Yes, thanks, Claire. And thanks to the rest of you for having me here and for reading.

Probably a very long time.

I went to Bosnia a few years ago and absolutely loved it. Sarajevo and Mostar are fantastic places to visit.

Almost all my friends and family members think I'm weird, first, for going to Bosnia, and, second, for liking it.

There is absolutely no good reason not to visit Bosnia if you want to. The war is long over. It's no more dangerous than anywhere else in Europe right now. And yet its Bad Boy reputation has lasted at least a decade longer than necessary.

I don't expect I'll ever see Iraq in as good a shape as Bosnia is today, so I don't think many tourists will go there. They certainly won't go there any time soon.

I’d throw everything short of war at them and let them think war is coming even when it is not.

Not every bad actor can be deterred, but some of them can be. They have to believe in their bones, though, that they’ll die if they mess with us or our friends. The last thing we should be doing is sending signals that the Syrian and Iranian governments can do what they want without getting shot at.

Sometimes war is necessary, but after our experience in Iraq I’d like to keep it to an absolute minimum and avoid at all costs getting bogged down in insurgencies. We know how to fight counterinsurgency, but that hardly means we should go looking for it.

It’s both.

20^th century European totalitarianism does inform modern Islamism, but so do Wahhabism and Salafism, which, while of relatively recent vintage, are nevertheless, older, entirely non-Western, and rooted in the religion itself.

20^th century European totalitarian also informs many secular Arab political movements, such as Baathism which was co-founded by an Arab Christian in Syria who was schooled in Nazi-occupied France.

Paul Berman explores this topic brilliantly in his book, Terror and Liberalism, which I heartily recommend to everyone here.

That is correct. One reason I supported the overthrow of Saddam Hussein is because I hoped to see a democratic domino effect in the region, but I have to be honest about this. It didn't happen. And I don’t say that because my views of the Arab Spring are pessimistic. I’d say the same thing even if Cairo today looked like Prague did in 1989, which of course it doesn’t.

I can count on one hand the number of Arabs I’ve met outside Iraq who felt inspired by what happened there after the Saddam regime was demolished. I know a larger number (mostly in Lebanon, though still a minority) who approved of the American invasion, but that doesn’t mean they felt inspired by Iraqi democracy. To a man, woman, and child, almost the entire Arab world looked at Iraq and shuddered in horror. The positives were completely drowned out by the negatives.

The country that inspires Arabs around the region to revolt is not Iraq, but Tunisia.

They’re certainly doing better than anyone else in Iraq. Iraqi Kurdistan is backward in many ways, but startlingly not at all in other ways.

Erbil, the regional capital, looks and feels little better than Baghdad, only it’s much safer, of course. While it is no more violent than Kansas, it is painfully and sometimes despairingly isolated and provincial. Beirut and Istanbul are vastly more modern and cosmopolitan.

Yet Iraq’s Kurds really have their act together politically. Absent are the conspiracy theories that run rampant in the Arab world. Anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism don’t even seem to exist. The people there are more stridently anti-terrorist than American conservatives are. When I ask people there to explain why their region is so different from the rest of the country, the answer is invariable the same: “We are Kurds.”

I think they will be fine.

On even-numbered days, yes. On odd numbered days, no.

The relationship between Iraqi and Iranian Shias is, as Liz Sly ably reports, far rockier than it sometimes appears from a distance.

Majorities in both Iran and Iraq are Shias, but they have only been bound to each other by sect for a few hundred years. Arabs and Persians have been enemies for far longer than a few hundred years, since before Islam even existed.

Iraq’s prime minister Nouri al-Maliki is sometimes described as an Iranian stooge, but I don’t buy it. I just don’t. Middle Eastern leaders routinely have relationships with others they detest. Never forget that Maliki, who is a Shia, sent Iraqi Shias into battle alongside Americans against Iranian-sponsored Shia militias. This was not the behavior of a stooge, lackey, vassal, satrap, or tool.

Yes.

The only thing that would surprise me at this point is if Baghdad ever resembles Paris the way Beirut slightly does.

The place is mind-bogglingly dysfunctional and that makes me a pessimist. But it’s much less violent and deranged than it was, so that makes me a bit of an optimist.

A lot of what happens inside Iraq will be determined by what happens outside. Regime-change in Syria and Iran would almost certainly help. Will either of those things happen any time soon? Who knows?

I don’t think there’s much else the United States can do at this point to make Iraq better. We no longer want to be there. Iraqis no longer want us to be there. So, for better or for worse, we’re leaving.

I find myself somewhat persuaded by those who say we are leaving too soon, but I don’t think even if John McCain were president that we’d stick around all that much longer. The difficult relationship between our two countries has already gone about as far as it can go.

I thought it would be much cleaner and shorter. Or, rather, I thought there would only be one war in Iraq, the one against the government of Saddam Hussein. I did not foresee an insurgency or a terrorist war.

I feel a bit stupid about that in hindsight, but I had my reasons. The Kurdish north had been free of Saddam’s rule for a decade, and the people there felt and still feel overwhelmingly grateful. Most Americans don’t know it, but Iraq’s Kurds are among our best friends in the world. Unlike the Kurdish separatist movement in Turkey, they are uncorrupted by terrorism. And unlike the Arab parts of Iraq, Kurdistan is overwhelmingly pro-American and even pro-Israel.

Iraq’s Arabs, I thought, would be more like Iraq’s Kurds than they are. That was my biggest error. Arab culture are politics are very different indeed from Kurdish culture and politics. I didn’t know that when the war started, but I sure know it now.

The biggest part of the problem was built into the industry.

Embedding with infantry units during the surge was less explosive than embedding during the invasion. I got plenty of material to write about, but I never broke the type of story newspapers most like to publish. The material I got was the kind that goes into long magazine articles, narrative dispatches, and books. Yet the majority of print journalists write for daily newspapers where editors were primarily concerned with explosions and body counts.

To write about explosions and body counts, you have to stay in a hotel and survey everything from afar. You can’t go into the field and cut yourself off from everything except for what’s in front of your nose. When I embedded in Sadr City, for instance, I had no idea what was going on anywhere else in Baghdad, let alone Fallujah or Mosul.

I had a completely different experience there than my colleagues whose job was to write the grim headlines. And there were more like them than there were like me.

Yes, with caveats.

A similar strategy has been pursued in Afghanistan, but it doesn’t work as well there as it did in Iraq. At best it works slower.

The idea is to compete for the hearts and minds, so to speak, of the local population while protecting them from insurgents. It was relatively easy to do in Iraq once David Petraeus figured out how because the insurgents were so unspeakably alien and vicious to the local people. Al Qaeda in Iraq was like an army of Hannibal Lectors.

The Taliban in Afghanistan is hardly better, but Afghanistan is a much more backward and broken society, and the people in the Pashtun community, from which the Taliban hails, seem to have a harder time aligning themselves with foreigners against “their own” for any reason.

The Petraeus model of counterinsurgency can't work anywhere that an insurgency is genuinely popular. The Israelis, for instance, would not be able to do this in the Hezbollah-controlled regions of Lebanon.

And I encounter that sort of thing less often at home than I used to. We can and probably will argue forever about whether invading Iraq was a good idea or not, and I’m agnostic about it myself now after supporting it in the beginning, but after almost a decade of involvement over there, Americans who are paying any attention at all seem to have a decent idea of what happened.  There are, of course, exceptions, but I no longer feel frustrated that so many of my fellow citizens haven’t a clue. So much information has been coming out of there for so long that we can finally argue about it intelligently.

Claire,

I’ve found that most Americans have understood Iraq slightly better each year than they did the year before.

Some of the best arguments I’ve ever heard about the Iraq war were between American soldiers in Baghdad. The war was divisive over there just as it was here at home, but the division was narrower because Americans who were actually on the ground in Iraq were more or less operating from the same set of facts. I never heard them say “Bush Lied, People Died,” for instance, or anything else remotely that fatuous. If anyone in the Army or Marines thinks we invaded Iraq for the oil, that everyone who prays to Allah is forever hard-wired for anti-Americanism, that the war was going well before the “surge,” or that General David Petraeus doesn’t know what he’s doing, well, I didn’t encounter them.

Hi, everybody. Thanks for having me here.

I'm on the West Coast where my time zone makes me look a bit like a slacker to those on the East Coast. I'm awake now, though, I have coffee, and I'll answer as many of your questions as possible, starting with Claire's. Stand by...