HH: Dr. Barnett, putting Chapter 3 into context, imagine for a moment that after General Petraeus was done testifying today, you had a chance to make an opening statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee. What would you say in the first two or three minutes of that statement to them? TB: What I would say is that we really have to think more broadly about what we’re trying to achieve in the Middle East, other than just create a security force that’s able to generate enough security to kind of cover the tracks of our withdrawal, or to put enough names on doors inside of government buildings, and claim that we’ve built a nation along those lines, that we really need to commit ourselves, first and foremost, to creating the economic conditions by which Iraq brings itself up from this long, lengthy period of dictatorship, and now this seemingly also quite long period of violence, that it’s our commitment to connecting the Middle East up to the outside world on the basis of something other than oil, that’s going to get the kind of economic opportunity that puts 70% of a lot of these countries’ populations that are either underemployed, or totally unemployed, and don’t see futures to connect to. And it’s that kind of problem that gets you the 27 year old lawyer, married, father of two, who decides that his best connection to the future is to strap on a vest of dynamite and step onto a crowded bus and blow himself up. It’s that kind of despair, ultimately, that we’re attacking, and Petraeus knows that, because Petraeus is a huge believer in the notion that you’ve got to create stakeholders. And stakeholders are mostly about economics, not politics. It’s mostly about economics, is giving people a sense that they have a future that they can wait for, a future that’s going to be better for their children than it was for them. And unless you put those hands to work, and connect people to those dreams of a better future, you’re going to face the kind of despair that radical ideologies can come in and take advantage of, and you’re not going to solve this problem. So I would caution everybody in this process to admit to the fact that there is no exiting the Middle East, until the Middle East connects to the outside world.