Of The Global War on Terror and a Strategy for getting it right". As well a contributor to "With all our Might: a Progressive Answer to Jihadist Terror." The title of his discussion is "Misfire: the Costs and consequences of the use of military force in the war on terror". I am going to introduce our second speaker after Professor Benjamin speaks. Professor Benjamin. Well thank you very much I have just been upgraded several several classes by becoming a professor, I want to thank you for that. I plan to visit northern California a lot more. First of all I want thank Jane Wales and the council for much of this wonderful invitation, I have had a terrific time thus far getting to meet some of you and one of the - not so deep dark secrets about life in Washington is that we love to see this kinds of boondoggles because we get to see our friends from Washington we never have time to talk to and so I really want to thank you for giving me that opportunity. Secondly my own - this has allowed me to extend my own personal racket which is to address unspeakably depressing things in indescribably beautiful surroundings you know there are worse ways of going at this. So I really want to thank you very much for giving me this opportunity, it is a spectacular place. Well I would like to begin by trying to unpack a bit more what Larry Wilkerson my friend from Washington was describing in his talk. Now I begin with a premise that may seem objectionable to some five plus years into the war on terror and we can talk about that phrase more if you like. I begin with the premise that's actually some people may find as objectionable but I think it's all true that it's good to capture and kill terrorists, the terrorists we face are in fact are in extraordinarily dangerous bunch and while I share a fear of Hezbollah, should we attack Iran, my own feeling is that Hezbollah remains a a group that engages in calibrated violence and what makes Al Qaeda so very dangerous and the and the sort of ancillary jihadist movements it spawns so very dangerous it's that they don't believe in calibrated violence, they are not interested in the negotiation process, they are really interested in mass killing or as use to say, in a somewhat heart bitten way, they are interested in stacking up the bodies like cordwood. Well in that frame work you would think that military instrument would have a certain amount of utility and there are times when it when it does and Larry mentioned Afghanistan and I am forth square behind him that was a necessary mission - an usual mission because after all Afghanistan was the world's first terrorist sponsored state. There are in fact really no states in the world right now that sponsor Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda briefly had a haven in Sudan a real state. In Afghanistan we had a very different situation and the Taliban relied on on Al Qaeda for fighting men and for money and for armaments and it was a very unusual situation and for that reason and because of the the very close ties between the the Taliban and Al Qaeda, the mission was entirely justified. Now the problem is when you get out of an anomalous situation like Afghanistan or what do you how do you go after like al Qaeda and to get at this I would like to talk a little bit about what it is Al Qaeda and other terrorists groups are really after. At the heart of things, terrorism is about narrative, it's about a story. It's about trying to convince other people that your version of the world is right and that they have to line up behind you and this case of course, the people who are the audience the people who the people who the group wants to convince are the members of the Muslim world and Al Qaeda's narrative, its argument at root is that the United States and the west are together a predatory power, they seek to occupy Muslim countries, destroy Islam and steal those country's wealth especially their oil wealth. And the unfortunate fact is that when you deploy military force against a group like this what you are doing more often than not is confirming their story. It's you know if it's if it's a war of hearts and minds, if it's a competition of stories, unfortunately we confirmed theirs and deployed a lot of precision guided munitions but but not a lot to change people's minds and this has been terribly terribly damaging. Now I would be the first to argue that after 9\11 we faced a significant and enduring struggle against jihadists. But I would also argue that we have made things a lot worse by using the military to the extent that we have and Larry made the argument that we do this because the military is more competent than other branches of government. I would differ with him a bit and I would say that this is a result of the mindset that we have developed over a number of years really throughout most of the post war but also because in the last decade we have really convinced ourselves that as the preeminent military power in the world this was a tool that should be used in preference for others. You have all heard about how we spend more money on defense than the next eight or ten countries combined. I think this kind of thinking went went to the heads of the administration, it was when 9\11 happened there was something of an intellectual vacuum as to how you will address this kind of threat and those who had a prepared view of the world, the neoconservatives who felt that we should be throwing our weight around more, rushed in with the ideas and as a result we decided to take this on in the first instances as a military challenge and as I said I think this has really caused us a lot of problems. Well we have confirmed their narrative and we have also had the effect of boosting the stature of terrorists because what happens when you confront terrorists on the field of battle is you glamorize them, you valorize them, you make them exactly what they are in their own rhetoric, which is they are the only true standard bearers of Muslim dignities, they are the only people who are prepared to stand up to the west, they are the only ones who are prepared to do what they have said in the Muslim world and particularly the Arab world has been bedeviled for decades and decades by the problems of by the problem of having leaders who have said the west is doing us down and are going to stand up to them and of course they did nothing or when they did something, they lost and there is this profound sense of humiliation that accrues from having lost war after war to Israel and war after war in south Asia to India and so we now we have the situation which the terrorists who have made this claims about their identity have been validated and they have proven that they are the only ones who can in fact challenge us and and bloody us on the field of battle. And I can assure that even though the 3300 and so - 3400 Americans American military men have died on the field of battle in Iraq were not all killed by Al Qaeda Al Qaeda is all too happy to point to them and to show their own prowess as warriors and to beam these images around the world. Jane Harman mentioned the internet, well the internet has been the vehicle par excellence of broadcasting this this great narrative, this great drama of the faith to Muslims and especially young computer literate Muslims in many different places and one of the interesting things and we can talk about this more later well the interesting thing that you find that is in in virtually every terrorist conspiracy that's been wrapped up in Europe, the perpetrators whether they actually managed to carry out their attack or not had a a cache, a library of videos of killings from Iraq in their homes on their computers wherever you will, they have been emboldened by the images of of these insurgents, blowing up humvees and bradley vehicles, they have been they have been strengthened in their conviction by all the different decapitations that they have seen and there is a feedback mechanism here and the terrorists understand this very well. If we were a little further south in California, you know I think the people would understand that the terrorists have very high production values. They deploy routinely two or three different video cameras for every operation, they know what this is about this is about showing and telling as much as it is about killing. Well let me quickly try to sum up for you some of the consequences of what is going on as I said we would have had a struggle no matter what but the struggle I think is going to go on a lot longer and it would be a lot more difficult because of their misadventure in Iraq and by the way what ought to be said at the very outset is that if are going to attack terrorists militarily, you better be attacking terrorists and before we invaded Iraq there were no jihadists to speak of in Iraq. Well one of the one of the sadder consequences is now there are jihadists in Iraq and there are a lot of them I am sorry Paul Hewes is no longer here because perhaps he could give better better intel description than I can but there is at least several thousand members of Al Qaeda in Iraq and they are overwhelmingly now Iraqi, they weren't Iraqis in Al Qaeda before, it was not inside Iraq. In addition there is a much larger insurgency Sunni insurgency and many of those groups have become rather jihadists in their outlook, now we don't know how these groups are going to behave over the long term but it is but American intelligent sources already say that they are looking for targets outside of Iraq and we know that that there have already been attacks outside of the country launched by Iraqis, the bombing of - the attempted bombing of four and successful bombing of three hotels in Jordan in the fall of 2005 carried out by Iraqi jihadists. Now another problem with using military force especially as we have in Iraq I think would be obvious to all which is that the military is a blunt instrument and inevitably lots of people die, lots of people have nothing to do with terrorism. We don't know how many people have died in Iraq but the most conservative figures those for which is there is actual concrete reporting, people who have seen the bodies accounted them up in morgues it is over 60,000 and it could well be that it is over half a million, that is - that is the range of estimates. Well if we have half a million dead people in the country and often a lot of them are blaming the United States, we have made a lot of enemies. One of the people who was involved in the attacks in Jordan was a woman named Sajeda Al Mubarak and her vest failed to detonate in which she was asked, she was interviewed after said why did you do it, she said that two of my brothers died fighting the Americans. I think I can give you can intimation of what we made up against in the future. The fighting in Iraq has had - has had consequence for the entire middle-east. It is often thought that Al-Qaeda is a middle-eastern phenomenon. But the fact is that throughout the nineties the so called moderate regimes of the region were extraordinary effective at snuffing out Jihadist groups in the middle east and the phenomenon was much more confined to the Muslim periphery in Afghanistan and also in Europe. Well now Al-Qaeda and Jihadist politics and Jihadist movements are back in the middle-east, there was probably no country that was better at destroying Jihadists than Egypt. Yet in the last couple of years there have been at least three major Jihadists attack just in the Sinai Peninsula. There have been a Jihadist - an anti regime activities in Kuwait, a country that never had any such activities before. We have seen in Qatar the first bombing, a suicide bombing associated with this kind of terror, Jane Harman spoke yesterday about the Maghreb and I think the Maghreb which has a long history that I should add of Jihadist terror is indeed getting much more tense and there is a danger that the terror will return in a much greater dimension which is also extremely is that there intelligence reports about Al- Qaeda cells in Gaza. Now, I have no great love for Hamas but I will tell you that one thing Hamas has done very effectively in the past is keep Al-Qaeda out of the territories because of the recognition that if there were a catastrophic attack that is an Al-Qaeda type attack in Israel, it would set back the Palestinian cause enormously and the Israelis would react accordingly, that is to say they would inflict significant vengeance upon the Palestinians. But because of the chaos in the territories and because of the appeal of Al-Qaeda, Al Qaeda is now gaining a foot held foot hold in Gaza, this deeply deeply worrisome. It is worth noting as well what is going on, I see the five has shown up. It's is worth noting as well how the administration miscalculated what would happen in Iraq, the idea was that the remnants of Al Qaeda would come to Iraq to fight the United States because they would have to demonstrate their warrior virtues and so on and so forth in fact, the radicalization that has gone on in many Muslim countries has essentially gathered into a great tractor beam, people who previously have no involvement in Jihadist politics is one of the interesting convergences of the time that both Israeli and Saudi scholars studying the biographies of people who died in suicide attacks in Iraq noted that almost none of them had any past activity in Jihadist politics. that is to say all these people were radicalized by their perception that was what going on in Iraq was in fact unacceptable and force them to behave as though this were a defensive Jihad that is to say Jihad in which all able bodied Muslim men are supposed to go and fight the invader. One other area that's worth mentioning is Europe. I mention before about the effect that the spectacle of a military action have had on radicals in Europe. Right now, the arrest in Europe as compared with say the United States of people involved in terrorist activities are running something like 10 to 15 times as high as they are in the United States and unlike in the United States almost all these arrests are serious, these are real plots one of them - the conclusion of a trial involving an effort to have to take a lot of fertilizer in turn to bomb in Britain happened just the other day, the Heathrow plot that we saw last summer would have killed perhaps as many people as in - how did we get from five to two that quickly? - would have probably killed as many people as 9/11, if it had indeed down tendered 12 planes. So these are very serious conspiracies that we were seeing and I mention before the films that were in these people's apartment, we are also know from their own words how much they were motivated by Iraq. Iraq was on the lips of the 7/7 bombers in London and here has been plenty of newspaper reporting on how people who had been you know quote model citizen who were involved in community affairs became dejected and bought the idea there was a war against Islam and that the united states sought to destroy Islam and they were therefore radicalize and they were also capable of finding essentially the socket in the wall in Pakistan where they could plug into Al-Qaeda and other Jihadist groups. Similarly, Theo van Gogh was killed, this is the the Dutch artist was killed by a young Muslim who also was irate about Iraq - the Madrid bombers set around and fantasized about blowing up Madrid's largest stadium, a soccer stadium because of Spain's support in the early days of the war in Iraq and their way of motivating themselves was to watch a film of the killing of seven Spanish intelligence agents in Iraq. Well, we could go on at great length about this sort of thing, but I think that it's safe to say that it's time that we demilitarized our thinking about how to deal with this challenge, the vice-president is particularly fond of saying how before 9/11 we used a law enforcement strategy, this is an incorrect description of what we did, our intelligence capabilities are absolutely essential in this role, our ability to put people on trial and to humiliate them that way as they did in Britain is going to be one of our most valuable tools in the war against terror and I use that term advisably but it's a former presidential speech writer I can also tell you it was a linguistic inevitability. With that I am going to close. I am sure that you will have lots of questions and I look forward to trying to answer to them. Our second speaker is Mark Danner a writer, journalist and a professor who has written for more than two decades on foreign affairs and international conflicts. He is a professor of journalism at the university of California at Berkley and author of the books "The Secret Way to War" and "Torture in Truth". He will focus this morning on the topic "Being provoked: The Costs of Creating a War on Terror," professor Danner. Thank you Chuck. I will give - gladly give that title professor to Daniel, I am a humble journalist and do not have the theoretical apparatus that is supposed to adhere to professors and I come here as supposed to I should say- I come here as a journalist and I am very happy to be here indeed in this august company, Lawrence Wilkerson waxed bucolic about the beauties of this place and talking about the deer he saw outside his window, having a wonderful time, I arrived at 4:30 this morning and was wandering around the dark grasping of trees, I think the same three deer mugged me which is why I think they were so happy this morning, they took everything had. So I want to thank Jane Wales, Secretary William Perry and the other good people who have done so much to organize this event,this very timely event. Having said that I find myself somewhat bristling here against the - what I call the danger of unanimity. Sitting up at this table I have this very odd and very unfamiliar feeling coursing through my body and that is the desire to defend the Bush administration. I don't think this should be my job frankly, I think we all agree that things are very bad in the so-called - now we called the so-called war on terror, I noticed in the program that this session is called not military solutions but military solutions with a question mark at the end and I have a vision of Jane Wales looking at the final program saying "let's not imply there could be a military solution, lets put a question mark here" and we have all learned in the last few years through hard experience that the war on terrorist as Daniel just emphasized very eloquently, as Lawrence Wilkerson said cannot be won militarily. We all apparently have learnt as well that everything that's been done in the war on terror virtually particularly the battle of the story as my friend John Arquilla calls it, has been done badly or the opposite of the way it should have been done. The question, it seems to me is why did things unfold in the way they did and I am going to add my little effort to emphasize how terrible things are by reading here a little quote. This is a quote from the spokesman for the Islamic state of Iraq. I don't know if any of you knew that there is an Islamic state of Iraq, its capital is Ramadi. It was declared last November, it has an emir, a leader and various other attributes of a kind of covert government and in one of the statements at the beginning of after its declaration, the spokesman said "the waves of the fierce crusader campaign against the Islamic world have broken on the rock the Mujahedeen and have reached a dead end in Iraq and Afghanistan, for the first time since the fall of the Ottoman Caliphate in the past century - this would be in 1921 which Bin Laden is fond of referring to the end of the caliphate - for the first time since the fall of the Ottoman caliphate in the past century, the region is witnessing the revival of the Islamic caliphates" which is to say these is a declaration of of sucesss and odd thing about this wonderful line of propaganda is if you look at it closely you can see how it seems very likely that many people reading it would regard it as true, that the United States has indeed seem to reach a dead end in Iraq, indeed many of our own most prominent politicians agree with that and we have even said so more strangely and also in Afghanistan, we have a renaissance of the Taliban, of al Qaeda elements and further not only have we have reached the point where - and think how we view this war, this upcoming war five years ago, not only have we reached the point where you can argue that the United States has lost that is that the forces opposed the united states in the war on terror have been at least at this point have been successful but if look for example at what's happening in Afghanistan you see Taliban attacks last year 1632, this year 5388 those are figures from the US military and a more interesting figure - it seems to me suicide ops in Afghanistan last year 27, this year a 135 so militarily one of things that's happened over the last five years is there has been created a kind of - what would you call it, a kind of tool kit for insurgency that you can find on the internet that's fairly simple, that's low tech, you can find the instructions for how to make suicide vest, for how to make IEDs Improvised Explosive Devices which are in some cases extremely simple and have been the main engine of of attack in Iraq have been devastating to the US military, but most of these things were simply in artillery shell duct taped to the bottom of a mobile phone a very simple equipment costing a few hundred dollars at most and tool kit can be found on the internet, it can be used wherever it's now has migrated from Iraq to Afghanistan. So you have a method that has developed over five years, that's being used with astonishing success on the most expensive, the most lethal, the most overwhelming military force ever deployed - The American military, we hear again and again that the united states spends more - I think in 2001 It was more on US military than the next nine nations together. The common place the way it's put now is that it spends more in its military than the all the other nations in the world put together I don't know that's accurate but it's certainly true that as main the main officials of the Bush administration believed in 2001 the US has an almost unprecedented preponderance of military power traditionally conceived, the key phrase and here we are five years later and essentially this group have somewhat rag tagged jihadists, has beaten the United States and the main debate has to do with withdrawal from Iraq which would unquestionably be a very major propaganda victory for the jihadists, no question about it and one of our major political parties now in the opposition in the congress essentially advocates that. So I emphasize and I hope in a kind of shocking way that the road that we travelled and the extraordinary phenomena that we witnessed, the extraordinary turn in our fortunes - I am going to go now to couple of vignettes that occurred to me as I was fighting the deer at 4 4 AM this morning. The first one was simply a conversation I had in September - late August, excuse me - in 2002 when the issue of Iraq was very much in the public debate, vice-president Cheney has just given a speech, veterans for foreign wars in which he said there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction, there is no doubt he is planning to use them against the United States, and about that time, a few days afterwards I met had lunch with Ryszard Kapuscinski a writer I love and long admired, does anybody know his work here, I wonder. He wrote a book called "The Emperor" about Haile Selassie, a great reporter who reported I think 32 wars during his career. I said Ryszard do you think there will be a war against Iraq, what do you think, this was September he looked at me in astonishment and said "Mark, of course there will be war, are you kidding, of course there would be a war against Iraq" and I said why are you so certain and he said "Mark states like to fight states" that is the American military and the US has conceived as a major power as a super power had to deploy its military force after this challenge, after this dirtying the face of power. We get here to I think - a theme I would like to explore a little bit maybe in the questions which is two generals we have had over the last five years, two generals. One is George W Bush, obviously the other is Osama bin laden. I think we should look at their generalship over these last years. What was Bin Laden trying to achieve as a general? Daniel touched on this theme a little bit and to narrow the question a bit what were the attacks of 9/11? What were they about? We have been trained by the rhetorics in the bush administration as to think of these as the acts of evil doers, acts of pure evil there were about killing as many Americans as possible and all that may well be true. But if you look at it from Bin Laden's point of view, what was he trying to achieve? And I will argue first of all that the weapons used on 9/11 have been mischaracterized and misconceived. The weapons used on 9/11 were not box cutters. The weapons of 9/11 were not even airliners. The weapons of 9/11 were the television set, that is what that attack was about was creating a spectacular image that would rule the world, that would be the main motor of Islamic recruitment and that would show above all as terrorism is meant to do - that the face of power can be dirtied, the face of imperial power, this is a phrase that Menachem Begin the Israeli prime minister and also the highly successful terrorist in the 1940s for he drove the British out of Mandate Palestine, this is the phrase he used, this is what terror is about, it's about showing you can dirty the face of power and indeed the attacks on 9/11 did that and if you look at for example the tape of Bin Laden, I think it's from December - sorry it's from November 2001, discovered in December 2001 in Afghanistan of Bin Laden having his conversation with the sheikh, European sheikh who came and visited him from Europe. He is asking repeatedly how is recruitment going, how many people are coming to the mosque, how many new members have you signed up, so the first task or the first job in 9/11 was to create an enormous recruitment poster for Bin Laden and to move Muslims who might have been sympathetic to the goals of Al- Qaeda into becoming activists and Muslims who were agnostic about Al-Qaeda, to move them into the role of being sympathizers. You can conceive this as imagine it a target, an archery target. It in the red centre are the Islamic, the activists, the people were actually going out and blowing themselves up who were activists in the movement. The circle around it - the yellow circle around it are sympathizers and we go out to people who are sort of sympathetic to its goals but won't do anything about it and so on. In the general point of spectacular terrorism is to move people toward the center, to generally move them toward the inner rings, so that's the first job of of Bin Laden as general. The second job and here I get to my title being provoked is the strategy of provocation. What do you do if you are facing the most powerful military the world has ever seen and you are rag- tag bunch of - rag-tag I suppose I shouldn't use but you are a handful of people without heavy weapons, without an army in effect. Well, you use the other guy's army. You use the other guy's army against him. You provoke a reaction, a reaction that will serve your political goals and that's precisely what Bin Laden did so successfully on 9/11. It's very clear and a lot of things have been become clear in the last five years and one of them is that the plans of Bin Laden and his associates after 9/11 were for the United States to invade Afghanistan, to become immersed in a - and stuck in a quagmire there as the Soviets had been during the 80s and thereby the forces of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban would finish off the second super power as they had finished off in their conception the first - the Soviet Union. Of course the American military did not do that, they mostly fought that war from the air and used Afghan allies on the ground but this is one of the reasons that Ahmad Shah Massoud, the leader of the northern alliance was assassinated two days before 9/11 because Bin Laden expected an invasion of Afghanistan that was to be the end of the United States as super power. So the US avoided this temptation but instead handed Bin Laden a much greater prize as we have talked about already repeatedly in this conference which is the Iraq war. The strategy of provocation means you use your enemy - your enemy's own power to create what you need and what did Bin Laden need? Well, he needed as Daniel implied, he needed to win the battle of the story, the story that Al- Qaeda told was one of western oppression of Islam, one of western dismantling of the caliphate on earth, one of western expansion into Islamic lands and indeed the United States in invading Iraq reaffirmed every bit of that narrative and did vividly everyday and one of the remarkable things about this war is you can dialup you tube and look very easily you know it takes two seconds, look at various films of IED attacks Improvised Explosive Device attacks and suicide bombings in Iraq, there they are. It is one of the reasons why journalist now do not go out when I first started covering Iraq, when you heard an explosion, a big explosion you try to see the smoke plume and you ran as quickly as you could - goodness in five minutes, I am just getting going - you ran as quickly as you could, you got into the the car, you try to get to the explosion, to the attack to cover it. People don't do that now in part because the American military and the Iraqi military if they see someone with a camera will very often shoot them which is very discouraging. But they do that not because they are foolish or unreasonable but because if you have a suicide bombing or a big IED attack, you are generally going to have somebody there filming it because that suicide bombing and IED attack doesn't serve just to kill Iraqis and to kill Americans, it serves to supply a bit of film that can go on the internet and recruit more Jihadis and show that in fact this war to establish or reestablish the caliphate is being won. So all of these things are advertising ploys. The problem is when we get to the other general who I mentioned George W Bush, we were provoked, my title is being provoked well in a sense Osama Bin Laden could not have anticipated the kind of success he had because he attacked - in American administration that is unique in my lifetime, in its predilection for unilateral action first of all, in its dismissal of multi-lateral institutions, in its attitude toward the limitations that any sort of multi-lateral action puts on the unilateral or the uni-polar United States in its general ideology, this was the perfect administration to attack and I have a quotation here I always - I just love to read, this is from the national security strategy of United States 2003 and it's a kind of artifacts from a quote in the early 90's presumably written by Paul Wolfowitz I am not certain about that but it said "our enemies will continue to challenge us using the weapons of the weak including international fora, judicial processes and terrorism". I want to say that again, the grouping is international fora, judicial processes and terrorism. So the UN, the world court, courts in general are grouped together with terrorism as the weapons of the weak and here we get back to issues raised not only by Daniel Benjamin but by Lawrence Wilkerson and others and something I have written about a lot which is torture and the violations of of human rights that have been so well covered, that have supplied images that give and keep on giving in the Islamic world. If Osama Bin Laden had come to Madison Avenue in 2000 and said I need a poster, I need something to really express my ideology well it would take more of a genius than Madison Avenue could produce to come out with that photograph of the naked Iraqi lying on the ground, his face contorted in pain and the leash around his neck in the hand of the female American military - American soldier standing above him, this captures everything in an extraordinary way, impotence, emasculation, American power, humiliation, it's all there and the United States has fought this war in a way that those images have kept on coming and have kept on supplying what Bin Laden needs. I see I have one moment left, I was going to use my talk to support the Bush administration because I felt their pain, their loneliness here. And I guess I will use my last minutes to say simply that I look back to 2001 very vividly and also 2003 when I shed my role as a writer and journalist and actually started going around the country debating, arguing against the Iraq war which was then to come. I did a series of debates with Christopher Hutchins with Bill Crystal, Leon Wieseltier and it's worth remembering that it was somewhat lonely particularly in the elite company of the commentariate in the press to oppose the war. The war was nearly universally supported I was going to say, that Tom Friedman, Jim Hoagland, Farid Zakaria, one can go on and remember that a lot of people on the liberal side believe this vision of spreading democracy and I think the only thing is a vision to which I am quite sympathetic to and I think the only thing that stopped me from supporting it and and attacking it as much as I was able was the fact that I have reported in the sign now says stop - soon it will be - two more sentences that I have reported in Haiti and other places where I have seen what a mess happens after a totalitarian regime and also the extraordinary limits of US power - there is a wonderful phrase that Napoleon used supposedly "you can do everything with the bayonet except sit on it". Don't think too deeply about that. But he meant to say that military power is very very strictly limited in what you can do and the past five years if they had done nothing else had proved that very vividly. Thank you very much for listening to me.