Irregular Warfare Podcast - Proxy Wars, Part 2: Opportunity and Risk in the Middle East

Episode Date: August 14, 2020

In this episode of the Irregular Warfare Podcast, Shawna Sinnott and Kyle Atwell discuss the history and context of proxy and partner warfare in the Middle East with Ambassador Ryan Crocker and Dr. Eli Berman. This is the second of a two-part discussion on fighting irregular warfare through proxy forces. Intro music: "Unsilenced" by Ketsa Outro music: "Launch" by Ketsa CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Thank you for joining us today on the Irregular Warfare Podcast. My name is Kyle Atwell. I am one of the founders and co-hosts of the podcast. And before we kick off today's conversation with Ambassador Ryan Crocker and Dr. Ellie Berman, I wanted to let you know that we are currently searching for a fourth co-host to join our team. If you are interested, please send an email with your resume to engage at irregularwarfarepodcast.com. That is E-N-G-A-G-E at irregularwarfarepodcast.com. Thank you again for joining us today, and please enjoy the conversation.

Think it through. What's the history? What's the current landscape? Who is allied with who? what's the current landscape? Who is allied with who? What moves are they likely to make as you move? What would their calculations be? Again, as Dave famously said, tell me how this ends. One of the principal findings is that the U.S. goes in thinking that the government, which claims to share this objective of suppressing this group,

really thinks of that as their number one objective. And what we find is that the local ally over which the U.S. thinks it has leverage has other number one objectives, and those are maybe the survival of the government itself. Welcome to Episode 7 of the Irregular Warfare Podcast. I am Shauna Sinnott, and I will be your host today, along with Kyle Atwell. Today's episode is the second installment of a two-part discussion on fighting irregular warfare through proxy forces. Our guests draw on both extensive practitioner experience and academic research to discuss the nature of proxy warfare in the Middle East. A central takeaway from the conversation is that principals rarely have as much control over local partners as they would like and while proxy relationships can be successful for the principle they also carry significant risks. These lessons are illuminated through discussion on

specific cases to include Iran's support for the Houthi rebels in Yemen and Israel's successes and failures at influencing different proxy forces during the Lebanese Civil War. Ambassador Ryan Crocker has served as a U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Kuwait, and Lebanon, and is a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Most recently he served as a diplomat in residence at Princeton University. Dr. Ellie Berman is a professor at UC San Diego and co-editor of the book Proxy Wars, Suppressing Violence Through Local Agents. Before entering academia, Ellie was a member

of the Israeli Defense Force and fought in the 1982 Lebanon War. You are listening to the Irregular Warfare podcast, a joint production of the Princeton Empirical Studies of Conflict Project and the Modern War Institute at West Point, dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of regular warfare professionals. Here is our conversation with Ryan and Ellie. Ryan, Ellie, thanks for joining us today. It's really great to have you here. Great to be with you, Shana.

Thanks for having us. So this is the second of two episodes on the topic of proxy wars. In the last one, we talked about proxy wars in Africa. And then today we'll focus on the distinct characteristics of proxy wars in the Middle East. And for both of these, Ellie, the book you co-edited, Proxy Wars, provides a good foundation for looking at these problem sets. So could I ask you to briefly rehash the general framework of that book and the methodology you used? Sure. I'll try to do this in a nutshell. But I think economists and political scientists tend to come at this and be surprised that the

Pentagon sees these as relationships which are first of all capacity building. We tend to come at this and be surprised that the Pentagon sees these as relationships which are first of all capacity building. We tend to see a junior partner, a proxy, that doesn't have interests that are aligned with those of the principal. And so it's important not just to build the capacity of the proxy, to do whatever it was the activity together was supposed to be, suppressing al-Qaeda Iraq, or suppressing the Taliban, or maybe even the full-blown state building. So that conditionality incentivization of the proxy power has to be part of that. And so what we tried to do was understand how common this problem that the U.S. had faced in Iraq and Afghanistan had been with a local ally who wasn't

so willing to comply with the program and work according to the doctrine. And what we came back with was, I think, kind of studying in its simplicity, the proxies always cheated when given the opportunity. In the six cases that we identified in which the principal applied fairly serious incentives, the proxies shifted to complying. And then there were another three cases or so in which, for reasons that kind of puzzled us, the principal decided not to incentivize. And I'm so glad to have Ryan Kroc here to talk to us about this. Yeah, absolutely. Ryan, you have extensive experience as a diplomat in the Middle East. From your view, how prevalent and significant

is the role of proxy warfare and more broadly foreign intervention in the region? Yeah, if you look at the broader Middle East as a political construct, it is probably the most interpenetrated region in the world in terms of the frequency and intensity of outside involvement. I began the modern era of this amalgamation, if you will, 1798 when Bonaparte invaded Egypt. And I think we're still in that period, basically. So every single country in the Middle East from 1798 onward has been invaded and occupied by at least one foreign power at least one time. And it created a unique political culture of put up enough of a fight so that you're not completely ashamed but not too much of a fight because you want to preserve the assets you have

let the occupier come through he's going to get there anyway uh hunker down and recalibrate recalculate rearm rest and then figure out where your adversaries' weak spots are and start hammering away at them. We've just seen this over and over and over. So given the complexity that you just described, Ryan, what is a principle trying to get out of these proxy relationships? I mean, what are those strategic objectives, particularly from the perspective of the United States? Ryan's the expert on U.S. foreign policy in big pictures, but let me just talk about what we've found in our cases. Typical cases are Iraq, Afghanistan, places where the U.S. has a strategic objective, which involves, first of all, suppressing some terrorist organization or insurgent force.

And then there are some larger geopolitical objectives as well. But, you know, the stated purpose of suppressing the Taliban was to reduce international terrorism. And so in those cases, I think, again, one of the principal findings, and I'd really like to hear Ryan's opinion on this, is that the U.S. goes in thinking that the government,

which claims to share this objective of suppressing this group, really thinks of that as their number one objective, the way we do. And what we find is that the local, maybe proxy is a strong word, but the local ally over which the U.S. thinks it has leverage has other number one objectives. And those are maybe the survival of the government itself. Something Ellie just mentioned and we were going into is,

you know, interest alignment. You as a member of the diplomatic corps and as an ambassador, was interest alignment at the forefront of your thoughts on where to invest U.S. resources and diplomatic efforts? Or were there other things you were thinking about? Well, as you know, particularly if it's a kinetic environment, you've got a lot of things around your mind. In the case of Afghanistan, although I think the strategic objective is pretty clear. 9-11 came to us out of

Afghanistan, Al-Qaeda, sheltered by the Taliban. Our strategic objective is to make sure that could never happen again on Afghan soil. We're a little less clear on strategic objectives when it gets to Iraq because that's another matter. So everything, for me at least, depended from that. That's the filter for which I would look at proposed assistance

projects amping up involvement by other countries, will it contribute to this ultimate goal in ensuring that Afghanistan cannot become again a strategic threat to the United States? But perceived interest alignment can look very different in practice, right? I think you've alluded to some of those challenges in Afghanistan in the past. Now, that's where, of course, the the differences started. So do you build vast infrastructure projects as a means of gaining that assurance? Really, really terrible idea. Projects that the other countries

were not particularly interested in and had no ability to sustain, let alone be paired on the line. But it all comes out of that single strategic objective for me. So alignment of interest in a sense. Eli, Ryan mentioned that the objectives were less clear in Iraq. In your book, Proxy Wars, there is a case study on interest alignment between the Iraqi government and the United States.

Can you describe the key findings for us? David, like my colleague at UC San Diego, took on the most difficult task, which is to write the chapter about Iraq, which in many ways is the chapter that motivates the analysis in the book. How often does it happen that principals are disappointed by their proxies and end up with results that were not what we were planning. What happened was that the Maliki government built a very narrow coalition and showed no particular interest, first in governing the Sunni majority areas in a way that you might think was fair, but also didn't show tremendous interest in controlling the Sunni majority areas in a way that you might think was fair, but also didn't show tremendous interest in controlling the Sunni majority areas.

And so when the part of the insurgency that was al-Qaeda Iraq rebelling against the Maliki government with its American principle, when that rebellion kind of exploded, and now we're talking about 06, 07, then Ambassador Crocker and Commander Petraeus were faced with this challenge of how to get the Iraqi military engaged in suppressing this insurgency of al-Qaeda Iraq, the thing that would eventually come back to haunt us or haunt the West is ISIS. Ryan, I know you see this differently from Elian. You would not characterize al-Maliki as a proxy of the U.S., but in Iraq at this time, were there any other elements over which the U.S. did have sufficient control to consider them an effective proxy? Yeah. Well, again, it comes down to a point of definition.

By my definitions, the only proxy force we had in Iraq would have been the so-called Sons of Iraq, the Sunni tribe that we trained, organized, armed, and paid to be part of the Effort against al-qaeda who are happy to do it because of the horrors of al-qaeda had Leveled on them and their families So you have that alignment as well as the guarantee to call any of the other forces there At a US proxy just to slap wrong and that includes the Kurds very very close and iraq and rosa and syria but boy have they got their own agenda and for the iraqi kurds part of that agenda is based on the expectation that we'll you will screw them again and we've got a pretty consistent track

record in doing so so uh it was only the assembly of ira Iraq that I would qualify as a proxy. And you know what? Both Dave Petraeus and I had the regret that we made them a proxy. That maybe we should have pushed harder and faster on the government, on Maliki personally, to embrace these guys and to pay them. Because, you know, it was a field expedient. We had to do something. We needed to get other guns in the fight out in Anbar. So we didn't really have the luxury of time

for the political debate, but just the fact that they were US proxy that hurt them and us in the long run. All right, I don't disagree, Ryan. And the definition we were using was the one we chose. So the principal puzzle in the Iraq case for us as an intellectual exercise, but I think this is a big policy question as well. that the United States had in Iraq, it didn't manage to induce the Maliki government to thoroughly suppress the insurgency and more broadly to introduce an inclusive form of governance that would have allowed American forces to exit, thinking that the local ally would be,

like many of our allies, a stable democracy. Again, we were pretty cautious on that particular point. You didn't want to send what was essentially a Shia-led army into Sunni Anbar. What we saw, of course, was that for many Sunnis, more in Mosul, I think, than in Anbar, Al-Qaeda was bad, but less bad than the Shia-led government and its forces. But again, legitimacy is important. Every action has reactions. You've got to try to think through several iterations of that. While you've got to get something in the field like now, not tomorrow, now. So lots of field experience. It's what you had to do. Did we think it was perfect? Even at the time, we didn't. But how else are you going to do it?

It seems like the U.S. is not the only actor trying to influence proxies or partner forces or local allies. There's a confluence of forces working in the region. And I think that's an important point. Could you describe, are we the only people trying to conduct proxy warfare in this region? Or how do we manage from the U.S. diplomatic perspective? Well, the short answer is absolute no to the first. Everybody is involved in it. is absolute no to the first. Everybody is involved in it. Look at Syria today.

Even more complex than Lebanon in the times earlier, where you've got God knows how many contending Syrian factions still out there. A very heavy, broad, regional presence. Turkey, Qatar, you name it. Iran, obviously. They're all in there with different agendas. And then you name it, Iran obviously. They're all in there with different agendas. And then you've got the outside players, Russia, the US, Turkey as a NATO member,

a quasi outsider since they're not part of the Middle East, even though they used to own most of it. That is a not infrequent construct. Who's the best at it if we were to say that one entity is very effective at running proxies more than others? Oh my goodness, Iran. They've got first, second, and third place. Why is that? Well, for them it was a matter of overwhelming national security. And it is interesting to look at patterns here. So as I think you treated this in your book, the Nixon Doctrine, which said we're not going to do any major ground wars in Asia anytime

real soon. We will find regional allies to keep peace around the world and we will give them economic and military assistance as needed. And our twin pillars of security in the Gulf were Iran and Saudi Arabia. Iran, in the 70s, they seized three islands from the UAE just to show they could do it and they deployed basically a mechanized infantry brigade into the Iranian peninsula at the request of the Sultan of Oman to put down the so-called Dhofar Rebellion in the west of the country. And Saudi Arabia, by the way, facilitated that deployment, this notion that

Sunni Saudis and Shia Iranians have always fought each other and always will, not exactly. So for the Shah, that was a very important projection of policy, that he was asserting that Iran can deploy armed forces outside its borders, sustain them, and win. A message to the rest of the region. What happens in the revolution? The doctrine doesn't change. Just for me.

the doctrine doesn't change just for me. If they were using regular forces, they were going to develop and use proxies, which of course is the post report for it. But they have done it brilliantly, I must say, just brilliant. Let's face it, he was just brilliant. And so still in Lebanon, of course, now also he's seen in Iraq and Syria where they were not going to allow to go down the drain, use their own forces

to some extent, but really relied on his and other Shia militia that were forming from elsewhere. So yeah, they got the gold cup when it comes to the management of proxyxies. Would you still say that this level of Iranian proficiency in running proxies is true in a place like Yemen? I think that's a place that seems to have a high association with Iranian influence,

but there seem to be a lot of challenges to control. Yeah. The Iranian-Saudi Cold War in the region, hot in Yemen, as it is in Syria, when it began in earnest and when we were publicly accusing Iran of providing significant lethal support to the Houthis, I saw Zarif in New York, and he found it hysterical. He said, you know, first, the notion that we are co-religionists, we're not. They are Vedis, just one half step ahead of the Al-Awis of Syria as a heretical schism for orthodox Shia. But second, as he put it at that time, we don't need to ship arms to the Houthis. The Houthis could ship arms to us. And I do think it was a bad misreading by the Saudis and by us of the nature of the Houthi movement.

Now, that changed over time as this war was prolonged. Yes, the Iranian did get into some pretty substantial arms defense to the Houthis. But again, sometimes lethal misreading of what their objective, who they are, what are their objectives, who exercises real control. objecting who they are, what are their objectives, who exercises real control. And I would say that Iran exercises very little control over the Houthis. Yeah, if I could just add one of the really interesting things about Yemen is that this long history of foreign powers trying to influence Yemen goes back at least to the Egyptians under Nasser in the 1960s. But the United States also attempted this in the 2001-2011 period. Ben Brewer wrote a great chapter

on it, and it turned out that the American mistake with our local ally there, the President Ali Abdullah Saleh, was to lose sight of the relationship, to basically go asleep at the wheel, it seems, and to stop supporting a local ally who seemed like he wanted to be compliant, but couldn't understand why the United States wasn't holding up its part of the bargain. Now, this doesn't really directly have to do with Iran, except that if we still had influence in Yemen to this day, maybe Yemen would be a very different place. And Ellie, I think that's really illustrative of the fact that the challenges we've been discussing to running proxies in the Middle East are relatively universal, not specific to one principle. So if we were to

summarize the major themes you both have introduced us to, it appears that first of all, these situations are extremely complicated, and there are always third-party considerations beyond the principle-proxy bilateral relationship. Second, that seemingly overt proxy relationships like Iran and the Houthis may actually be situations where the principle has very little control. And third, to understand modern proxy relationships, you need to understand historical context. And that's something you, Ryan, have continued to emphasize, because that's how you grasp how these relationships affect contemporary interest alignment. And all of that is a solid baseline from which to deep dive on our main case study today, that of Israel's use of proxies

in the 1981-83 war with Lebanon an event you both have lived through Ryan is a diplomat in the embassy and Eli I believe as a soldier on the ground yeah so I was the this kind of the representative the senior partner in the invasion of Lebanon in 19 the summer 1982, and where the junior partner, if you would, was the South Lebanese Army. And of course, I was a buck private at that point, highly trained, but pretty ignorant. And so, you know, sometimes you go back and research to things that you think you know, or you think you'd like to understand better. And I've certainly found that happening in this project. So what were Israel's objectives working through local proxies in Lebanon? So Lebanon is always as complex. So you have to bear with me for a minute, because

there were really two different objectives that Israel had in Lebanon, at least. But the main two were these. Israel wanted to secure its northern border, because at the northern border, the border with Lebanon, there was ungoverned space north of the border on the Lebanese side, and Palestinian terrorists were infiltrated through that space across the border and killing civilians in Israel. Israel wanted to put a stop to that. That was objective number one. The SLA was going to be the partner, and turned out to be an outstanding partner in securing that strip of formerly ungoverned space in the south of Lebanon,

just north of Israel. There was a second objective, though, which is a little more complicated because it was in a way a hidden objective of Ariel Sharon, the defense minister, during the 1982 Lebanon War. And that was to remove the Palestinian Liberation Organization under Arafat, in particular his part of it, the Fatah, to remove them from Beirut and from Lebanon altogether. And that unannounced objective of the incursion or invasion into Lebanon in the summer of 1982 meant that Israeli forces did not stop at the northern border of this defense zone in southern Lebanon. They just kept rolling, we, because I was involved, just kept rolling all the way up to Beirut and to the east-west road that connects Beirut to Damascus in Syria.

Israeli forces didn't go into Syria, but Israeli forces laterally moved all the way up to a line whose western end was in Beirut. And Ryan, I know you've also described the Israel-SLA relationship as one of the most explicit, accurate example of a successful proxy relationship with the requisite control. accurate example of a successful proxy relationship with the requisite control? Yes, word count and the word proxy counts for a lot. The Lebanon experience would be a great example, as Ellie just mentioned. The South Lebanon Army was an Israeli proxy. They armed them, they paid them, they fed them, and they directed them. That would be my definition of proxy.

In contrast, the Lebanese forces were definitely not anyone's proxy. Not Israel, not us. And I think some confusion over that. We all paid a high price. So, Eli, how did this case study play out using the analytical framework in proxy wars? So the case study on Lebanon is a chapter written by Matt Nantes of St. Louis University. Of all the cases that we look at, this is the one in which the proxy's interests are the most aligned with those of the principal and in which the proxy is really the best behaved. The South Lebanese army just seems to have no reason to deviate from the stated goals of the relationship because they share this interest in controlling the territory

and in minimizing incursions of terrorists through their territory into Israel. We're talking about a proxy relationship between Israel and the South Lebanon Army, but it also sounds like, Ryan, the U.S. Embassy was involved. They're trying to understand it. Could you kind of frame more broadly what this proxy relationship was?

Yeah, to be honest, we didn't worry too much about the SLA in the early going. And it was precisely because we did see it as a proxy of Israel, in no way able to mount independent action. So we basically felt that the working assumption was that anything the SLA did would have been not just total coordination with the IDF, but at the direction of the IDF. We worried a lot more about the Lebanese forces and what they might do, because nobody had total control over them except themselves. So, again, it comes down to definitions. For me, a proxy is a wholly owned subsidiary, which the SLA was.

And many of their fighters, even as it's very nice, were not from South Lebanon, meaning they were even more involved to the Israelis. So very little sign he did anything independent of Israeli command. Eli, based on your research, did Israel have full control over the South Lebanon army? And what did that look like? How did they control those actions? I'd say almost full control. Israel had a strong interest, as it still does, in a kind of a secure northern border, in a northern border which would not have incursions of terrorism coming across, and also some interest in reduction of smuggling and other things that most countries care about at borders. And there had been very painful incursions of PLO, Fatah terrorists, across that border.

And so the role was to distance the PLO from the border. Eventually, though, Hezbollah, with Syrian support, would put missiles north of that support security zone, missiles and rockets, which had range that went over the security zone, and the SLA would just become redundant. So this is an interesting point. So you had a proxy, which is the South Lebanon army, and then the principal, which is Israel, and they had interest alignment, and they were working well together. But at some point, Israel said said this isn't worth our investment and they had to find a way to off-ramp the proxy without damaging their reputation or what did that look like? Not at all, Kyle.

SLA would last about 13 seconds in South Lebanon when the IDF executed a complete withdrawal, which is what they did uh it wasn't any of those fine points um uh again they hung on the sla and israeli for 18 miserable years it was time to quit and go home the sla had no home to go to yeah even even more than 18 years because the relationship actually predated the 82. But I think the major point is that these relationships require some credibility because you don't want to be the proxy of some other country for generations and generations if that's not what your neighbors in the country you live in approve of. Yeah, it's beyond proxy.

What's the context? What political alliances are forming? What are we seeding? What's the test board look like? I don't think either of us ever took a serious look at that before Q82. Eli, was the SLA the only proxy relationship that Israel had in Lebanon at the time? So I think that these were proxy relationships, proxy now liberally defined to mean a local ally over which maybe the senior partner has some influence.

So there were two proxy relationships. The one with the SLA, there was really no tension. The SLA was happy to see Israeli forces enter and set things up and kind of reinforce their position in a way that would make it easier for them to fight. easier for them to fight. But there was another proxy relationship that was imagined with the Christian Falange forces. The Falange was a local ally of both Israel and the United States. Bashir Jomail was... and the attempt there was a proxy relationship that would, with one of the objectives of that relationship, was to expel the PLO, the Palestinian forces, from Lebanon. So the other important figure in that was the liaison of the phalange to both Israel and American forces was a man named Eli Hobeika. It sounds like Israel thought it had more control than it actually did. Exactly.

So when those control issues came to light very quickly, so that proxy relationship failed dramatically in two ways. In one of them, there was an agreement between the Israeli forces and the local ally, the proxy, if you will, the Falange, that Israeli forces would not enter Palestinian refugee camps where the Palestinian fighters were sitting. That would be the job of the Falange. And that arrangement set up the disaster. Right. I know we were talking about the Shatila massacre earlier and the tragedy that that really was. Ryan, you were on the ground in

the aftermath of that. Where was the breakdown between what Israel thought Lebanese forces, the Falange, were going to do, and then what actually happened? The mission of the Lebanese forces to enter the Shatila refugee camp and pacify, if you will. What they wound up doing, of course, was murdering hundreds and hundreds of Palestinian women and children. I know because I counted the bodies. There is a lot of conspiracy thinking in the Middle East that, through that revelation that has ever occurred to you before, a lot of Arabs still believe that the Israelis were knowing all along and probably directed it.

I do not believe that. Israel had a commission of inquiry that produced some pretty feather-light punishments for senior commanders. What I think actually happened was that Israelis thought they had more control of the Lebanese forces than they did, or even worse, thought that somehow the Lebanicus forces would adhere to the same standards and conduct as they would. So this is interesting. It really highlights the risks of engaging in proxy relationships. In this case, the risk for Israel was not just that its immediate security objectives would not be accomplished, but in fact there were significant political or reputational costs as Israel

has been blamed for a massacre that was conducted by the group it was trying to work through. So that's the difference between a semi-reliable ally and a proxy. I think you have to run... Proxies, if you accept my definition, are not terribly hard to control. The patron has all the strings and all the parts. A non-governmental force that shares some interests but not all, that gets really tough. And here's the kicker on this one. I mentioned Elie Hobeika, who was, at the time, an Israeli asset. They were pretty upfront about this. Hobeika was their guy.

And that, of course, made it all the worse. When I got back to Lebanon years later in 1990, I learned something new. At the time, the Israelis thought Hobakar was working for them. The Syrians had doubled it. So we've got to know what we're talking about and we've got to know what we control and what we don't. And in the Middle East,

it's almost always the case that we don't have quite the influence that we thought we did. But I think the Hobaka episode or the Hobaka drama and relationship is indicative of the full relationship, I think. I'd like to hear what you want to say on this, what you'd say about this, Ryan, given your experience, that there was never only one principle in Lebanon. given your experience, that there was never only one principle in Lebanon. Anything that the Israeli government wanted to do with the Jamal brothers had to take into consideration the possibility that the Syrians would object and would respond. Is that right? Well, yeah, it is.

Well, yeah, it is. Of course, the 82 invasion provided the purchase what you think was achievable lashes back and you're in a worse position than you thought. So 18 years in total with some presence on the ground in Lebanon. And what did they and we get at the end of it? Replacing the PLO with Hezbollah, a far more lethal force in and out of Lebanon. And I don't know, the number I heard, that in those 18 years, the IDF lost over 1,100 troopers in Lebanon. A stunning number when you put it all together, and particularly for a country as small as Israel. Everybody knows everybody else. As we take what we've learned today and try to apply it to future engagement in the Middle East, Elliot, what are your recommendations for policymakers and practitioners on the ground? I'd say that in a narrow sense, in these relationships,

starting with the Pentagon, you want to build the relationship in such a way. So recognizing that there's not going to be complete alignment of interests. You want to build the intervention in such a way that you can close the spigot and introduce conditionality if you want to. Ryan mentioned kind of the big infrastructure projects. Well, the big infrastructure project is useless until it's finished. And stopping it a quarter of the way, stopping it three quarters of the way, it doesn't provide much of an incentive unless the local partner is very,

very forward-looking. Much better to be able to do what I think Ryan and General Petraeus did in Iraq, which is to cut off logistic support, fuel and ammunition, which the local ally might need immediately and can be done at a much lower level, unit by unit, rather than for the entire government. So building interventions in ways that allow conditionality, I'd say would be lesson number one. You're a highly experienced diplomat in the region of the Middle East, and you've worked with a lot of partner forces and proxies.

What would be your advice to the diplomatic corps, to the military practitioners and policymakers who are looking how to approach the Middle East partnerships moving into the future? Well, it's all pretty basic stuff. What are your aims? How achievable are they? And by what mix of American tools, you know, development, diplomacy, defense, what's the history? defense. What's the history? Is the issuer involved in something that has echoes from the past? So to be as clear-eyed and analytical as you can possibly be and to always keep an eye on the price tag. How much are you willing to pay to have a shot at achieving the goal you had stated

uh distill that further because i'm going to tell you everything i learned in the middle east and you would think that would take hours it would take the two minutes i have left be careful what you get into nice lesson for us a blessing for israel obviously in in lebanon Nice lesson for us, lesson for Israel, obviously, and in Lebanon. Think it through we think we can get a clean victory and get out? If we do, we need to lie in the shade until that notion passes. And then how much are you willing to pay? The second thing I learned, be just as careful what you propose to get out of. This engagement can have consequences as great as the original engagement,

which in case it's by military means. And Iraq, of course, would be the poster child for both. We were definitely not careful getting in and equally careless getting out. You say that's pretty simple, but that sounds very complex to me, actually. That's a lot of knowledge of history, a lot of knowledge of the world, and a lot of sophisticated thinking for a policymaker. Yeah, well, the days of the folded gap are forever gone, whatever Putin may think. It's all going to be a complex, messy set of little wars from now as far as I can see.

And I think that's an appropriate place to stop for today. Ryan, Ellie, thank you so much for being here and sharing your insight. You have enjoyed the opportunity. Thanks. Thanks again for listening to Episode 7 of the Irregular Warfare podcast. We release a new episode every two weeks. In our next episode, Shana and Nick will have a conversation with August Cole and Peter Singer, authors of the books Ghost Fleet and Burnin' about the future of irregular warfare.

Following this, episode nine will explore what characteristics of military units determine success in irregular warfare environments. Please be sure to subscribe to the Irregular Warfare Podcast so you don't miss an episode. If you are interested in applying to be an IWP host, send an inquiry to engage at irregularwarfarepodcast.com or visit us on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook to request more information. We will be accepting applications until September 15, 2020. One last note. What you hear in this episode are the views of the participants and do not represent those of West Point or any other agency of the U.S. government.

Thanks again, and we'll see you next time.