On behalf of Bama Marie Slaughter, our president, and Peter Bergen, the vice president and head of the international studies program, the sponsor of this event, want to thank you all for coming. To my left is Tara Mahler, another fellow in the international security program here at New America, and we have our author or co-author, J.M. Berger, who has written ISIS, the State of Terror, obviously a very topical book for this time. So without further ado, I think we'll start by letting J.M. tell the story of this book, how did it come about, what does it mean, and what does he think is important for us to know, particularly those who have not read the book, although of course at the end of this event we will all buy a copy and go home and read the book. Please. And thank you. And thank you for having me, thank you for the kind introduction. I am looking at my notes, I'm not texting anybody or I'm not tweeting. So I've been talking about ISIS for a month straight, without much break. And a lot of those talks have been along the same lines. So I'm trying to mix it up a little bit today, especially since I'm sitting with people who have written about aspects of this problem that are very relevant to where things go in the future. So I want to talk a little bit about ISIS as a millenarian cult. And the millenarian phrase comes from a reference to beliefs about the end of history that there's in the classic formulation there will be a thousand years of peace on earth prior to the end of time. And Islam does not have a specifically millenarian take that has a thousand year reign, but it has a very similar kind of approach. We use this phrase to talk about groups that believe they're going to build a perfect society and that in order to build a perfect society you have to tear down the existing society and rewrite all the rules. And a lot of the dynamics that we see ISIS using really echo this kind of approach. They very clearly fit into the mold of this and it's easy to lose track of that because ISIS is such a multi-dimensional problem. It's got a military component, it's got a terrorist component that comes out of al-Qaeda, it's got a huge stake in regional politics. But when we look at the strategy that you're using to build their state, their proto-state, to build their organization and to attract fighters and attract immigrants, it very much fits this mold. So what we've seen and there are many examples of this that go back through history are groups that have this utopian vision. And a lot of extremism, even though we think of these people as death cults, and it was very popular for a while to talk about al-Qaeda as a death cult, but really what they're about is a vision of a perfect society that they think they can implement. Some think they can do it sooner, some think they can do it later. ISIS has moved the sooner part up to the maximum setting at this point. They're trying to build it now and they're trying to show that they've built it. So the other phrase that we use that talks about this is apocalyptic. We describe them as an apocalyptic group. And generally speaking, when we use that terminology, that's all about the imminence, the right now of it. So even though al-Qaeda had a vision of a caliphate that would eventually rule the world and establish peace on earth, that was set off in the future, some point in the undefined future. They didn't have a plan for implementing it and ISIS has taken that dream and they've made it into a reality that they hope to depict. That doesn't mean that what's actually happening on the ground reflects the image that they're putting out. But they are projecting an image of a very utopian society that includes some very disturbing elements from our perspective. There are a couple of ways that they do this, but the one that really has grabbed the attention of everyone and is responsible for me sitting here is their use of social media. You know, I was fairly early on the ISIS beat because I had done some studies of how extremists use social media for recruiting, how their communities organize. And in late 2013, early 2014, I had built out some tools for monitoring this kind of social media. And that was the same time that ISIS was sort of launching its really organized initiative. And so I was riding that wave more by good luck than by foresight. And what we've seen is that ISIS is really leveraging communications, these kind of global communications and regional politics to take a millenarian, apocalyptic cult dynamic and broadcast it in ways that we've never really seen before. When you look at the history of these kinds of groups, you look at groups like the Anabaptists or you look at the Branch Davidians. What you see is that they're primarily local phenomena. They arise out of communities. They're people who know each other and who are drawn in from a relatively tight geographic radius, not completely. But their focus tends to be on a town, a village. It's a small community somewhere. And what ISIS has been able to do is to take a regional situation, exploit it, and then leverage that out to the global community. And it's enjoying what really is an unprecedented success in that. And we've seen that just over the last four weeks, we've seen a large number of Americans who have been arrested traveling off to join these guys. And they're not joining necessarily for the same reasons that jihadists have in the past. My first book was on American jihadists. And this is a movement that has a long history. Americans have been joining these kinds of groups since these kinds of groups entered their modern phase. But what we're seeing now are teenagers who are getting up and going because they want to be part of this perfect society. So we see a lot of discussion about the recruitment of women because this is about building families. It's about building a generational project. And the content that ISIS puts out is radically different from what we've seen before. And it feeds into this kind of recruitment, this kind of millennial draw. They alternate between visions of society that is functioning perfectly. So the pictures of markets that are filled with food, they'll have pictures of nursing homes. They have black flags hanging on the wall and say, this is how we take care of our elders. Police cars with the black flag on the hood. They're aggressively painting a picture of a functioning society at the same time that they're broadcasting these horrific images of violence, the way that they meet out justice in their view, both in terms of the execution of hostages and westerners, but also what they do to their enemies in battle, what they do to prisoners of war and what they do to criminals in their own territory. And both of these elements are things that we have seen on smaller scales before. So it's the scale and the broadcast of this that really distinguishes them from previous attempts to do this. And arguably there was never a time in history before that these capabilities, these global broadcast capabilities, lined up with a group who had ambitions on this scale. What they are able to do is take the template that has worked in the past for small groups to create highly committed people who will do extraordinarily extreme things and they're able to globalize it and pull people in. And we're gonna see that, I don't think it's gonna be limited to just extremism and ISIS. We're gonna see, I think, a lot of shifting of political boundaries over the next couple of years as a result of social media, as a result of global communications, 24 seven news, information travels and people can find each other in ways that they couldn't before.  Now you get online in 20 minutes, you're gonna be in a check room talking to 50 other radical druids and you can afford to travel to them. At the heart of all this, and I apologize, I think it was a little more focused in my head, this is the first time I've given this particular talk. So you get the new material, but it's a little rougher. Sort of fundamental to this is the maintenance of the illusion that everything's going great. And we talked about this in the book. Al Qaeda was based in, as many traditional extremist groups are on a presumption of weakness. And that pervaded everything it did from its choice of targets, they hit the United States because they were too weak to hit the apostate regimes in the region to its timeframe that its caliphate was gonna take place off in the future at some point to its propaganda and messaging, which if you've watched the most classic Al Qaeda propaganda film, The State of the Uma, which if you haven't seen it, you've evidently seen clips of it on the news. It's the one with the guys on the monkey bars. Two thirds of that feature length movie is about how weak Muslims are and about how weak they are. And Muslims are under attack or under oppression. They can't do the things they want to do. They can't live as their religion tells them. And then there's a short burst at the end that says, oh, and by the way, here's the solution and then it's guys on monkey bars and people training. And ISIS has really revolutionized that kind of model. The State of the Uma is kind of a classic extremist recruiting piece. And ISIS has thrown out the elements that make it a classic piece. They've thrown out the weakness. And you can see this progression starting in about 2012 and going through 2014 in their propaganda. In 2012, they were putting out stuff that said you had the same kind of story. We're really weak, we're under attack. And then they just dropped it. They just took it out. Then they started saying, no, we're strong. Then they started releasing lengthy narrative versions of their operations, showing them attacking and taking revenge. And this rhetoric of weakness just slid out the bottom as they were able to rise up on the ground. So what we have now is a situation where they have communications infrastructure and military strength enough to project an image of strength. They're saying we're winners. We want you to join us. And as long as they can maintain that illusion, that's an extremely powerful tool when you look at it in the context of these apocalyptic cults. It is the projection of strength, the certainty of victory. These are things that just have an incredible appeal to people who are vulnerable to this kind of message. And so that sort of brings us up to today and how are we gonna deal with this problem and where do we go from here? The issue now is extremely complicated. We've got all the ingredients of a regional war if we don't have a regional war yet. And I think that's something that ISIS would like to have. And I think that's something that some of their actions have been designed to court. In as much as people are distracted as there's other things going on as everything stays complicated, they're able to hold on to their base of strength. They announced their caliphate that they were going to claim the mantle of the caliphate at the same time that they seized Mosul. And Mosul is kind of the most prominent symbol of that strength now. So the question is, what's gonna happen to this group if and when it loses Mosul? And it's probably when, but I tend to be cautious because ISIS has outperformed our expectations in a lot of ways. Apocalyptic groups, malignarian groups have always failed because there's still a world. So if they had succeeded, the world would have ended. So they're always wrong. And they deal with failure in different ways. And some of them will become even more violent than they were to begin with. ISIS has set a pretty high bar for violence at this point, but I think they could become more violent still. The question is whether they can rationalize this to their broader community, whether the groups that are pledging to them overseas can rationalize around the loss of Mosul, whether if they lose Raqqa, if their territorial holdings are revealed to be weak. You know, I think if you look at some of the reporting that Liz Sly has been doing for the Washington Post, it really tells you that these groups are, that these towns are not doing very well, that there are health problems, that there are problems with sanitation, that their governance isn't going real well, that they have to periodically kill off larger members of Sunni tribes to keep dissent down. The more we can expose that kind of thing, the more it undermines their narrative of strength. But the question is what happens to the structure that they built up so quickly when that narrative of strength goes away. And I don't think we really know the answer to that. That's a question that sort of looms ahead of us. And we were talking beforehand about some of the parallels in this group to the Branch Davidians. There are similar kinds of elements, although ISIS is obviously doing this on a scale and with a sophistication that is far beyond a group like that. But one of the concerns I think that we need to have is that if we go to take Mosul, and I say that's an if at this point, we keep hearing that it's gonna happen next week, it's gonna happen next month, it's gonna happen in September, maybe it'll be January, I don't know. Eventually we're gonna take Mosul. One response that ISIS could have to that would be to create a city scale Waco to burn it to the ground on the way out. And there were a lot of reports about that to create. And they didn't pan out. It appears that Crete's been taken back in as much as any of this is clear without being raised. There were several reports prior to the capture of Crete that indicated that the whole town had been booby-trapped. I haven't seen how much that's panned out. If that's true, that's something we need to think about going forward. Ultimately, the other thing we were discussing and Tara was asking about prior to our coming out here was the difficulty of policy prescription. And that's, in the book, we did try and make some policy prescription. Most of those are things we shouldn't do, like we shouldn't put a ground force into Iraq to deal with this, and we shouldn't rise to their provocations when they put them out there. And it's really hard to see an outcome in ISIS territories that isn't going to involve a horrific loss of human life. It's hard to see any victory here that's not a peric victory. It's going to be, there are a lot of different scenarios in which a lot of people die. That doesn't mean ISIS is going to succeed or that it's invulnerable, but that it is stacked the deck so that there will be a tremendous cost to whatever happens. And in my view, I think that the political structures of the Middle East are such that we're not going to see a complete solution to this until there is a dramatic upheaval, probably in the form of a regional war, that resets the playing field. And that doesn't mean that the outcome of that is going to be better, but I don't think that, I don't think you can navigate the minefield of Middle Eastern politics, as it is today, and see a clear definitive solution to this problem. And the fact that ISIS has spread, obviously it's claimed that it has spread to a number of countries, and I believe them when they say that, I believe that they have some presence in each of the countries they've claimed because they have not claimed some countries where they have visible support. So they have some threshold, they have to have some kind of organization before they will adopt these different regions as part of ISIS. And the fact that they've been able to plant seeds, particularly in Libya and Nigeria, really raises a question about if we do see the playing field reset, if we see the political structures in the current Middle East changed, how are they going to be able to exploit that? And there are a lot of different directions that they can exploit it from. So one thing we tried to make clear in the book is that we don't view ISIS as an existential threat to the United States. It's primary tool against the United States in the immediate future is terrorism and terrorism on a scale that is something we need to fight, it's something we need to be concerned about, it's not gonna topple the United States. September 11th happened, the government went on, people went to work the next day, it fundamentally, we're very resilient country and we've come, I think, to understand that if you look at the reactions to the Boston Marathon bombing, I thought that that was a remarkable show of resilience that people really adapted, they did what had to be done, they went after the perpetrators, but it did not have the same paradigm shaking political implications that September 11th did. In the regional sense, ISIS is a much bigger problem and the question there is whether we can do anything that will improve the situation with our actions and it's difficult for me to see how we can do that and I know everybody has an opinion about that and I'm sure I'll hear some of them in the questions. Ultimately, I think it's hard to be optimistic when you look at the current situation. You can see an end to ISIS, but all of the past to that end seem to be very, very costly and if I have a blinding insight someday, a brilliant escape hatch that we can all get out of this in one piece, I will certainly be publishing it but right now I don't have that, so I think we'll go to questions. Well, first we'll let Tara make a comment or two. Sure, I was just gonna make a general sort of response to the book in terms of what I thought when I read it, the weak points, the strengths, what you did really well and then some questions woven in and I guess to start it seemed like the book had a pretty ambitious agenda and I thought it was extremely, extremely accessible and extremely timely. I asked him back in the green room before, when did you put the last edit in and they were editing it, putting in things in January and the book came out in March which is difficult and well appreciated. So it seemed like you tried to address the question of the genesis of ISIS, the group and how it's different than Al-Qaeda, people tend to put terrorism groups in big buckets and they're actually quite different in terms of their strategies and their vision and then you tried to do a look at the policy prescription and I thought the real strength of the book was in the second part, looking really deeply into ISIS and how it operates specifically with regard to its tactics and its strategy and how it's different from Al-Qaeda. I thought it was interesting because while the focus and the argument you make is the way it's different and how it's been able to be successful because of all the ways it's different and I'll touch on those in a bit. As I worked on Iraq back in 04-06, my perspective of this was sort of reading it, remembering back to what I was reading at that time and I thought it's interesting for all the differences that you point out. The themes in the book of the importance of messaging, information control, propaganda being crucial, metrics, problems and psychology, which were all very, very salient in all parts of the book were the same issues that were being looked at with regards to the insurgency back in 2004-2006 at the height of the insurgency in Iraq. So there were some consistent themes I thought but there were also, I think you did a nice job illuminating some of the differences with regard to ISIS and the two I thought you did particularly well and I thought were really valuable in the book because I had not read anything on sort of a deep dive on the social media side. I thought that was by far the strength of the book. I mean they go into extensive detail on the suspension of accounts, the active users, Twitter has 290 million users so the battle between being able for the tech companies to actually monitor and take action on these accounts and whether or not Facebook and YouTube and Twitter are doing enough. I thought you really spelled out that debate really nicely in the book, recognizing all the metrics issues that are quite difficult with trying to do that and then the second part that I thought was really interesting and fascinating was the different way that ISIS is using violence. So back in 2004, 2005, 2006, I mean there were videos, there were propaganda and there was violence but the book does a really nice job of showing the different way that the group is using violence instrumentally both as a recruiting mechanism and in terms of glorifying and promoting it in a way that other groups, both terrorist groups and regimes, I think you compare them to a 1.2 or Steven Pinker compares it to regimes like the Nazi regime is that they are proud of the violence and use it as a promoting mechanism whereas other groups traditionally sometimes have sort of tried to hide the violence so they did not glorify their worst, most atrocious acts globally and the intersection of both those things, the social media and the ability to broadcast their message in a way that other groups have not traditionally been able to do and this blatant graphic use of violence combined I thought was really sort of the interesting nexus that came through in the book. So that was my general takeaway. The last point is just to the policy prescription we spoke about this in the back. I mean I think you and you just touched on it, I think you did a good job pointing out this is what we shouldn't be doing, this is what we've done wrong, this is how the mistake led to this bad thing happening I was sort of left after the complex deep dive on social media, the complex deep dive on the use of propaganda and graphic imagery, the complex deep dive you did on the psychology and how you build empathy and try to get people to change their behavior. I sort of wanted, because you did such a good job on that I sort of left the book thinking each of those areas needed me to have more specific concrete actions and then you published an article online like yesterday with specific Twitter actions or Twitter critiques, so that gave me some of it. But I felt like those types of things would have really helped me get to that next point but I know the policy prescription part is the hardest or we'd all be sitting making really. Well yeah, I mean there are certainly limits to my ability to prescribe a solution here. I would also say that the part of the problem was writing the policy prescriptions in January, not knowing what ISIS was gonna look like in March and April. So for instance, the article I did yesterday didn't apply then, it applies to sort of like changing dynamics that we've seen. So, but yeah, I mean, this is unfortunately hard and I know people pay like 20 bucks for this so they should get three simple steps to defeat ISIS. I'm basically finished but just my one final thing. I thought, so all your writing on the social media part I thought was really good and interesting but I think that it really underestimates the scope of the difficulty for these tech companies to take, get a grasp of these problems even if they wanted to and were putting forth their best effort. There's 290 million active users, you can't automate a social media mechanism to do this. It's like people actually going through reports and even if they were putting a best forth effort I think it's extremely difficult problem to tackle just because of this amount of material there is and they're not a security agency, they're a tech company with other interests as well. So. Yeah, I mean, on that I would just, I mean, I do agree with that and I think that, you know, I think that I was hard, I've been hard on Twitter in the past on this issue and I've slowly come around to thinking that Twitter is doing a reasonable job if not a perfect job at this point. You know, but what we do see is that, I mean, you know, and it depends on the company and their philosophy and what obligation they feel. So on Facebook, the propaganda element is almost crushed on Facebook but the recruiting is still there. That's something that's like too granular, it's too small, it's too private to really to completely defeat that process and most of the time when we see people being arrested in this country it's because they've been in contact with us it's on Facebook. Twitter, one of the strengths and weaknesses of Twitter is that things are very visible when they happen on Twitter. And so it's battling that big visible part where they sort of, you know, are running into an issue and the question for them, I mean, Facebook has made the decision to address this problem directly with intention. We're going to, we don't want this on our service and we're gonna deal with it whereas Twitter is doing it reactively. They don't want to really take a position on ISIS not because they like ISIS but because they don't want to be arbiting political who's politically legitimate and who's not in the world and I'm sympathetic to that desire.  Thank you. Great. Thank you. I had a similar listing of, you know, thoughts on the book but Tara covered most of that and you didn't really talk about the book so instead I'm gonna more respond to your talk than to the book itself. And besides how often on a DCP stage you get a chance to talk political theology, you know, in a legitimate sense. In what way do you think this millennial death cult framework is helpful and how could we use it? I'm just thinking, because when I start thinking about other groups that would fall into this vein, whether I think of, you know, Jonestown or the Branch of Indians or maybe, you know, Jim Jones and Squeaky Frum, maybe the, you know, the Rajneeshis.  You know, the Branch of Indians just wanted to be left alone on their compound.  So, in what way is this helpful?  Perhaps, is that something we could wrestle with? You know, and yet acknowledging that none of these would be recognized by the mainstream practitioners as being anything close to what they see in the book. But is there some way in which you can think about the differences? Because again, this strikes me as a singularity within even this, you know, millennial death cult paradigm that you're trying, telling us is helpful to think about, you know, and how does that, so what accounts for this one very singular difference that turns them, because every one of these other groups is essentially an internal homeland, you know, homeland security or Ministry of Interior if you've got one of those, it's a police problem. Yeah. It's an internal police problem and you may be worried about, you know, what they're doing to their children and, you know, lack of education and, you know, oppression of their members and so on and so forth. But that's, you know, that's pretty much the end of the list of crimes. ISIS obviously is something that's dealt with with ministries of defense, departments of defense, looks to take territory, conquers whole groups. So if you could, I guess I'll push this back over to you. If we can start, there are internal discussion by saying in what ways do you think that this, you know, how does this difference come about and then how does that make this death cult paradigm useful or not as a category? Well, I think, yeah, I mean, you put your finger on it. I mean, scale and ambition are the things that ISIS has, that differentiates ISIS from certainly like the Branch Davidians or Jonestown. The question is, you know, the leadership, who in the leadership is making the decision about what they want to control. So if you're, you know, David Koresh, it's a compound. If you're, you know, in Jonestown, it's a bigger compound. If you're the Anabaptist, it's a town. And I think that you can probably point to the fact that ISIS has emerged from al-Qaeda, which had some of these elements but was really more of a political animal. It was a political movement. It was an extension of a political movement. And what you see in ISIS is lacking, relative to most of these other examples, is a singular cult of personality. That it, because I think, because it has this lineage that goes back through the al-Qaeda organization that has local and regional political participants, particularly the Ba'athists, who are at senior leadership levels in here, that it's a more political group than a traditional religious, completely religious cult would be. I think that they're exploiting the dynamics of a millennial cult. And, you know, a question that we have about this and people raise this frequently, and I don't think anybody really knows for sure what the answer is. Does the senior leadership of ISIS believe this stuff? Or are they using it instrumentally to control a population and to attract recruits? You know, I'm guessing that the Ba'athists, that Baghdadi recruited probably, at least didn't start with a belief that they were going to institute a perfect society that was gonna rule the world. Whether Baghdadi himself believes it, I don't know. But the people who follow them believe it. So they're able to use the mechanics of this kind of group very effectively to achieve a broader political purpose. And that, you know, the fact that they're doing it in that way rather than just focusing on the compound, the village, even the state, you know, may suggest that the leaders don't believe that they aren't true believers because they would have more of a fanatical internal focus if they really believe this is the end of the world is upon us and a thousand year reign is going to begin. So to me, that's the major distinction. As far as whether there's a particularly Islamic character to it, certainly, you know, ISIS has built out from Islamic teaching. I think that it resembles, you know, its dynamics as this talk sort of has been indicating that its dynamics are more similar to groups that cross a lot of ideological boundaries, the Christian and Protestant and just weird UFO cults. I mean, if you sort of look at a lot of the mechanics of the group and how it functions, you can see the similarities there compared to if you compare ISIS to Muslim groups. You know, the spectrum of Muslim groups is obviously much more diverse and much more dissimilar. That said, you know, I think there is room for an examination of this and Will McCants, my colleague at Brookings is working on a book about ISIS's apocalyptic beliefs that I'm very much looking forward to reading. And I think that'll probably help shed light on this. I think that there are, if you look at the sort of, if you wanted the classic example of this kind of cult, in Islam, you go to the assassin cult and that had an interesting mix of internal and external focus. It had a utilitarian political piece that interacted with the outside world, but the internal dynamics were much more similar to a Waco or the Anabaptists where, you know, there's a secret society once you get into a certain point, all the rules go out the window and you have the license to do whatever you want. One thing that I meant to mention in the beginning of the talk, and didn't, is that ISIS has adapted that kind of moral license. So when you see these cults, there's often taboo breaking that happens, particularly with sexual practices. In smaller groups, that tends to be leader-oriented. So you're David Koresh, you get to sleep with everyone and the men all have to be solid. In the assassin cult, towards its later days, they decided that the end times had arrived and so reportedly, and a lot of this is sort of shrouded in legends, I don't want to overstate the credibility of it, but reportedly, there was a period and a group within there where they just threw everything out and it was just like, okay, you know, bacon and orgies, it's the order of the day because the end of history has come, so all the laws are gone. What ISIS has done, and again, this may argue to a more instrumental use of this kind of dynamic by leaders who are doing it cynically, is it's created a dual structure where you have a highly puritanical society that also has sexual slavery, pedophilia, and host of practices that are done in a structured way. It's not, we're not discarding the law because the end of history is here, which is something you see in millennial groups a lot of times is, in early Christian groups in particular, it's like, well, the end of the world is on us and so therefore God doesn't want us to do all this stuff that he wanted us to do before, and instead ISIS is providing that outlet, but it's doing it in a way that is controlled and I think that we see when you look at the quality of recruits that they get frequently from the West in particular, but also from the Arab world, you see people who have different kinds of mental problems who are attracted to that outlet. We had a sex offender in, I think it was Wisconsin who was arrested for trying to join ISIS last week. I think that this stuff is being used very instrumentally and in a calculated way to bring people in and to attract people who are capable of very extreme actions because that's the other thing, the other element of this is that what this structure does for ISIS is it gives it fanatical followers who will not stop at anything if they can be convinced by their leaders that it's within the realm of what they do. So they will take much more extreme actions, they will be more violent, they will be more willing to die and they will, on a smaller scale, it pervades everything, so on a smaller scale you've got their supporters online who literally spend all day every day out there putting this message out in a way that is very difficult for us to compete with. I guess I'll start the questions, I'm gonna pull us back down out of political theology now and get back to the most familiar ground, at least here in New America, social media and tech companies. How confident are you that the social media companies are doing what they can? I mean, the social media companies' entire raison d'etre is to know their users intimately because they sell that. So you can't sell something if you don't know it really, really well. The users are the product, presumably, they're extremely familiar with their product. Facebook brags that if someone puts up a fake profile they can recognize that we don't even, that there's just something internally inconsistent about how anyone's gonna put up a profile that's fake and they can pull it down in a day. So how can they do these companies know who these people are? Are they able to identify them? Are they sufficiently aggressive in pulling them out? And how much of this is, as you alluded to, a lack of comfort with discriminating based on people's ideas and at what point does someone being, I don't pretend to be a tech kid, but the term's fanboys, is that right? At what point is someone, is a fanboys activity no longer just amusing First Amendment silliness and moves into the realm of being threatening and creating a climate and assisting in recruiting and whatever else? Just one other add-on to that, I mean, related to that, aside from the tech company, part of the problem is the laws haven't actually caught up with free speech on Twitter. So what constitutes threatening language in the olden days of a newspaper or TV is very different. Something might not be threatening to me if I see somebody say it about me on TV or in a newspaper, but it feels different when it's actually on you and you're going on a live stream before an event. There's actually a different threat component, and the laws have not actually adjusted to take into account that. So part of it, I guess, to pose the question, is to what degree also legally or legislatively what needs to happen? Yeah, I mean, we're in a brave new world here on both these fronts.  And the laws are a lot of the laws that apply to them right now are based on telephone companies. So if I use telephone to call up a contract killer and order a hit, the telephone company is not liable for that. Now, the problem is that social media is a hybrid of private communications, of sort of being your living room where you get together and your living room and talk to your friends, and that's kind of a protected venue. And being out in the town square and shouting things out at the top of your lungs, and that's a different kind of venue. And it's both at the same time, and we haven't adapted to it legally. And the companies, I think, have not wrapped their heads fully around the implications of it. I think that each of the companies is taking a different kind of approach based mostly on their internal philosophies. Certainly on Facebook, it is very difficult to find. I mean, I recently went to look at fan pages, which is how ISIS was functioning last year this time. They would create fan pages on Facebook, and then that would be a place for people who are interested in ISIS to gather, and then they talk to each other and you make connections that way. And I went back a couple of months ago to revisit that, and I couldn't find any ISIS fan pages. So the companies do, because they are in the business of understanding who their clients are so that they can tailor things to those clients, the companies do have the ability, at least theoretically, to get pretty granular about identifying who people are, maybe not perfectly. The approach that I took in a paper that I published last month gave a 95, I was able to do from the outside, identify a group of 20,000 accounts as ISIS supporters with about 95% accuracy. So if you suspend that group, you've still got 1,000 people who are not ISIS supporters who are getting knocked off in that process. And then the question of where do we draw the lines is also pretty complicated.   Google has added YouTube, particularly what's usually what we're talking about in that context, has added flags for supporting terrorism and they are pretty quick to suspend videos that support terrorism up until at least very recently, as of the last time that I looked at it, they had other technical tools they could be using to further stem the use of their platform. They may have implemented some of those. I've noticed that there's been an increase in ISIS, has been going to more other kinds of video sharing services and they still try and get on YouTube because that's where the big audience is. That's where they want to be, but they're finding it very difficult to operate there. And then Twitter is a younger company, a younger service than either of the other two. And it's only recently become a public company, so I think it's still feeling its way through these issues and figuring out what its responsibilities are. And I think that they did, you look at the comments that their officials have made. I mean, I think they're coming at it from a much more libertarian viewpoint that they want. They just want it to be the wild west and they don't really feel like being the cops. And I think that they can't probably sustain that over the long term, especially since ISIS is now using the platform to threaten to kill Twitter executives. It's an interesting study actually in the size and scalability of these organizations. I mean, in some ways Twitter has lost control of a part of a platform that it owns entirely. And how is it going to reassert control over that is like really kind of interesting question and it's going to have implications that go beyond ISIS. It's going to come up again and again in the other context, I think. Yeah, I'm just going to follow up on that. I mean, my understanding on the Twitter side of the equation, in order for something to be suspended, it's based on a report. So there's not like an automated bot that's like scanning 290 million active accounts and then taking out hashtags that have threatening ISIS related messages or they'd be honestly probably getting rid of a lot of people that aren't affiliated with ISIS. Well, that's, yeah, I mean, it's, there are better and worse ways to do this. Yes, they're not doing it as a program. Like Facebook has a team of people that are working on this, using a combination of network tools and human creation, whereas Twitter by its own account is responding to user reports. So I think that, you know, it's, I think that there's certain, there are ways to approach the problem if one is interested in doing so. And you know, I think that if you look at how each of these platforms deals with child pornography, for instance, they're all very aggressive on it. It's a question of how much resource they want to put into it and what legal liability they think they are going to face for supporting it. Terrorism is more complicated.  Terrorism is inherently political and it inherently involves a spectrum of people ranging from people who just hate US policies to people who would like to see Islamist regimes to people who are pro-ISIS. And so I think, you know, part of the reason that Twitter would be hesitant about setting a precedent here is that if we're going to decide that ISIS is the group that goes too far, you know, what's the group that goes too far next week, you know, and why are we doing ISIS but we're not doing Nazis or we're not doing, you know, Lord's Resistance Army. I mean, so, I mean, if I were Twitter, I would want to articulate a principle that would be inclusive of ISIS and would apply to other situations. And it's just a question of, you know, how many people do they want to have to hire to do this and to keep track of this and to think deeply about it? What about on the government counter-messaging side? Do you have any recommendations in terms of tech companies aside? I mean, the government is notorious for not doing a good job but anything digital counter-messaging. So, do you have any suggestions or? Well, you know, fundamentally we're, democracies aren't real good at propaganda and that's a good thing in many ways. I think that the counter-messaging is best served by an approach that fosters private parties to do this. One of the issues that you run into is, you know, you could set up a State Department grant program that would give grants to people who are going to do counter-messaging against ISIS. The problem is that a lot of those groups will then be instantly delegitimized because they're taking money from the State Department. And then that, you know, in the target audience of radicals that you're looking at, that kind of government support is just like the kids of the deaf. So, I think that the best way we can approach this is really to undermine the projection of strength, to use the intelligence that we have access to and I think that we should be more aggressive about using intelligence instead of just collecting intelligence. You know, if we can do, use satellite pictures. I mean, does anybody here doubt that the United States has a satellite that could read the digits off your watch from space? So that's not a secret we need to protect.  If that stuff's true, we can expose that. And that is something that we can do in messaging. If we're doing it truthfully, that can be a very powerful tool. Let's, so we've now come from like things theological down to tech. Let's get down to like just basic terrain again. We've seen over the last couple of months a lot of pressure on ISIS in Iraq. They've lost a great deal of terrain in Diyala. The recent losses in Tikrit. And now it appears that the big push is going to be into Anbar. So there are, and Mosul is more or less encircled although it's still held. So not a ton of good news for ISIS in Iraq. However, in Syria they seem to have a very secure base. You know, they get bombed every now and again, but that's really the extent of it. How much do you think they draw on the safety and security of this safe to everything except air power base on the Syrian side of the border? How important is that to them? What capabilities does that give to them? And how important is it to think about taking that away? Well, I think that what we see is that a lot of ISIS military strategy, it seems to me, and I'm not a military analyst. So you can correct me if I'm wrong on this. But it seems to me that a lot of what they do militarily and kinetically is about image management. It's about maintaining that image of strength. So if they lose, if they start to lose in one place they'll open up an initiative in another place. Even if it's not a serious one, that they can't take, you know, they'll hit Ramadi, they can't take Ramadi, but they'll hit Ramadi, they're trying to change the headline constantly so that it's not, it doesn't appear that they have like a cascading loss of capabilities and facilities. So in as much as that image projection is such a key portion of what they do, Raqqa is very important to that because that's where a lot of their internet capability comes out of. A lot of their ability to broadcast. The question is like, you know, that I think we're struggling with in Syria now is that if we just devastated ISIS in Syria with airstrikes are we handing the country to al-Nusra then? Are we handing it to al-Qaeda or are we giving it to Assad? Because there's no good party to come in and take over the vacuum that would leave behind if we knock ISIS completely out from there. One thing that I wonder about in terms of our air strategy is really, I mean, I think we could in theory take out electricity, we could take out internet connectivity, we could take out roads and do things that would have relatively less risk of civilian casualties but would have a dramatic effect on their ability to control their narrative and isolate them and at least sort of stem the spread of what they're doing in this global arena. So beyond that, I don't wanna, I'll stand by my lane and I'm not gonna talk in detail about their military strategy because I'm not qualified to tear. No, I was just gonna say based on some of the comments in the book, it seemed like there was attention on the strategy a little bit because on the one hand, you and Jessica attribute the genesis of the group to sort of the retreat of the US and the failure to negotiate a status of forces agreement, the inability to sort of stand firm after the surge sort of drop down attack levels. So you attribute part of the genesis to US actions or almost lack thereof or weaknesses or failures but then at the end, you're actually, the prescription is actually kind of a little bit of retreat. I mean, you didn't fully spell it out. I think you might have said contain but be careful of overreacting. So I did have a hard sense to understand on the sort of strategic level, there was a tension because you were blaming retreat for the genesis, but then you were almost prescribing a little bit of retreat, not complete isolation but you were prescribing a more restrained approach to fix it. Yeah, so I mean, if you broke it, you break it, you bought it kind of problem and so both of us were on the side of, we shouldn't have broken it in the first place, both at the time and in retrospect. And then my instinct, my feelings on this it was kind of interesting because when we first invaded Iraq, it was before I really started working on terrorism issues and so I've been watching my views evolve over time as the situation has evolved and I was very much against our going in. After we went in, I was very much in favor of us really stabilizing the country before we left and precisely because of this kind of dynamic, not this exactly, I didn't like look into the future and see that we're gonna be talking about this but something like this. And along with everybody else, I got fatigued with the whole thing and I, at the point that we started talking about withdrawing, I was ambivalent about the wisdom of our staying and it was clear that there was no will in the American political public to support our continuing on there. So ultimately, if we're going to go in and try and fix this problem militarily, are we prepared to occupy Syria and Iraq for 30 years is the question and maybe if we were prepared to do that maybe that would be the right thing to do but I don't, I kind of think it's not even still. So yeah, I mean I think that it reflects kind of the horns of the dilemma we're on here with our role in the Middle East. Part of our problem in the Middle East, part of the reason for groups like this finding traction politically, is that we've allowed the creation of a scenario where everything that goes wrong can be attributed to us and out of all the things that I would hope that we could fix in learning lessons from this, I would hope that it would be to let the stakeholders in the region take more responsibility even if it's going to go in a bad direction, which I think maybe we're seeing that in Saudi Arabia and Yemen right now. So I don't know, I'm glad it's not my job to do that because there are a lot of really painful choices that you have to make in looking at those. All right, with that I think we're gonna start our question period. This is how it works. I will call on you. Once you get the microphone, please wait for the microphone. Stand up, give your name and any relevant affiliation and ask a question. Now let me go through that. The article A indicates that it's one question singular. The word question indicates that it like ends with like a slight rise to your voice. That is the marker that there to be a question mark there if we were seeing it in print. I can see that some questions may need a sentence or two of setup. No question requires a three minute, four minute monologue to get set up. So again, once you get the article, ask a question in a relatively succinct manner, please make it a question, not commentary statements, monologue, what have you. And with that right here in the front in the ground. Thank you very much. John Keller, retired school teacher. What would their ideal society look like? I think that the portrait that they're painting in the media reflects what they would ultimately like to see is a society that is extraordinarily strict on moral grounds that they believe that they can follow the texts that they cite as being the prophetic tradition.  But, you know, it's authoritarian. It's to our sensibilities. And I think through really most people's sensibilities, even as other Islamists, incredibly repressive in terms of the rules of strictures that are on your society and your movement. They also, the violence that we see them executing in terms of their justice system, I think is kind of an interesting question. It's extremely violent. And they have cultivated a society of violence, of almost, you know, reaching psychotic proportions in a lot of ways. And it's really kind of a question that we pose in the book. And we're going to see over the next couple of years is like, what happens if they're able to, if you're able to create a society that has violence embedded in its DNA at this level and in this so visibly and so celebrated, what kind of society is going to result in that? Because I don't think it's going to just hum along like a satiritarian dream for five years or 10 years. I think you're going to see, you know, I think you open that box, so you're going to let a lot of stuff out that is really potentially going to take a very dark turn. And they're really focusing on children in terms of inoculating children to violence at a very early age. And, you know, in their minds, I think this is creating a generation of tough warriors, but what it is doing is creating a generation of traumatized children who have been exposed to incredible violence and forced to take part in violence at a really early age. And we're going to, you know, there's going to be a lot of long-term effects to this even if they go away tomorrow. Right there next to you in the blue shirt. Hi, I'm Ken Meyer, Gordon Roldachs. I tried to log on to the Islamic State website the other day, and I couldn't find it. Did I not do a good search or are the search engines blocking it? And if so, what is the URL? I make a point of, I'm actually extremely strict on this much to the frustration of many of my journalist friends, but I make a point of not helping them do their jobs by distributing their propaganda outlets. They do have a website, last I checked on it, I was able to access it. It helps if you are searching in Arabic, if you are following these networks in Arabic. One of the reasons that there's, you know, I spend so much time talking about the broadcasting part of the social media thing has to do with the fact that, you know, it's not always, it's not the easiest thing in the world to find this stuff. And the more that they can broadcast, the easier it becomes for people to get exposed to their material. And you're never going to be able to, I think, completely control the internet.  But the object is to limit it and make a higher bar for participation. Their website is, right now, they do have a website that has been functional for some months, somewhat surprisingly. Sometimes these sites are allowed to continue or the intelligence agency or the FBI might ask that a site be allowed to stay up even when a company might otherwise take it down. In the case of the ISIS website, a lot of their sites are hosted on a by a company called Cloudflare in New Jersey that has kind of a reputation for hosting a lot of stuff that the government would rather it didn't. Not just political stuff. The site, you know, their site is sketchy. It's not like huffing to post where there's a featured article and, you know, like a lot of reading content. Most of content is video, audio. It's updated every day with new material and I'm not going to give you the URL. I'm sorry. I'm not going to give you the URL. I'm sorry. Right here in the code. Great. Please wait for the mic. My name is Hal Kassoff. You mentioned you're not a military strategist, but you also indicated the potential for regional warfare. And I'm wondering in such an event, have you speculated on what the role of Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Turkey, particularly vis-à-vis the Iran-Iraq alliance? Yeah. I mean, I've speculated on it, but not in a informed way necessarily. You know, there's obviously Saudi right now with what's happening in Yemen, the Saudi Iran tensions are at the sort of center of things. If I were to pull out like a takeaway that I feel like I can say with some credibility that concerns me in this process, in the bigger sense, it would be the prospect that Russia could decide to actively take sides with supporting the Iranian block, Iranian-Syrian block, and turn this into a attempt to turn this into a proxy war situation with us that we would feel obliged to participate in. Ten years ago, you know, it kind of felt like we had gotten past that with Russia and these days it's feeling a lot more like the bad old days. So what I expect is chaos, and that's about as specific as I'd probably get with it. Okay, thank you. You know, I'm looking to do like the Obama male-man woman, man-woman thing, but none of the women here are helping me out. So in the meantime, I'll give it to my colleague, Chris Leonard, who has a question, but I will give preferential option to women in the future here. Yeah, thanks. Chris Leonard, I'm a fellow here. I was wondering, following up on this regional war issue, you said you felt at this point it might almost be inevitable, and I was wondering what are the tensions you see that would be intractable short of this kind of reordering through regional war, and do you see regional war being between nation states or more along the ethnic lines? Well, I think that, you know, the sort of what we're seeing starting here is a mix of nation-state and ethnic sectarian kind of interests. So the Saudis are at war with the Houthis. They're not at war with Yemen, technically. And the question, you know, that in my mind is, is this kind of, can it simmer for a long time or is it going to escalate? Because there are so many different parties with different interests. The thing that concerns me in this context and really the only reason that I'm thinking about this for, because coming from the perspective that I come from, is that ISIS is particularly focused in its attacks on places where it thinks it can escalate other people's violence to its advantage. And, you know, I wrote an article last week that I was expecting to get beat up on pretty badly and I actually didn't, I'm not sure why. But talking about the Sana'a bombing of March 20th, there was an ISIS-claimed bombing of two mosques used by Houthis that led, that arguably was a catalyst for what happened next. The Houthis responded by saying, well, this is it. We're like, we've got to take over this country once and for all and then the Saudis responded by saying, well, if we're not going to go for that. And, you know, we've seen this in the past in Iraq more regionally that they will pick the targets that they think can touch off rounds of fighting that don't involve them and then leave their adversaries weakened and give them an opening to sort of try and propose alliances. So, but yeah, I'm not going to try and oversell my grasp of Middle Eastern politics to you. Good, yes, ma'am, in the back. Emily Mush in the CNA. To what extent do you see the ISIS messaging to local Sunnis in Iraq as a weakness? Because we see the outward facing messaging as being very effective in galvanizing global recruits from across the world and what have you. And there's a lot of emphasis, there's a lot of expertise dedicated to that effort. But for the local Sunni who lives day in and day out under ISIS and knows its weaknesses personally and sees that the water stopped flowing, the electricity's turned off, initially that Sunni Shia, ISIS could exploit those fears, life under ISIS is better than life under Maliki, et cetera, et cetera. But when that narrative breaks down, what alternative does ISIS offer? Does it have a message for that disaffected Sunni? Yeah, I mean, a lot of the messaging, they do a lot of messaging internally. I mean, we all talk about the external messaging because it's aimed at us. But they do a lot of internal messaging. Most of it is denial, denial, denial. Everything's going great, nothing to see here. And obviously, if you're living there, you're going to have a different view of that. What we've seen is that they are willing to use extreme violence on Sunni populations in the country to suppress dissent. And so a combination of fear of ISIS, fear of the alternative, with the stories that we see coming out of the region, we see a lot of people who live in these areas talking very ambivalently about what their prospects for the future are because they don't see a good outcome. And I think that what we'll probably see increasing as the Iraqi army paired with Shia militias are starting to make progress against ISIS. They're creating material for ISIS to argue against. So I think, Aki, I think you made the comment that there were zero prisoners of war and we saw other reports that really talked about looting and retribution against Sunni populations. And the more that stuff happens, even if things are going very badly in ISIS territories, they can leverage the fear of that to try and, maybe not even succeed in making people love them, but just succeed in making people stay home instead of rising up against them. And the fact that the Iraqi regime didn't live up to its promises to the Sunni awakening partners, I think makes that a pretty easy sell too. Aki, up front. Hi, Aki Parrots, your humble Twitter follower. I have an eight-part question. I was just wondering whether you could talk a little bit about what happens the day after tomorrow. I mean, what are credible, powerful bases of support in these areas that ISIS currently controls that could potentially rise up and sort of supplant ISIS in the event that they're pushed out of these areas? Well, I mean, it seems to me that the most likely outcome at this point, putting aside the regional war question, is Iranian hegemony. I mean, one of the questions I had when we first started talking about taking action against ISIS and that's contributed to the ambivalence that you see in the book is if we're going to go in and do airstrikes against ISIS and only ISIS, or ISIS now knows her, the primary beneficiaries of that are the Syrian and Iranian regimes. So the question is if they are going to be the primary or only beneficiaries of this, should that have our fingerprints on it and shouldn't they pay the cost of those gains themselves because I would guess that if all other alternatives fell that Iran could probably take out ISIS if they really wanted to and if they thought that they had to that somebody else wouldn't do it for them and if it didn't serve their purposes to have that kind of antagonist in the region. So short of that, I mean, I think the problem is is that you have this kind of shield block. If you want to call it that, it's not a real accurate characterization but we'll call it that. Syria, Iran that is notarily pretty resilient and the question is Saudi Arabia going to be resilient in a war? Is Jordan going to be resilient in a war? I have more confidence in Jordan than Saudi Arabia but can Saudi Arabia prosecute a war against Iran and not have an uprising at home while that's happening? And I don't know the answers to those questions. It's hard to see short of the mythical quality of the Kurds at this point. It's sort of hard to see anybody you really want to root for in this. We like Jordan. Can Jordan deal with all these problems and its own internal problems at the same time? That I don't know. Part of the resetting of the political playing field, I guess one hopes that a strong movement could emerge from that but it's hard to see the seeds for that now. We saw the Arab Spring raise that promise and what we saw was that it's easier to embrace a more liberal, democratic kind of principle than it is to implement it in an organized way. I guess if there's hope, the hope is that people have learned that you can't just do it on social media. You can't whip up a flash mob, whip up a public and not have any idea of what you're going to do after your uprising has upset the status quo. But that's the problem. Every regime in the area that's not morally repulsive is incredibly weak and fragile. Or both. The Iraqis, the Lebanese, the Tunisians, really, really working the systems hard. Nothing to write home about.  I've sort of been working through this thesis in my head, but I think extremism thrives when the status quo is changing in one direction or another. It doesn't necessarily mean better or worse, but when the status quo gets upset, that's when people turn to extremism. They're rebelling against the change. And there's a lot of status quo change that is happening and needs to happen in these countries. And so, you know, the rise of a democratic people's front may not necessarily solve the ISIS problem. It may give us somebody to root for, but it may not fix it. Up against the wall. Bill Lawrence, where do you come down on the humanitarian piece and the humanitarian intervention piece? Because given where I sort of see, I haven't read the book, but given where I see your analysis going, still somewhere in this mess, in this chaotic mess, somebody has to stand up for the millions of refugees and someone has to protect communities that are being attacked. So where do you come down, first maybe in terms of principle and then secondarily in terms of actual actors? You've covered some of this, but I just wanted to ask it again. It's a really, that's a really thorny question. And what I would like to see, I don't know what the best approach for us is, but what I do feel like is that we don't have any kind of consistent principles that guide our approach. I would like to see us articulate principles we can live with that strike some kind of balance. Our interventions may stop a specific bad thing from happening while sparking six other bad things in their wake. Part of the reason I think that we have an attribution problem in the Middle East, everything's our fault either by action or inaction, is that we do things on a very ad hoc basis. So it's like, oh, well, ISIS is terrible, so we're going to take care of them. But what's happening in a car, we're not really that interested in it, so we're not going to intervene there. And ultimately, I think if we could articulate a set of guidelines, even if we don't stick to them perfectly, even if we have to make exceptions, it would help because I think that going back years now, I mean our interventions, our humanitarian interventions are very headline driven, they go to where the sexy headlines are, and they are determined to a great extent by headlines. In Bosnia, I worked on a documentary about Bosnia some years back, focusing on the foreign fighters, but also on some of the steps that we took in terms of where we went to intervention. And the message that I got in interviewing people was, we decided to intervene when the headlines reached a certain pitch. And it was a purely political, domestic political decision, and not a humanitarian decision. So I would like to see us have some structure for this, even if it's not something like if you would like put down a 10-point plan, even if I don't agree with all 10 points of the plan, at least if we have a framework that we can sort of say, okay, now where do we need to go from here? And really, I mean ISIS, we're on ISIS now, partly because they are carrying out atrocities, they're carrying out genocidal attacks on people. They're doing great evil in the world, but we're also doing it because they're doing great evil in a very headline friendly way. They have courted those headlines, and so that's where our focus goes, and I don't think that's necessarily the best way to make decisions about what we should do. I would add to that, combined with polling, I mean you said domestic, but it's headlines combined with how the American public reacts to those headlines, because I mean I'd argue that the administration has followed polling probably more than it should on some of its speed of decision-making, and I think part of that might be watching how people respond to bad lines, when they're in favor of strikes, when they're not. I personally think it actually, on foreign policy, the American public is more malleable than, traditionally studies show, the American public on foreign policy issue polling is more malleable than domestic, so people tend to have strong views that stay consistent over time, historically on education. It's harder to change people's views on that. It's easier to change them on foreign policy, so that's the area where you should have leadership being able to make the case, rather than react to the polling, and I think it's been sort of the inverse, which is the one problem. Okay, I'm going to cut us off because we're out of time, but I promised the last question to the gentleman here. Mike, the phone please. Deskush Irani, my question, who created, do you think Iran created ISIS to take the pressure out of, to save the regime's asset? No, I think that Iran is happy to exploit ISIS. I think it's happy to try and manipulate the situation with ISIS to its advantage to give it political leverage, but I think that there's a pretty clear lineage to this group that goes back some years, and we can sort of point to where it came from in a pretty specific way, as rising out of the al-Qaeda movement. Yeah, we will end on that note, noting that not only did Iran not create ISIS, but as I often get asked the question, America didn't do it either, nor did Israel to the best of my knowledge. So on that note, thank you very much for coming. Again, on behalf of Emery Slaughter, I'm Hugh Bergen. We want to thank J.M. for coming.