One of the purposes of containment policy here would be to provide a chance for alternatives to the theocratic regime there now to gain force. So the second question is about the role of the military in Iraq.  Well Brenner when he was head of the CPA had dissolved the military, people regarded that as one of the major mistakes made because it took away one of the unifying pillars, the unifying forces of the country, but one of the things that happened is it provided a relatively clean slate to build a new military.  We now have a fairly good military.  A friend of mine who has helped train the Iraqis described Iraqi elite special forces units being on a par with say the Israelis, that is really maybe an exaggeration, but [???] and there has been secondly a general taking the military out of the political process in many ways and I don’t want to exaggerate that because it is quite clear that Maliki has reached down and made sure that certain commanders moved ahead that some have the special funds that they could use for special projects so on and so forth, but he seems comfortable enough with military that the news this morning carries the information that he is allowing some 20,000 military officers who were previously able to come back, who were previously expelled for being [???].  So in the long term I think there is a cause for worry.  At the moment I think it is probably not and a large concern.

Speaker 5: [???] fellow state department retiree.  Allen can you talk a little bit to generational changes and distinctions within some of these societies, Iran and Iraq in particular with respect to interesting engagement in political governance and the role of Islam that they think should be played.  I mean we have seen so much on the streets in Iran in the last few months.  I am wondering after having looked at this for a generation or more, do you see changes there that you can talk to?

Speaker 2: Well it is interesting, I was supposed to go to a conference this next week on generational change in Iraq, so I don’t know a lot about that.  One of the things that has happened though is generational change has been disrupted and this is because of the large number of people who went abroad, refugees haven’t returned home and equally sizable amounts of internally displaced persons.  So this means that educations have been disrupted, starting a family has been disrupted, all sorts of other things and so there is a great deal of generational confusion.  I don’t think I can go much beyond that in Iraq.  I would say, if you are going to speak about generational change in the gulf as a whole, it will be interesting there is a large [???] and in most of the Gulf societies the indigenous youth that is and the people who are citizens of Qatar [???] and so forth have been given educational opportunities.  Many of them – and I will have to make exceptional for various countries are sort of what should I say, not overly ambitious, but also have rather insular views and let me give you an example.  I spent some time with a person who teaches cultural anthropology in Qatar.  She is an American-Egyptian origin and she explained an exercise that she does to try to *kill across the sense of cultural relativity and the importance of cultural factor.  She asked in Qatar who dives pearls and the answer that comes back is men do.  Why do men dive for pearls.  Well because it is Quranic, it is Islam.  You will find in the Quran or in the Hadif something that says that.  Then she asks research question who dives for pearls in [???].  The answer is it is a women’s profession and the illustration plants the seed that there are cultural determinance to religious practice and to societal practice.  So anyway societies are changing.  Not a good answer [???].

Speaker 1: Alright thank you so much for joining us today.  Thank you so much Allen and thank you for being patient and hope you can join us again for another luncheon on the Rumi Forum thank you.