What's going on everybody, my name is John Hammond and this is the first video and hopefully a long series on Pico CTF 2019. I'm not going to be playing their game or kind of their interactive Unity experience activity thing. I'm going to stick to the challenge problems strictly as they are the challenges like a regular CTF. So that's where I am with that said, I'm not going to be playing the factory secret challenge because that's kind of inside of that little Unity activity thing. It's on one point and I'd much rather do the real cybertech computer nerd stuff. So we're going to do that. Let's dive right in. I'm going to check out this Glory of the Garden challenge. It has about 50 points in the forensics category at the time of recording, which is after the competition is over. I'm sorry, I'm really bad at this. It has 9,368 solves and I just solved it because I tried to record this a moment ago and failed after I submitted the flag, it was stupid, whatever. So here we go. Which challenge says, this garden contains more than it seems. You can also find the file in this location on the shell server and we'll jump into the shell server later right now because we're given a download link, I'm just going to copy this link and we can work with it on our host machine. So I'm going to check out the hints before we get started because it's my philosophy that if you're playing a game, you're in a capture flag competition and they will offer you hints without any repercussions like it doesn't take away points or anything. It is to your advantage to read those hints. Just get an idea as to where you're going, what you're doing, what you're after. So in this case it says, what is a hex editor? So that's kind of the angle that we want to approach this with. If we happen to not know what a hex editor was, we could simply go ahead and Google that. You can see I'm already checked out Wikipedia here. It says that's a computer program that allows for the manipulation of the fundamental binary data with real raw zeros and ones and hexesimal values that we'll see that will represent that computer file. All those numbers and stuff. The name hex comes from hexadecimal. That's that number base 16, right? Represented by 0 through 9 and A through F so we can get 0 all the way to 15. So we could take a look at that and let's do it. Let's just dive right in. I'm going to fire up a terminal here. I will make a little directory for us to work in, move into there. And it's called Glory of the Garden, cool. So let's jump into that. I'm going to use W get to download this file here and we have garden.jpeg. So JPEG file extension, right? We can assume that's a picture or an image if I were to open up my little file browser here. We have a garden.jpeg and it's simply a picture. Nice pretty garden, okay? That doesn't entirely help us because we're looking for the flag right in this capture the flag competition. We want that string or that specific token that will prove, okay, we found this vulnerability or we found the hidden information or the secret that it was trying to hide from us. We exploited the service, whatever the case may be. So this picture isn't really what we want. We want to look at that raw binary data. We want to be able to view this in a hex editor. So in my terminal here, if I get back to it, I'm on Linux and I like to use hex edit. That is not installed by default so you would need to grab it, pull it off from your repositories. If you're on Ubuntu, you can use apt, or if you're on Arch, you should be able to use yay, your pacman, or you could use gex or bless or some other ones that you might be interested in. I'm going to use hex edit. So let's do it. Pseudo apt install hex edit, I need my password here because it's Pseudo and we'll just grab that and pull it down. Okay, great. So now I can run a hex edit and if we want to check on the man page for that, get an idea of what it really does, what it really is, we certainly could. But we should just be able to supply the file name as an argument that we want to actually work with and interact with. So let's check out hex edit, garden.jpeg, and here we are, a lot of noise, a lot of nonsense if you haven't seen this before. On the left hand side, it's showcasing where in the position or what location within the file is this whole line of hex coming from. In that middle section that I kind of have highlighted, those are the raw bytes. That is the actual data that constitutes this file. Once it's hexadecimal representation, and if it could interpret that and translate that into its ASCII representation, like the letters and printable characters that it could read out, that's going to be displayed on the right hand side. So we can see this header here, J5, and that is a kind of special signature for that JPEG file. If we want to go take a look at that with that file command to do simple quick and easy file reconnaissance, we can see, okay, here's reading that initial magic bytes that signature there, it'll tell us this is a JPEG image, and we can open it up just as we did with like I have known or with our GUI as needed to. So if we were still viewing that within hex edit, we would have to navigate through all of this hex. So I'm going to hold down my arrow key for a long, long time, and you can see at the very, very bottom, I'm at 0x15, 16, 1700, and it's growing, it's growing, but we got to get to that number right there. So that's going to take a long time. I think we could hit G, no? Maybe I'm not too hot on the hotkeys for hex edit, I think a better solution for us is to use something that is native, XXD, XXD, given that file name, it'll just spit out all that data printed out to the screen, and we can see at the very, very bottom, Pico CTF, the game organizers, the creators snuck in a little secret message or some information here. They say, here is a flag, Pico CTF more than meets the eye in some kind of lead speak there. So if we try to copy that and work with it, we're going to end up copying the entire rest of that hex dump, and that's not super useful for us. So we can mess with some of the flags and the arguments, the parameters we could give to XXD to just see that output, but because we know it's just getting that ASCII representation, those printable characters, those strings in the binary, we can just simply run strings on that binary. So strings garden.jpeg, pump all that out, and you can see that very, very last line, nice and easy for us, here is a flag, Pico CTF more than meets the eye. If you wanted to grab just that as your output, obviously there's a lot of other nonsense that comes out here, we can just simply pipe that to tail, I'll use tack N1 so I get the very, very last line, N for the number, N, tail saying let's grab from the very, very bottom, and N1 so that very first, last line, here's the flag, and let's go ahead and cut that up too because we can use cut, keep building our pipeline here, here is a flag, and I'm going to use a delimiter with the double quote, so that way this will be the first field, this will be the second, and then essentially the third after it, let's grab that second field with tack F2, and there's our flag, nice and easy, we can save that redirect to getflag.txt if we wanted to, and we can copy this line and just build out a simple little get flag script so we document our solution here, put a little shebang line, bin bash, save that, mark that as executable, getflag.sh, and there it is, cool, okay, if you wanted to solve this with Katana, which is the utility that I put out with a good friend of mine, my roommate Caleb, you'll see him in the Discord server as Alissa Tiger, we can go ahead and activate the virtual environment for that, that's in GitHub, Katana for me, and it's env, bin, activate, now I can run Katana just as a simple command, and we'll specify that flag format pico CTF, this needs to be a regular expression, so inside of the curly braces, I'm gonna use a period to match any character, a star to match as many of them as possible, and a question mark to make that lazy, so I just leak up until a return up until that very, very first closing parentheses, or closing curly brace, and we can actually just pass along the little URL here for that file, I'm gonna copy that link again, and I'm gonna use tack a for auto mode, and paste that in there, Katana will initialize and it will run strings on that after it downloaded and just pump out the flag that it found, that'll automatically be saved in our clipboard, so I can use control shift V just to paste it, or we can go ahead and throw that in the scoreboard, and those are 15 points, so that's that, that's how you solve Glory of the Garden, simple strings challenge, it's what you really gotta go through for your little warm up challenge in a new beginner CTF, so I hope you enjoyed that, hope those were some new techniques if you haven't seen them before, hex editor stuff, raw binary data, and that's that, let's move on to the next couple of challenges, thank you guys for watching, if you did like this video, please do like, comment and subscribe, love to see you guys in discord server, link in the description, love to see you for other CTF, love to see you on patreon, paypal, all the good stuff, thank you for watching, I love you, see you later.


Hello everybody. Thank you for coming. I didn't expect so many people, so I had to print out a few extra booklets. So that's very flattering. So the mini workshop we're going to do is called Design the Life You Love. It's inspired by the book, Design the Life You Love, a step-by-step guide to building a meaningful future. All the templates are designed by the author, Isabe Ursell, so she gets most of the credit here. I'm just taking a lot of her material, reconstructing it, and we're going to run through it together. So to give a bit of background, the reason I got interested in designing my personal life and my own experiences as a product was really doing software design. You realize that a lot of the processes and tools and rituals can be applied in other areas and in really interesting and meaningful ways. So the process we're going to go through today, just to recap for anybody who missed the little spiel at the beginning, is first deconstruction, taking apart the whole of the life, breaking it into ingredients or building blocks. Next, changing our point of view about it, using metaphors and activities to see it differently.   Chicken soup, if you're to deconstruct it, consists of several ingredients. You have chicken, onions, salt, pepper, broth, a pot, a bowl, fire, a spoon to eat it with. So those are the ingredients. Those are the building blocks. You can add them, subtract them, take them away. Or you can change how you look at the soup. You can... I mean, your initial point of view might be that it's really a flu remedy, that it's something your grandma gives to you, that it's not vegetarian, that it's not easily portable. And we can take these preconceptions about the soup and start changing aspects of them. For example, instead of chicken, you could have tofu and make it vegetarian. That's a new product. You could puree it and then freeze it and then turn it into a popsicle soup. And that's a new product. So that's about recombining and rearranging the ingredients to create something new and something totally different. And then expression is maybe taking this frozen popsicle, this soup popsicle, and saying, hey, you know, this is a space pop. This is something that can be eaten on a space station. It lasts for a long time. It's not messy, easily portable, no drips. And it's a completely new product that you get to by deconstructing, looking at it, reconstructing, and then expressing it. So for the first activity, if you open up your little booklets, we're going to do a deconstruction map. So for five minutes, I'll start a timer, create a map of the ingredients or building blocks that make up the soup of your life.  It doesn't have to be fancy. Just roll with it. All right. Five minutes. Starting now. Sorry, that was everything. And just keep adding on and on to the fill in the page until you totally run out of ideas and it's all squished together. Okay. One more minute. All right. Good. Okay. I hope you all got some good ideas mapped out. And now that you've become masters of deconstruction, if you flip to the next page, the four quadrants, you can then start mapping the different ingredients of your life into the emotional, the physical, the intellect, and the spirit. And this is where you can really see how your life balances out or maybe how it doesn't. You'll see that some of the quadrants are fuller than others. Some are empty. Some could use a little extra work. For example, some of the entries that could go in each quadrant, this was the page, in emotion that you love your cat, physical, you have a small apartment, intellect, learning one new thing each day, or spirit, spiritual things that are part of your life. For example, volunteering in a soup kitchen. All right. So four minutes for this one. Go. All right. One minute left. All right. And time's up. Okay. Let's move on to the next activity. So this is really about finding the opportunity areas or the gaps in your maps and your quadrants. So where are the areas that you had aha moments or found insights?  Because we always design within constraints, there's the reality of not enough time, not enough money, and these are the things that foster creativity. So five minutes, if you want to fill out the insights, what you have too little, too much of, one opportunity, and one constraint. All right. One minute left. All right. So next activity.  We all have vices, conflicts, weaknesses. And the point is that we get to keep what we love, get rid of what we don't, and transform what we can't change into something we can use to create a more positive outcome. So one thing we're going to do to try and change your point of view is look at who our heroes are. Just out their name, draw an icon or symbol for them, and the qualities, attributes, values that adhere them to you, including, yeah, a symbol for each one. So three minutes for this. Just draw it to your heroes. Okay. Has everybody listed out their heroes?  Yeah? All right. Okay. Now, next step, cross out their names and put in yours. Because their qualities are your qualities. The values you recognize and admire in your heroes are really your values. Because what you see in other people, the good you see, those are the things that are important to you. So keep those values in mind as we move into the next activities. What are the things in people admire that you want in your own life? So the next activity is a metaphor for today. This is a drawing. Do a drawing or some writing to describe your life the way it is today, and use a metaphor. For example, my life, I might draw Bangkok. My life is Bangkok. It's a little bit chaotic, it's a super, it's a fun city, but not quite as organized as I'd like it to be and a little polluted, a bit too much traffic. So that would be my metaphor for today. Bit of room for improvement. One minute left. All right, good. Hopefully everybody has their metaphors. So if you switch to the next page, we'll be drawing a metaphor for tomorrow. How you would, the picture, you would like your life to be in the future. Maybe it's something like a tree. It could be defined as a pomegranate tree, beautiful, bountiful, and in order to improve your own making, it's growing, it's giving life. Or it could be, another metaphor could be Cirque du Soleil, colorful, playful, energetic, chaotic. Or it could be a flying machine, inventive, creative, pushing you forward. There's all these different images your life could take on. Okay, five minutes to draw a metaphor for tomorrow, your life in the future. All right, one more minute. Hit. Let's move on. So let's take a minute to look back on all the work that you've done so far and gather the important pieces to select your key ingredients. What are the things that really matter to you? The parts that move you, the things that are next to your heart, that are dear to you, and that you want to hold on to in your future vision? Just make a quick list of about 15 to 20 words of the things that matter. The key ingredients for the life you love. One more minute. So the last step is Reconstruction, which is all about making choices.  For example, if your metaphor was Everest, the things you might need to do would be find a great Sherpa, value the amazing journey that you had, even the difficult hike up to the summit, and training for the mountain, the toughness of body, mind, spirit, and something you might want to avoid would be complacency, laziness, falling into old habits. Okay, 30 more seconds. Okay, a little short on time, let's jump to the last section. So this is Expression, taking your ideas, the components that you've decided you want to keep in your life, and expressing them in a way that's creatively, uniquely you. So there's three options here. You can create a vision map as expression, draw yourself at the center, add the visual details and inspirational quotes that relate to your life. This will be the you of the future, or create a manifesto of it as expression, a public declaration of your opinions and your goals, your beliefs, your intentions, and these will be your calls to action. Or, this is my preferred one, create a to-do list for the life you love. Simple steps, the actions you're going to take to get there, and don't forget to include long-term, short-term, as well as serious, playful steps or goals. So take five minutes for this last activity, choose any one of the means of expression, the to-do list, the manifesto, or the vision map, whichever you feel is more you. It looks like everybody's finishing up drawing. So, in conclusion, those were the four steps, setting an intention, and about your life, deconstructing it into the constituent parts, trying to come up with a point of view of one of the parts, realign how you think of it through metaphors, heroes, finding your values, and then reconstructing it into something new, combining the parts and expressing it in a way that's uniquely you. So these activities, some might seem a little cheesy, not quite you, but it's really that basic formula that's the big takeaway. And that's it. Any questions? Comments? Hi. Thank you for the recommendations and trips that design the life you love. So I have a question slide. So after you do this to-do list and the expression, for example, do you have any advice on how to make this life that you designed real not just like a to-do list? Because sometimes you might just try to draw somehow. Yeah, and I think part of that is really keeping this visible, putting it up somewhere that you can see on a regular basis, and then just aligning your actions to it every morning when you get up was a small thing that I can do to contribute towards this vision, this goal, and keeping that just somewhere visible and prominent that's a constant reminder for you. Yeah, discipline and have it there is just constant inspiration and it's always something that can be revisited because we're constantly changing, right? It's all about iterating, redesigning, failing quickly. So trying this out. Maybe you've come up with your to-do list, you give it a quick whirl, and actually it's not right for you. Going to the gym at six in the morning is not happening. And so you iterate. Maybe it's evenings, maybe it's something else. And so it's just about keeping it visible, going back, looking at it, redesigning it the same the same as we do with any piece of software, any product we're releasing for it. Thank you. Anybody else? Hi, I noticed there's a combination of drawing and sort of mind mapping. And could you maybe explain a little bit about how they help in framing? So is there perhaps an advantage to using more drawings of those works, for instance? And I just wonder how this might relate to concepts like the vision board or some of these, where some people might be more disposed to images or words and how they might help. Thanks. And so I think these types of activities that are very visual are great, especially for people who are typically less visual and more wordy because the step two, like coming up with a new point of view, it's really a lot easier when you're out of your comfort zone and doing things in a way you don't typically approach them. So a lot of people, especially, I'm guessing there's some engineers in the audience, don't use drawing, sketching, these kind of fluffy artsy activities as creative jumping points. So when they do get into it, it's a very different way of looking at things, and I think it just forces you to change your perspective even more. For somebody who is naturally more artistically inclined, visual, I'd actually say go the opposite way and do activities that are more writing or structured or mathematical to pull you out of your typical comfort zone. Anybody else? Between the 1, 2, 3, 4, like, the point of view somehow. I want to understand the logic of this design, like you have the point 1 deconstruction, point 2 point of view, point 3 reconstruction, and then point 4 expression. What's the logic? Yes, so I think it's kind of flow. Okay, so the flow, I think step one deconstruction, the reason we need to break it apart at first, is because life as a whole is just too big, it's too broad of a problem to tackle. So you need to first break it down and just select one part that's manageable, that you can address and take concrete steps toward. So I think that's why breaking it down is the first one.  You have to take steps and push yourself to see it differently before you can combine it in a new way, to see it without the connections to other things that bias us when we're just in our day-to-day grind. And the reconstruction, I think, can only happen, of course, once you've seen it differently and you have a new way of looking at it. Then finally, expression comes last because it's really about the packaging, you know? The product is the elements that come together and then the expression, how you give it form, how you make it uniquely yours and show it to the world and share it and share your light is that comes last once you know what your goals are, what your life is made up of, how you present that is the last step, it's the packaging. If I know the metaphor for today and for future, I draw differently. And then, if that's me, I'm holding this information and I'm trying to understand myself better and more. So what should I? Is there anything that I can think of to draw the conclusion there that there will be something that I need to work on? Something like that, which brings me to one of the bike routes. Yeah, and I think a lot of them will be very personal and idiosyncratic and there's no one size. So it's really about first just acknowledging that there is a difference and seeing and using that picture to show what to you are the elements that are missing or broken and that's something really only you can see once you've drawn it out. It's not very helpful. Is that everything? Okay, I think I'm out. Thank you all very much for coming. I appreciate it if you want to chat after.


Never we'll let it bed and not look anything 10 minutes for the open. I would trade if I was up that late If I was sadly to trade We'll take the day off. It's not enough time to prepare So we're gonna watch this square and again, it's a long See if we can get it There's no good shorts today The news came out about Russia and the market doesn't care. So Okay, and we're gonna give this a big cushion here 7850 There we go Stop's gonna be 7850. Oh, this looks great And I don't have the entry yet Look at this. Let's do 80 by 50 There do it and get the stuff and just make sure you have yourself size correctly. Here we go Let's see if we can get it up 83 84 Where can we go with this now? The market just doesn't care Does not care a woot so let's double triple check our stop I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna give it any more run. I Mean you could give it 78, but that's that's just super wide. I think 7850 should hold But you know how long's go There was no good shorts today though. So Is we're gonna do this or nothing was either do this on nothing That's just see if we can get it up to 83 and be done Here we go America Over 82 is the next point that we're looking for and go Yep, the market does not care Doesn't care a woot of a boot about the Russian news interesting It's where the cookie crumbles here. It is where you have to be in it You have to be in it. Here we go and push over 82 and the flurry and I'm just gonna be out I can't worry about anything else right now Dante than this Who am I doing anything else today? Here we go square Square square square. Here we go. Here we go over 82. There we go. Here we go This is what we want to see. This is exactly what we want to see Here we go. We're gonna get it up to 83. So maybe 85 today on this. It's a nice Fact ring bar again with the market. Who knows Here we go. Here we go. Hand of the button there square 8250 Here we go. Here we go. Here we go. Here we go. Nice straight. Here we go one more push up to 83 if we get a flurry over it I'm gonna get it 83 Come on, Bootsie. Well, I'm talking somebody said they can't hear me up in the speaking all morning. Here we go 83


Today's the day we fly away in the sky We're boarding a plane in 10 11 12 1 Four hours, we're gonna be taking off from the surface of the planet Flying high above the heads of everyone first landing in Calgary Staying there for three hours editing a video and then boarding another plane that was taking us to Seattle There was no direct flights from Winnipeg if there were they were really expensive, so no, I'm okay with staying in Calgary Haven't I always said I love Calgary, so hey, I'm gonna be hanging out to Calgary airport I'll tweet when I'm there Even though you're watching this a week later Whatever I told you they're gonna be spoiling things on Twitter, so on Facebook So guys I'm gonna get all my stuff packed up. I gotta bring diesel to his resort We got to leave in 10 minutes. Well, these are how you doing back there? Ready to go to your resort We're about to bring him to his new kingdom for the next four days. You're gonna be super nice, right diesel right Hey diesel Come here, bud talking to you You can be super nice to everybody, right? No, I won't be a super nice boy, man. I'll be a good boy I'm gonna miss you diesel. I'm gonna miss you It's only four days including today including today You're gonna get spa-like treatment, man.   I'm having so much fun I hope so anyway This is a big test because if this resort does well with diesel They will be my go-to resort every time I go out of town And I can't take diesel with right They're one of the best Around here, so I trust them. I've heard really good reports from them done my research, so We'll see He'll be fine. They'll be fine. They'll feed them. They'll walk them. They'll play with them What else does the dog want right dogs are very simple creatures unlike us humans And diesel is enjoying his kingdom at the pet resort It was very nice very nice I decided not to film it guys for the safety of diesel and myself I didn't want to post where he stays on The internet. I hope you understand that Because if they do well, they're gonna be my go-to place I got selling you before and I want to bring them there again if I ever travel again So I I really don't want the whole internet knowing where he stays when I'm gone He deserves some privacy So now Off to the airport I'm gonna board a plane and fly off the surface of this planet And we take off in 10 11 12 1 3 hours. We want to be in this lane Parking this lane 10 4. All right. We're at the airport people Just about getting to the airport. What is this called James Armstrong Richardson International Airport?  I don't know where I'm going. This is a whole new airport Hey, they redid everything so even if I didn't know where I was going before I wouldn't know now I Want to go to economy parking I think Yes This way. Well, there's got all these hotels right at the airport now. That's convenient. What do I got to do here? What do I got to do here? Ah? What's this? I Hope they make this easy because I have no idea what I'm doing No idea. What do I do? Oh, is that a button? I? Pushed it. What happened? It gave me something a present Okay All right, here we go. That's gonna take me to Calgary We're in the Calgary airport now just got our bags for a connecting flight. We're gonna be flying to Seattle from here flight leaves in about an hour and a half. I thought I had three hours here, but Apparently not that's okay. Let's sit in around right? So I'm gonna take my bags here and head on down to the USA That was a fast flight Takes 14 hours to drive here took an hour and three quarters to fly here That's so much faster Boy Got everything in order here. I think we can go Like chaotic. I have no idea what I'm doing. No idea. This is the room. Let's see. Shall we? What smells like pool in here? Like clean Smells very clean Begs in here Oh, look at this. I got a little kitchen in here. How cute is that? Okay, I'll give you guys a tour of this place right away as I give myself a tour All right, let's wait wait wait first. We'll put the do not disturb sign off that didn't work. Okay guys. We're here We're excited to be here. Let's take a tour of our little room here The door here. What's in there? Hello a walk-in closet. What else do we got? Here's the bathroom over here. Oops Yeah, hi, I still look the same as I did in Manitoba Distance doesn't change anything All right, here's the what's a tiny bathtub? Poor thing is really low. It's like I love I'm gonna duck take a shower And that's that's the room guys. What do we got here? We got a little stove and some ovens An oven not some ovens interesting. Oh, we've got dishes. Wow And this is my view. I hear music. You guys want to listen to some music? How do I open this thing? One second Hold on hold hold that thought right there. There's a lock on this thing? Apparently they lock us in here But no, I don't understand Now that we've got the window open the music stops, of course, of course. Yeah, yeah, very nice Very nice. Can we close it without breaking it? Why do I have a feeling that's not usually open? At least we got an air conditioner. Nice bed here TV remote because I don't have children so I don't have anyone to change the channel for me So I need a remote Okay, guys. Well, here's a fridge. What's in the fridge any complimentary drinks? Pop water soda nothing. Oh wait, let's do the check Seattle. Oh, there it is You always have to do the check. Okay guys, so this has probably been quite a long video already I'm gonna end the vlog here. We're in Seattle Vlogger fair is happening on Saturday day after tomorrow.  Maybe wander around the streets a little bit Maybe I can get a hold of some other vloggers to see if they're here and meet up and hang out Or I'll just hang out here by myself Okay guys, I will Talk to you tomorrow 4 a.m. Central time right here tune in to find out What I'm doing tomorrow that doesn't that make sense right, but it's a secret You don't know what it's gonna be, but I do there's exciting things happened happening tomorrow two exciting things There might even be two videos. You never know You'll have to just find out live music in Seattle Thought I got off on the wrong plane there for a second. That was nice Okay, see if I can cross the street without dying red light All right Yeah, we just had Supper Mexican restaurant live music. Well, you can still hear him. I'm probably gonna fall asleep to the sounds of trombones


I would like to ask you, how do you think the old-fashioned financial system will adopt to the changes caused by the development of cryptocurrencies? Poorly. I think the traditional financial system will adapt the same way the traditional telecommunication system has adapted, the same way the horse and carriage industry adapted to the automobile. How many people in this room own a horse? No? Not yet. Maybe it's a hobby, but you certainly won't use it to go to work every day, right? So I think the idea of having a fixed relationship with a centralized institution that holds your money for you is going to be one of those obscure, weird, elitist things that weird, old rich people do. So they'll have a personal relationship with their banker, which is ironic, because they're the only people who have a personal relationship with their banker to start with. But in the end, they'll be the only people left who have that personal relationship, because all of the rest of us are going to be debanked. So I don't think the financial industry is going to adapt very well. And it's not because bad people work for banks. That's not the case. Great people work for banks. And the greatest of those great people who work for banks are going to quit working for banks and do a startup in the cryptocurrency space, because they spend the first couple of years trying to persuade everyone around them that, hey, I've seen the future. It's not this. This system you've put together from 70s technology with cobalt to a mainframe that tries to do things and is slow, inefficient, and insecure. This is the past. I've seen the future. And they'll try and try and try and try to persuade. But the problem with large centralized institutions like traditional financial services is they have inertia. They're organizationally sclerotic. As a result, they can't change. Even if a lot of the people inside them want to change, even if they know that not changing is the end, they're simply going to try and delay the inevitable because they're unable to change. This is the nature of large organizations. And so as the creative and interesting people inside these corporations try and try to persuade that they've seen the future, eventually they get tired. And they say, you know what? I'm going to leave and start a startup. I'm going to actually pursue the dream because I really understand that this is the future. And since nobody here understands me, I'll just take it elsewhere. But the best part about it is they're going to do that in January. And they're going to fund their startup with the bonus they got in December so they can turn around and compete with the very company that gave them the bonus in the first place. And we will welcome them. Thank you. Keeping Bitcoin awesome. As enterprise use cases grow and ETFs zoom large on the horizon. Is there anything that we could or should be doing in order to ensure that Bitcoin remains the open, decentralized and censorship-resistant systems that we love? For instance, is running a full node helpful? If so, what tools make this feasible for a non-coder? Amber, great question. I would say that running a full node is helpful if you know how to do it, but that's not the most helpful thing you can do. The most helpful thing you can do is use and hold cryptocurrencies in the most decentralized peer-to-peer manner available to you, so that your use expresses the principles you want to see in the network. Be the peer-to-peer network you want to see in the world. So what that means is, don't keep your coins on any of your coins from any of the blockchains on centralized custodial wallets. Don't keep them in places where other people have the keys, and therefore can not only control, censor, seize your money, lose and steal your money, but they can also express your preferences in the adoption of different protocols and different changes to the underlying mechanism. Keep your own keys. Take the decentralized power into your hands. Hold keys for all of your cryptos. Use wallets that are strong on privacy and strong on decentralization. Try to avoid using decentralized services as much as possible, and it's not possible to do so 100%. You know, we still live in an environment where a lot of the things we want to do require fiat, and I use exchanges too. I have to. However, when I do use exchanges, which is not that often, I use them very, very short period of time. I will move money into the exchange, exchange it and move the result out, and not give any control over maybe a 15 minute window of exposure to that exchange. And even then I do it reluctantly, and I like to find other ways to do it with perhaps decentralized exchanges and person-to-person trading in the future. That's not always possible. So take control. Be decentralized yourself. And the other big one is not running a full node. Running a full node is something that's more for techies. And I absolutely encourage it. And it will be a fantastic learning experience, but it won't have as much of an impact as you might think. You know what has an even better, bigger impact? Choose to make your labor part of the new economy. Withdraw your productive potential, your creative capacity, your work ethic, your labor from the old economy, and firmly position it in the new economy. Accept crypto for all of the products and services that you produce and create and offer yourself. Be part of the new economy. Hire people who accept crypto in preference over people who don't. So whatever business you're in, accept crypto for what you do. And then if you're paying other people, web designers, taxi drivers, hairdressers, system administrators, accountants, lawyers, whatever it might be, find people who accept crypto. If you move your labor into the crypto economy, not only are you creating more capacity within the crypto economy to not do exchanges, not move back to the fiat world, and to be able to create internal circulation, velocity, and economic activity within the crypto world, you are also opting out. You are depriving the traditional economy from your maximum creativity and productive potential. You're still in that economy in some ways, but you've taken out the most important thing. So that's what you can do to keep crypto awesome is move into that economy and engage in that economy as much as you can. Hi, my name is Jed. I work for a cryptocurrency exchange in the Middle East called Rain. First of all, I want to thank you because I'm only here because of your Patreon channel. I won one of the tickets you gave away. So y'all should follow Andreas on Patreon. Thank you. My question is, you know, a conversation that I that I catch myself having with people very often. And this is also kind of with mastering Ethereum, just on the brink of being released, is thinking about what is at stake here? You know, if Bitcoin succeeds, we replace money. That that's kind of what is at stake in my mind with Bitcoin. With Ethereum, we have, you know, maybe we're replacing cloud computing, maybe we can decentralize social networks, all these different decentralized applications. But in my head, even if you sum up all of those industries, there's still less than money. So I'm just wondering what your thoughts are on terms of what's at stake in terms of what both of these projects are trying to accomplish? I think that's that's a great question. And it's a very controversial topic, because this is not something you can design. It's something where you design what you think it's going to do. And then the market decides whether to adopt it for that application. And you can never force the market to adopt it for an application it's not suitable for. That's the fundamental problem is we don't know what these things will be. And the most interesting applications that they have are ones that don't exist today. I think that's the biggest thing that people fail to notice, which is that if you measure what these technologies can do in the future in terms of the applications we have now, you're missing the point. I remember the conversations in the early 90s, when people were saying, okay, so let's say this internet thing that you're building succeeds. Well, how many phone calls can it support? How many fax messages can it really support? And for all of this investment in infrastructure, is it really worth it to replace all of the fax machines and phone calls when we already have a system that works? In fact, arguably the system you're describing is slow, inefficient, and it has this weird decentralized thing that doesn't really work for our profit margins. One of my first presentations I did about the internet in the 90s, the CEO said, this sounds really interesting. So how do we buy it? The question isn't how many faxes can you send over the internet? The question isn't even or wasn't eventually how many phone calls can you do over the internet? At first it was none. Then it was very few. Eventually it was parity. And then six months after parity, we could do high definition calling for the entire planet on a single fiber optic cable. Exponential technology meets linear technology. And all of the value of the internet has nothing to do with that. It swallowed and destroyed the phone industry. That value evaporated. Why? Because I don't have to pay a euro a minute or a dollar a minute to call my parents. Because I did used to have to pay. I remember sitting in a phone booth in London feeding pound coins into a phone so I could speak to my family for a minute, a minute and a half. We'd have a prearranged time. The entire family would line up in front of a phone with one of those big curly cords. And then I would call and they'd get in line and quickly go, hi, Andreas. This is your cousin. Hi, Andreas. This is your aunt. Hi, Andreas. This is your uncle. Love you. Love you. Love you. Love you. Love you. Love you. Love you. Click. Because I had a minute. I could afford a minute and a half. So everybody had to get in there quickly. That industry was generating billions of dollars. Now they can't. It's gone. And none of that got replaced by the internet. It's not about that. All of the interesting industries that came out of it did not exist before. So replacing money isn't about taking the banking industry as it exists today and creating another blockchain-based banking industry and saying we're done. That's it. And it's worth the same amount. And we're running the same applications. It's about fundamentally changing what money is and how it works. It's going from batch money to streaming money, from a concept of money cut in time periods that work on a day, week, or month, to transactions that can happen in milliseconds globally for values of a thousandth of a penny. And I'm not making those transactions. Some kind of autonomous agency is doing it. And they're probably changing between cryptocurrencies in real time while they're doing that. None of these applications exist. So it's not about replacing the money with one currency that's global. First of all, that's a broken model. We're not going to have one currency any more than we're going to end up in a world with one language. Quite the opposite. We're going in fragmentation. We're going to have choice. Choice between hundreds of different currencies for different purposes that will be fungible and fluid and easily exchanged by an algorithm on your wallet that decides how to arbitrage between two opportunities. You will not just have a bank in your wallet. You'll have a full loan for an exchange brokerage house and a system for exchanging every loyalty, rewards, token, or other symbol as fast as you need it to do the transaction that you direct. None of that will be visible to you. Just like when you have a browser on your phone, you essentially have an entire phone company that is doing things like least cost routing and optimization in real time. And you don't need to know about that. We're not replacing all money with one money. We're replacing the concept of money with a new concept of money and a plurality of systems that don't need to be in geographically defined monopolies with rigid rules and difficult exchanges, high barriers for adoption and trade. That all goes away. It becomes as fluid as sending a packet across the internet. And then the interesting applications start. A lot of people ask me, so what are the interesting applications in Ethereum? To me, the killer app is simple. Governance. Ethereum is about reinventing the modern corporation. It's about reinventing human organization, not commerce, not trade, not money organization. It's about taking a geographically rigid concept of a corporation with shareholders, a 15th century concept, and replacing it with a model of governance where decision-making can happen, ad hoc collaborations between people can emerge and dissolve very, very rapidly. And you can have fair, transparent, open governance of these projects. What are these projects? I don't know. Funding projects, collaborative projects, development projects. Who knows? Reinventing the corporation. That is the killer app. Is it going to happen now? No. It might take decades, but I think that's where we're going.


Good afternoon. My name is Peter Bergen. Welcome to the New America Foundation. I'm the director of the National Security Studies Program and really excited to have a debate about the question whether Iraq can be termed a success with two of the most distinguished people imaginable taking opposite sides on this issue and both of whom happen to be fellows here at the New America Foundation showing that we are a foundation that doesn't value a particular party line. On my right, on your left is Doug Olivant who's had a distinguished career in the military. He was NSE director for Iraq under both presidents, George W. Bush and President Obama. He was senior coin advisor in RCEs in Afghanistan. He's got a PhD in political science or history. He will be arguing that Iraq is a success. On my left, on your right is Lieutenant Colonel Joel Rayburn who's also had a distinguished career in the US military, still active duty. His comments won't represent obviously his present affiliation as a senior fellow at the National Defense University or he's speaking on his own behalf not on behalf of DOD obviously. Joel is actually doing his PhD in history. His PhD focuses on the history of the British involvement in Iraq in the 1920s and that's at Texas A&M University. So both sides have agreed to make opening statements for about 12 minutes. So thank you very much for coming today. The question at hand is, is Iraq a success? This is a very different question from was the invasion of Iraq a success? Was the invasion of Iraq a good idea? Or was the US government successful in Iraq? I'm defending none of those propositions. And of course the phrasing of the question itself is generically suspect. To borrow Mao's famous quote when he asked what he thought of the French Revolution, it's too early to judge. So let me instead defend a more modest proposition. Does Iraq, the Iraqi people in regime, have a fighting chance of turning itself into a decent place now that the Americans have departed? And to this I think the answer is clearly yes. And the creation of a decent place in the Middle East has to definitely be considered a success. Now my guess is virtually all of you voted no to the question before we started today which makes my task fairly easy. I just have to convert one or two of you. But I can see the difficulty of the task. It's difficult for Americans to give Iraq a fair hearing and for three different reasons which I call the problems of 2003, 2006, and 2011. There is a large group of Americans who are understandably upset about the issues surrounding the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. And who at some level don't want to hear any good news about Iraq that might emerge in any way to vindicate Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, or Steve Campbell. There's a second group who experienced directly or vicariously the hellishness of Iraq's civil war that peaked in 2006 and who simply cannot picture an Iraq that's not incredibly violent. I'm sympathetic to this view but that's simply no longer the case. And finally, there's a third group that is so upset that President Obama did not manage for whatever reason to leave a force of US soldiers in Iraq that they almost want Iraq to fail to show him wrong. So despite these high barriers to an objective assessment of Iraq, let me lay out some stubborn facts to forward to spelling some myths. First, Iraq is a parliamentary democracy. Its elections in 2010 were widely judged to be free and fair. Now while there were some issues surrounding government formation that followed the elections, no one disputes that the parliamentarians did win their elections by the rules of the game. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki emerged as the winner of this long contest. Maliki is an extremely strong leader and for two reasons. First, institutionally, he's the prime minister of a parliamentary democracy. This is often lost in American observers who are used to a system of much stronger checks and balances. But parliamentary democracies don't generally work this way. The British prime minister, for example, has virtually no checks on his power. But second, Maliki works in a system with extremely immature institutions and a national unity government that puts his political opponents inside the government. So not only the institutions immature but because of this national unity government that was forced on him, he has his political opponents inside his government. By analogy, picture of two or three of our departments, let's say labor, commerce, and energy inside the Obama administration were manned by tea party candidates as their secretaries and took their directions from Carl Rowe. In both the real case in Iraq and this imaginary case in America, the executive has to get things done and make his government work is going to find ways to work around them. So first, it's a parliamentary democracy. Second, it's starting to write its economy. Iraq has huge unexplored, untapped reserves of what is called cheap oil or oil that is easily extracted by simple, easy techniques. Or put another way, the Iraqis don't have to do fracking. At 3.5 million barrels per day currently and reasonable expectations of pumping 3.7 million barrels per day by the end of the year, Iraq has the extractive capacity to generate cash flow to both care for its citizens and provide capital for other industries. World markets are figuring this out. Last month, Iraq's Asia cell telecom company put 25% of its shares on the Iraq stock exchange. They sold out in one day for 1.5 billion US dollars, roughly, giving the company an evaluation of around 6 billion. A competitor company, Zane, should offer similar shares by the summer, putting the market cap of just these two Iraqi firms at over 10 billion dollars. While Washington may continue to ring its hands over Iraq, the markets are sending a very different story. As the Iraqi money starts to generate better services, though with the inevitable lag of letting contracts and dealing with increased demand, we should expect the economy to start to self-generate. For example, once Iraq gets its power generation problem fixed, now that its demand has roughly peaked, we should expect light industry to emerge. A third reason we should expect Iraq to turn out OK is the incredible resilience of its people. Last year, according to the Iraq body count, 4,568 civilians died from violence in Iraq, plus just over 900 police officers. This in a country of 30 million, whose people are the target of an active al-Qaeda franchise. Just by point of comparison in the city of Chicago last year, there were only over 500 murders in a city of 2.7 million people, a very comparable per capita death rate. And yet the Iraqis get on with life on a daily basis. Attacks come, the family's mourned, but then life goes on. It's an extremely admirable trait as the Iraqis refuse to let terrorism define them. And most importantly, they have refrained to date from retaliating against the Sunni population from which the al-Qaeda terrorists take the refuge. A fourth reason is that while terrorism is not defining, it is being fought. The GOI is commanding terrorism as best it can. However, the tools it has at its disposal are blunt ones. Not unlike, as needs to be pointed out more often, the ones the U.S. Army used from 2003 to 2005 until Stanley McChrystal recrafted JSOC. Lamentably, it's difficult to see the Iraqis generating a JSOC-like capacity in the near future. So while we see demonstrations in Anbar about mass arrests, those mass arrests are almost certainly keeping the body count down. While I'm no more excited about mass arrests than the next guy, it's important to remember that you must do something in the fight against terrorism. We need to cut the Iraqis a break. Finally, the coming elections, scheduled national elections, scheduled for next spring, should help. The results of the 2010 election, with its photo finished between Maliki State of Law and Ali Alawi's Irakia, was perhaps the worst of all possible outcomes, as neither of these men was ever going to play Hillary to the others Obama. We should expect a much cleaner outcome in 2014, perhaps one that allows us to do away with national unity governments and create something that can actually function. Now, there are some claims that need to be preemptively dismissed. One, Iraq is not an Iranian pawn. Yes, there is Iranian money in Iraqi politics, just as there is Saudi, Qatari, Turkish, and perhaps even American money. And Iraqi politicians of all stripes do fly to Tehran to visit. But that's prudent politics. Iraq is dead set on a long-term strategic relationship with the United States, as it's continuing to build its military around the M-16 rifle, the M-198, howitzer, the M-1 tank, and the F-16 fighter, all American produced, continues to demonstrate. Iraq is dead set on fully implementing its strategic framework agreement with the United States. And in fact, the Iraqis often complain they do not find much enthusiasm on the American end for implementing the non-military clauses. Where are the Iraqi students, military and civilian? In fact, a democratic Iraq is the greatest long-term threat to Iran. Iraq is providing to the Iranians another model for how a Shia majority state could be run. Iran's claim to legitimacy, Tehran's, is that the Shia must live under clerical theocracy. Iraq shows daily that's simply not true. And it grows more true each day that Iraq's oil revenues expand and Iran's contract, tectonically shifting the balance of power between these neighboring states. If you want to undermine Iran, back Maliki. Second, Maliki is not out to destroy the Sunnis. No one seriously believes that the Charlie's charges against Hashemi and Asawi are groundless, though they may not be quite as portrayed either. But again, the mass arrests of Sunnis are much better explained as the best tool the GOI has in its fight against al-Qaeda in Iraq. Again, it's not perfect. I'm not endorsing it, but it's not random and faceless either. We need to remember a stubborn fact. The Sunnis of Iraq tried to overthrow the democratically elected government in 2005 to 2008 and lost. When you do this, try to overthrow a government in still a civil war and you lose, you very seldom then just get to fall back to your normally democratically allotted share of power. For someone who has lost a civil war, the Sunnis of Iraq have it pretty good. I would suggest that both the Serbs of Kosovo and for that matter, the South Carolinans of 1866 would be very glad to have the deal that Iraq's Sunnis do. Fourth, Maliki is no authoritarian. He operates forcefully, but is far more measured than any other leader in the region, most emphatically including the Barzani's of the KRG. His regime is clearly more decent than that of Syria, Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Kuwait, less authoritarian than the KRG and Turkey, leaving only Jordan as perhaps the only near pier among his neighbors, though Jordan is measurably less democratic and accountable. Grading on the curve for the region, Maliki's doing okay. In short, Maliki's no dictator. I'm not equating him with Mother Teresa either. He was the executive power during a civil war, which always demands some temporary and regrettable measures as American leaders from Abraham Lincoln to FDR have shown us in our own case. But the combination of a decent government in Baghdad, the resilience of the Iraqi people, and the oil wealth that will, frankly, allow the Iraqis to by their way out of a lot of problems should make us all relatively optimistic that Iraq will be a success. Not because of America's mismanaged occupation, but because of the Iraqis, and old and noble people will make it so.  Iraq remains a weak state. Its political institutions are charitably immature. Were it not for oil, there'd be no real economy. There's a serious terrorism problem. Relationships with all the neighboring states are problematic. Sectarian divides remain tense. It's still very possible that Iraq could revert to its previous state of dysfunction or find a new variety into which to fall. The chaos in Baghdad is likely a precursor of the sort of political drama we can expect for some time to come. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm going to have to start over. I've mistakenly been reading from a piece by a Doug Olivant written in December of 2011. So let me set that aside. It seems to me, as Doug has pointed out, that most of the 10-year retrospectives of our Iraq experience tend to look at the situation that Doug had described in the piece I read to you and conclude that since Iraq in 2013 is a mess, the whole decade's involvement was not worth the cost. But this is to make the mistake of assuming that every development in Iraq in the last 10 years has been the inevitable result of the invasion itself, as though the authoritarian regime of Nuri Maliki, the deeply polarized political system, the crony capitalist economy, the government's drift into alignment with the Iranian regime, the tension always verging on conflict between Baghdad and Erbil, and the safe havens for al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups, both Sunni and Shia, have all flowed uninterruptedly from the decision to invade. In actuality, these are the consequences of a series of decisions between 2003 and the present. And if we're to evaluate the success or failure of the Iraq project, it has to be on the basis of these intervening decisions, at least as much as on the basis of the decision to invade. This is only natural and fitting in any protracted conflict. The aims and goals that obtain at the outset of such a conflict are rarely the ones that stand at its end. For example, at the end of the two world wars, none of the great powers would have said they were fighting for the sake of the sovereignty of Belgium or Poland. And I'd submit that it's similarly inappropriate to judge our Iraq experience based on how we feel about the 2003 invasion, as Doug has seconded. I believe there have been four major decision points in Iraq to consider, dividing the war into clear phases. And first was the invasion. Was that a success? Well, yes. Remorse over the removal of Saddam seems to me to be the result of a memory lapse. For those of you who can remember the world as it was before 2003, there's no doubt we in the Middle East are better off without him in power, destabilizing the region around him. And I hope we would not purposely wish him and his cronies back on the Iraqi people, even though they are resilient, as Doug points out. But the second decision point was probably more important than the invasion, the decision to collapse Saddam's state, not just his regime, by disbanding the Iraqi army and criminalizing the former officials who made the state run to the extent that it did run, to replace it with a deeply divisive political process and a new state dominated by Shia Islamist factions, and to stick for almost three years with the plan to build the capacity of that new state as the country sank into civil war. Was that a success and was it worth the cost? Well, no. The loss and blood and treasure for both us and the Iraqis was immense and what it brought was a sectarian state that became a party to a brutal conflict, a very stabilizing force rather than a stabilizing one. Fortunately, the third decision and ensuing phase of the war undid much of that damage through the military and political surge to put a stop to the sectarian war and reverse the process that had turned the state into a sectarian faction. This phase was a success beyond all expectation with playing a role in driving sectarian violence to near zero and creating an atmosphere in which Iraqis turned away from sectarian Islamism and embraced something much closer to secular nationalism. The culmination of this shift came in the January 2009 provincial elections when parties building themselves as nationalists dealt a crushing blow to the sectarian Islamist incumbents unseating those incumbents in 13 of the 14 provinces that held an election. And this brings us to the fourth decision point and phase, the decision to withdraw and to do it on a timetable that was not closely linked to political and security conditions in the country. Has this been a success? I'd submit the only way to judge that is to assess whether we've secured or are advancing our enduring interests in this important country in the middle of an important region. And I think there are five enduring interests in Iraq. First, that Iraq should not be a threat to us in its region. Second, that Iraq should not be a sanctuary for transnational terrorist groups. Third, that Iraq should not be under undue Iranian influence. Fourth, that its strategic resources, its oil and gas, should flow freely to the global economy. And fifth, and finally, that in support of these other objectives Iraq should be stable both in political and security terms, not just for Iraq's sake but for the sake of the entire region. So where do we stand with respect to these interests today? It's true the Iraqi state is not a direct threat to us and our allies the way Saddam state was but beyond the state Iraq has become an enduring base for transnational terrorist groups that were largely neutralized by 2009 but have since returned with the will and capacity to operate beyond Iraq attacking our interests and those of our allies. Foremost among these is al-Qaeda in Iraq which now appears in Syria as the Jabhat al-Nasra the most important of the insurgent groups fighting against the Assad regime. But Iraq is also a base for several extremist groups sponsored by the Iranian regime's Quds Force that before 2012 were quite active in conducting attacks against our troops and our diplomatic missions in Iraq. And now they're beginning to play a role beyond Iraq's borders. Those of you who follow Iraq will recognize Asad Bahlal Haqq, Kitab Hezbollah and the Promise Day Brigade. Published reports and YouTube postings tell us that these groups are now playing a role directly in the Syrian conflict alongside the Assad regime's troops fighting against Sunni insurgents there and some of them say they've been transported there by the Revolutionary Guards Corps from train camps inside Iran. You may say this doesn't mean the Iraqi government is complicit with this militant activity but you'd be wrong. Asad Bahlal Haqq which is the most lethal of these groups that I've mentioned is the prime example. This militant group has been embraced by Prime Minister Maliki and his party who have welcomed the group as it rebranded itself from a political party that claims credit, rebranded itself from being strictly a militant group into being a militant group plus a political party that claims credit for having militarily expelled us from the country. And this leads us to our third interest in Iraq that the country not be under undue Iranian influencer control. Unfortunately, Iran does exert a great deal of influence in Iraq today as we see in both small and large signs. One small sign is that Prime Minister Maliki has welcomed into his office as a senior advisor, Abu Metti Al-Mahandis, the top Iraqi deputy of General Qasem Soleimani who is commander of Iran's goods force. But a larger sign of Iran's undue influence is that the Iraqi government has adopted policies in harmony with those of the Iranian regime and hostile to our own on at least four major issues in the region. For example, the Bahrain crisis of 2011 on which Iraqi politicians denounced the U.S. position in Bahrain in our presence with the Fifth Fleet. Secondly, a war of words with the Erdogan government of our NATO ally Turkey. Third, in the international sanctions against the Iranian regime which the Iraqi government has on multiple occasions stated its intention to ignore. And lastly, in the Syrian Civil War where Prime Minister Maliki himself said the Assad should not fall and that there is no reason for him to fall. The Maliki government has turned a blind eye to Iranian overflights of military assistance to the Assad regime and just last week Maliki added a declaration that the toppling of the Assad regime would lead to a sectarian war inside Iraq. A statement that some people took as a threat rather than a warning. I don't mean to argue that Maliki and his government are controlled by the Iranian regime. The truth is actually worse. Not that their Iranian puppets are that they fundamentally perceive their interests more closely aligned with those of the Iranian and Syrian regimes than with our own. Maliki and his government, like so many people in the region, believe they are involved in a region-wide Sunni-Shia conflict in which they, the Iranian regime, the Syrian Alawite regime and Hezbollah are ranged against a coalition of the Sunni Arab states and Turkey among whom are some of our allies. It's in this context that we have to evaluate our fourth interest, the Iraq strategic resources, soil and gas. Well, they are flowing and there's every reason to think that if Iraq were to stabilize, its exports could increase dramatically over the coming decade. But what would we think of those increases if Iraq and Iran were to form an export block controlling the production of more than 7 million barrels per day? Would that represent, as Doug argues, a shift in the power balance in the region? Probably in ways that we would not see to our liking. But even if the Iraqi state were completely benign toward our interest, do we believe that Iraq is stable now or that it will grow more stable in the coming years? I'm deeply skeptical and here are some of the reasons. First, that the country is increasingly polarized on sectarian lines, as we've seen with the tens of thousands of Sunnis marching in the streets of Anbar and other provinces, chanting that the people want the fall of the regime in what looks virtually identical to that the constitutional order that the United States helped put into place has since 2009 been degraded by Maliki's dominance of the courts in the parliament with the checks and balances that were in the constitution, even in a parliamentary system, erased and the independent institutions that were meant to exercise oversight absorbed into Maliki's office, that the new Maliki dominated order has been secured by an army and intelligence apparatus under the direct control of the constitution, not of parliamentary institutions, that the private sector that might otherwise be a break on an overbearing state is instead little more than a crony capitalist extension of the dominant political parties that lives off corrupt government contracts, that Iraqis have transferred their own civil war directly into Syria where Iraqi Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds are all intervening on opposing sides, making it just a matter of time until the conflict comes home again. And in fact that the civil war at stake pointed out with 4,500 civilians killed by insurgents of terrorists last year and that's almost twice as many as were killed in Afghanistan. If Afghanistan is in a state of war then Iraq must be so as well. It was also more people killed in 2012 than were killed in 2011 in Iraq despite the fact that American troops are no longer there to draw fire which refutes the old theory that when US troops departed the violence would depart as well. But I really can't do better in the one eminent scholar of Iraq who observed not too long ago that the most serious risks to Iraq's internal instability come from the overlapping and interacting effects of renewed ethnic or sectarian conflict on the one hand and an irreversible breakdown of the current constitutional order on the other. Either of these conflicts could arise along any of the major fault lines in Iraq. Shia, Sunni, Arab, Kurd or Inter-Shia, further either of these contingencies could spark the other. I can't go over into Iraq and exacerbate internal tensions. I couldn't say it better myself than Doug Alamant said it in 2012. Now, Miriam Webster defines success which is the question here today as a favorable or desired outcome. The fourth phase of our experience in Iraq stands out among other similar cases in American history including Germany, Japan and South Korea for the way in which a favorable or desired outcome seemed not to be the reason. Do we believe that Germany, Japan and South Korea would be what they've been in the world and are today if six decades ago we had treated them the way we've treated Iraq in this fourth phase? But for the purposes of today's debate I'd ask the audience, does all that I've described and that has been described by that eminent scholar of Iraq Douglass Alamant sound like a favorable or desired outcome? I'd offer that when we consider the four major decision points in Iraq and ask to conclude that they did and then they didn't and then they did and then they didn't. Thank you, Joel. So I'm just going to ask a few questions to both of our debaters just to clarify some things and also move the conversation forward. I'm going to ask a very basic question. Is it possible to go out today in Baghdad and have a meal in a restaurant and basically sort of have an okay time or is that still something that isn't feasible? I think it depends on who you are. I think for the vast majority of Iraqis that is the case yes. As a foreigner could you go to a restaurant or is it possible to go out in the way that you can go out in Kabul say I remember when I was in Baghdad with you in 2008 it would have been inconceivable to pop out to a restaurant at that time. Right. What about today? I think it would be inconceivable today for say a U.S. diplomat to do that. It would be conceivable for some private citizen or a journalist who can travel under the radar in Baghdad to do that. But that's not really the point. The conflict has been displaced. The conflict and I think you'll also find that the Sunni base for the terrorist groups that used to operate inside Baghdad has been, were largely forced out of a good deal of Baghdad in the many genocide that the state carried out in 2005 and 2006. Doug? Baghdad is much, much safer today. As I tell my friends, there are really three ways to get hurt in Baghdad. If you follow three rules you're probably going to be safe. One, don't stand outside a Shia mosque on Friday or join a Shia religious procession. Those places get blown up. Two, don't stand around Iraqi policemen. I have a friend who uses Ministry of Interior officials for security and I shake my head. Why would you, you're standing next to the targets. You're not the target they are. And third, don't hang out with any moderate Sunni because they're also likely to get blown up. If you follow those three rules, your chances of getting hurt in contemporary Baghdad are fairly slim. And I would say that said, I would still dye my hair. And I would say the fact that you have to follow Doug's three rules indicate that the country is fundamentally not stable. Well, that brings us up. Go ahead. It indicates that they have an al-Qaeda problem who are interested in killing those three groups of people. And who's funding al-Qaeda? It ain't Iran. Which would be a symptom of an unstable state? Well, let's talk about al-Qaeda for a second. I mean, the fact that AQI is sort of back and able to produce large scale terrorist attacks in central Baghdad from time to time is arguably the most important part of the anti-Assad insurgency. And doesn't that tend to argue against the proposition that Iraq has been a success? Iraq is going through a transition point. The U.S. special, you know, U.S. JSOC left Iraq when the rest of the U.S. forces left Iraq. You know, JSOC kills bad guys. That's what they do. They're very good at it. They're very efficient. When that capability was removed, al-Qaeda in Iraq was given a chance to regenerate. The Iraqis are going to have to learn how to deal with that problem internally. The growth in violence is all from al-Qaeda in Iraq. I've conceded that their institutions are immature while their security institutions can do basic things like defend their borders and keep an event safe and more or less keep the streets safe. You know, as the United States itself found out, digging out a terrorist group that's embedded in your own people is extremely high degree of difficulty. Yeah, I would say one of the smartest things that I heard a general say during the Iraq war was that we can't kill our way out of this insurgency. The Iraqis can't kill their way out of the insurgency that they're facing now.  You have to do some political outreach to the moderate center in order to dry up the base for the extremists that you're fighting against. And I would say the Iraqis are failing on both cases. Without the JSOC there, they're not doing very well at killing the actual bad guys and they're not doing very well at reaching out to the moderate center in order to try to deny the extremists the base. Joel, you didn't entirely respond to, I thought, the comment by Doug, which is judged by, let's say, Saudi standards or Kuwaiti standards or Syrian standards or Iranian standards. Iraq is looking pretty good on a lot of levels. They're not looking very good in terms of our interests. That's the argument that I'm making. Regardless of how they look on some absolute scale of democracy in the Arab world, it's a matter of whether they're aligned with our interests, whether they're moving towards stability that's in concert with our interests. Well, I mean, presumably we are interested in more democratic states rather than less democratic states. Broadly speaking, that is an American interest. I think in the long term. Well, look, I'm not arguing that we don't have an interest in a more democratic Iraq. I'm arguing that there isn't a democratic Iraq. I'm arguing that Iraq is going less democratic as the months go by. Joel has really shown his hand here. Joel is interested in the United States setting up authoritarians who will get a people that don't agree with our policies to implement their state in a way that we agree with. In the short term, that works. In the longer term, as we're starting to find out all throughout the region, that's not such a bright idea. We really, again, we fundamentally believe as a people that if you let people self-determine that eventually, and we're not saying it's going to be pretty in the short term, but eventually they will come around to understand a democratic view of the world. Well, this is not at all what I'm saying. And in fact, I would say this is a matter of pot calling kettle black. I'm arguing that Maliki is Iraq's new Mubarak, that he's the new dictator, that he's consolidating a state, and that he's going to face a popular uprising in the same way that Mubarak did. Although I think that when that time comes that the state, the regime underneath him is not going to respond to the way that Mubarak's did, and that there will be a bloodbath. That's what I'm estimating. If the people don't like the state, they did let that be known in the spring of 2011, and dozens of them were killed by the security forces that Maliki sent out in the street. So we have a precedent there. Let me ask you a slightly different question. A pretty good indicator of the success or lack of thereof of a country that's gone through a lot of conflict is refugee returns, and I'll give you an example of a case which you both know which is Afghanistan, about 6 million refugees left as a result of the Soviet invasion of civil war, about 5 million have returned since the fall of the Taliban. But Iraq, it's pretty striking. You had 2 million refugees leave the country, forget about the internally displaced, almost none of them have come back. And why is that if the country is such a success, Doug? You are having large-term refugee flows to Iraq. Now, albeit a lot of that is because most of them were in Syria which is now turning out not to be not such a great place to seek sanctuary. But we are seeing large, but I want to say it's human right watch, just wrote on this a couple of months ago. What do we see? I mean, I'm seeing numbers of 10,000, 20,000. This is not millions of people. 10,000, 20,000 a month starts getting you there pretty quick. So your large-scale refugee returns is something that you assert. Yes. There have been hundreds of thousands that have come back, but the point is not that they've come back, it's where they've come back. They're not coming back to their homes. They're coming back to places where it's safe for their sect to go. The vast majority of them, Sinni's, who are not able to go back into Baghdad because Baghdad has been made in a hostile place for Iraqi Sinni's. Quick question for you, Joe. Quite a persuasive. The market is a pretty good indicator, just as perhaps refugees are returning. Well, how do you respond to Doug's observation about the market capitalization of some of these big telecom companies? It's kind of interesting. Doug mentioned AsiaCell and how AsiaCell's shares had sold out very quickly. I remember the days when AsiaCell was the main source of financing for al-Qaeda in Iraq in Mosul because they were a combination of extorted by al-Qaeda in Iraq and complicit and funneling taxes, virtual taxes to al-Qaeda in Iraq. So things are not always as they seem, and I'd want to peel back the layers of the onion on that one before I would conclude that it's a positive thing. Maybe, I didn't read those reports. Maybe AsiaCell was funding al-Qaeda. I would suggest not to the extent that USAID is funding the Taliban. If you want to do business in some places, you know, regrettably those funds are going to end up in the hands of bad guys. It's a matter of degree. Okay, we're going to throw it open to questions. We have a mic in the back. David, is it working? Yeah, General Kimmet. General Kimmet is here. Hi, thank you. Mark Kimmet. You brought probably one of the most significant issues to the fore, both of you. The notion of Sunni reconciliation. Doug, I pretty much agree with your argument, but I don't believe with your prescription of they lost, get over it is probably the right way going forward. I think it's important not only for their interests, but our interests to recognize that the Sunni Arab world is looking at what's happening in Iraq and they're taking sides. So, while the comment may have been a bit soft more, perhaps you can give us some better articulation of a better Sunni reconciliation or Sunni adoption policy that you might recommend. That said, I probably agree with everything else you said and voting on your side. Yeah, but you probably came in that way, so that doesn't matter. Look, I think as the case in Syria is about to show us, as the Alawites are about to learn in a very painful way, if you're a minority sect who uses violence to rule over country for a long period of time, it's going to be ugly in the aftermath. That said, I think it's clearly in Nuri Al-Maliki's interest to bring down the heat on this issue. And I think he would be a fool and no one's claimed him of being a fool were he not to find moderate Sunni groups that he can work with. I mean, if the leaders of these former Islamic parties that were linked with terrorist and surgeon groups have to be ostracized, fine.  But find legitimate leaders that are out there that you can work with and make it clear that via these leaders you welcome the Sunnis into your coalition. Any thoughts? Yeah, I just see him going in the opposite direction. He is trying to bake his own Sunni leaders. He's trying to pick who represents the Sunni community, which is to detach Sunni leaders from the Sunni from the Sunni base and he's getting burned every time he does that. This will reflect itself in provincial elections if they're held next month as they're meant to be held. Well, thank you very much to both.


This programme contains paranormal content and is for entertainment purposes only. It also contains strong language, nudity and scenes of a sexual nature. So, Lauren, when's the medium coming? It should be here any minute. Oh, my God, that's the man. Oh, no. The man and his dog. Shall we give it a go? What, is there a bit spooky? I'm checking. Yeah, same. Hiya there, you alright? Oh, God, he's perfect. Is it a girl or a boy? It's a girl. Oh, she's very excited, isn't she? Oh, no! She looks attention. He's less the medium and his dog, Shea, specialised in finding spirits. I really hope we don't find anything bad. So, when would the dog bark? Does that mean anything? No, she's just excited at the moment. But when she starts working, she'll go round and then anything she picks up on, she'll start staring at things or she'll bark or she'll push you out of the way if it's really bad. I mean, I heard there was a medium coming round but I wasn't expecting Scooby-Doo to walk through the door as well. Picking up on anything? Definitely feeling, man, presence around. Oh, thank God. Definitely. I'm seeing, like, black boots on this guy but it's like as if he's got, like, a vest on as well. Hang on. That sounds like me, Dad. I get a foreign name, to be quite honest. Oh, really? Foreign name, yeah. Like, a bit pirately, maybe. I've got a bit of a feel but it could have been Philippe.  Up your fashion game, man. But I feel you're quite susceptible to picking up stuff because when you're open, you can... Like, that's when things can, like, come in, the sort of thing. Say, when I do the paranormal... Oh, she's very open and things can come in, right? Oh, my God. That's a way of telling you that she doesn't want to go up the stairs. That's what happens when I do the paranormal. The only thing that this is telling me is that the dog is scared of a spiral staircase. What's going on now? Just seeing something. Something that we can't see. I have never been this petrified before. So, overall, what do you think the verdict is? I don't feel it's really bad. But I think there is an energy here. So, how much longer do you think you'll stay for? Till I do the cleansing and I get rid of it all. Are you gonna come back and cleanse? Yeah. Les is gonna come back and get rid of Philippe. I can't have a French man living upstairs. What will Josh think? Please hit the like button here for even more amazing MTV videos.