>> this week book tv covered several events live from the virginia festive of books. next, a panel discussion of the mideast. they talk about their books and current events in the region and took questions from festival attendees. several events will also air next weekend on booktv. >> afternoon. i'd like to welcome all of you to this session of the virginia festival of the book, "voices from the middle east." i will be moderating the panel. i want to thank the city charlottes vol for hosting the festival, and thank c-span and book tv for covering it.

we're on the air now. before i get underway, i also want to ask you, as always is, to turn off your cell phones. i want to introduce the publisher of just world books, the company that put out the books of these three authors and one other, and then i will take over after she has said a few words. >> thank you so much, bill i'm really delighted to be here this year, just world books, i tunneled it a year ago and we already have four fabulous books and we have three of the authors here this afternoon. i want to thank the virginia festival of the book for letting us have this panel, which my company is cosponsoring, and the virginia festival is the principal sponsor and brings a tremendous amount of wonderful things to the city every year. i thought it was appropriate to found my company here in

charlottesville because of our local hero, thomas jefferson, who, of course, was very much in favor of both building international understanding of extending the range of what is permissible discourse about international affairs, and also doing so through books. so that is why i'm very proud and happy that just world books is headquartered here in charlottesville. we have a couple titles coming out. one on food policy and its relationship to the middle east, and another on pakistan. very timely topics. the title is timely books for changing times.

and that's plenty from me. i want everybody here and watching on tv at home to go to the web site, www.justworldbooks.com and check out as our new titles come out on a timely basis, thank you. >> don't forget to buy them when you check them out. i'm going to introduce our three distinguished authors in the order in which they're going to speak. they'll each speak briefly, and then we'll try to have as much time as possible for you to enter act with the authors. i know there are lots of questions they will raise and certainly having read each of these books, they raise lots and lots of questions, and even answered some, whiches even better. our first speaker will be ambassador chas for example. chas has had an extremely distinguished career as an american diplomat. he is now out of that role and is able to say, really, what he

thinks. although i rather think when he was diplomat he did as well. i know him best as -- in his middle east role having served as ambassador in saudi arabia, particularly during the crucial period of operation desert shield and desert storm, and he writes in the book, quite impressively, about that period, which not too many people have done. he was also stationed in many other places. he famously was in china at the time richard nixon went, and i believe was his translator with mao. our second speaker, whose book is entitled "gaza mom" is a gaza mam and has her mother with her, that's a big job, as anybody who has been a parent knows, but she

is also a well-known writer. to those who get their news from the blogosphere, she is one of the people who has helped us news the palestinian issue, particularly with a focus on gaza. she has also written for the guardian newspaper and has ban reporter for al-jazeera and her book, i can tell you, is both lots of fun to read and also poignant and occasionally sad. it also has a few recipes in it. so it has a bit of everything. you can tell from the title. "palestine, politics and everything in between." the third speaker and the third book, joshua foust, author of "afghanistan journal." a blogger well known to those who are following events in afghanistan as the title of the book tells you, the name of the site where he appears most

frequently. he has been a military analyst, specializing in afghanistan, pakistan, and the post soviet central asian region. he is currently a senior fellow at the american security project in washington, dc. we'll start with you, chas, and i forget to tell you the name of his book "america's misadventures in the middle east." which there are quite a few. >> more there should be. as bill mentioned i spent 30 years in the service of the united states as a diplomat, and during that period was very careful to avoid the middle east, finally it caught up with me, and i arrived in saudi arabia at an exciting time. in many ways this book, "america's misadventures in the middle east." the title explains the content. it's about how we got to the

sorry pga -- sorry path in which we find ourselves. this is a series of essays and speeches which provide a realtime look at what was happening and what i thought was going wrong and unfortunately more often than not i proved to be all too prescient. so, book starts, as bill mentioned, with my experience in the gulf war, where i was very, very determined, if i had anything to do with it, to ensure that general william sherman's definition of the purpose of war was applied. he said, war -- the purpose of war is to produce a more perfect peace. i failed completely. there was what no war termination strategy, and a military triumph of enormous, perhaps unprecedented,

proportions, was never translated into the political arrangements that might have produced a victory. the war in fact, because there was no war termination strategy, never ended up saddam hussein remained in power, and some years later, a decade or more later in 2003, we walked into the great ambush called iraq. , from which we are only now extricating ourselves. also, in this book there's a lot of discussion of the so-called peace process. this is now an historical rim is in sense -- remembrance of something that no longer exists, although people like to pretend it does because it's so politically convenient. i think in the region itself now, this peace process, which extended for most of the 44 years or so of the occupation of

palestine by israel, this is now seen as a transparent fraud from beginning to end. the purpose being not to produce peace but to keep everybody distracted while israel seized more land and settled more colonists. so it took me a while who come to the conclusion there was less there than meets the eye. again, in america's misadventures in the middle east" you can read how i came to the conclusion everybody much smarter than i had long before come to. i think i have to say that the book is also about, as i mentioned, our stumble into iraq, which was preceded by our

lurch into afghanistan. we had very feasible, simple, and achievable objectives in afghanistan, namely, to bring the perpetrators or at least the sponsors and architects of 9/11 to justice, kill them, cam -- capture them, eliminate them, and punish those who had given them shelter and safe have '. namely the taliban. for reasons which are very hard to understand, our mission morphed into something quite amorphous, very hard for nip -- i know josh is going to explain what victory in afghanistan would mean, even though in my view we have already lost that

war. the point is that we hung around, but we also went into iraq, a country which we have ruined, which is now divided violently between religious -- two religious tendencies in islam, whose christians have almost all fled, despite the historic role they played in that country. we have driven 20% of iraquis from their homes, 10% remain in exile abroad. half those of driven from their homes and as we leave, we do not know whether iraq will enjoy any degree of domestic tranquility, and we do not know what its strategic orientation will be. will it be a stooge of iran or return to its historic role as a balancer of iran? you could say in a way our major achievement in iraq, aside from

eliminating saddam hussein, at huge expense, obviously to the iraqi people and to of uses, our main achievement was to make it necessary for us to subconstitute ourselves for iraq as the balancer of iran in the gulf. and given the poor standing we now have in the gulf, especially as the arab awakening sweeps through the common space of network youth in the arab world, each revolution in each country having its own characteristics, sort of like a pan full of popcorn, each kernel pops at its own time and takes its own shape but they're related. this has left us -- this and the total collapse of the peace process, have left our country

with remarkably little influence in the region, which i find depressing because i spent my years as a diplomat trying to exercise influence on behalf of the united states. i'll stop here. i'm sure there will be lots of questions about evenness bahrain or libya or even saudi arabia, which i know better than those, and we'll take those up as they come. >> thank you very much. laila, over to you. >> well, you heard a lot about war and how wars are started and how the end of war may come about or how one negotiates the end of war. in my book it's a little different because i cover gaza, and i try basically to -- the point of the book is to understand gaza. how we can understand a place that has been effected and ravaged by occupation, and i don't use war because that

applies symmetry when there is none in the case of palestine. so the book is largely based on the blowing have kept, and it was the first palestinian blog from gaza to have been started, in late 2004. so let me talk about that and how the blog came about, because blogging has become so relevant-especially in the recent period now in the middle east. i return to gaza in 2003 after finishing my graduate work in the united states, and i began to work for algiers, al-jazeera, and israel was demolishing homes, and i commuted back and for from gaza to the united states where my husband was, and because he lacks an israeli i.d. and its controlled by israel and

becomes relevant to understanding the matrix of israeli occupation. i have to go back and forth to visit him, and eventually i had a son, and in 2004, on a trip back to gaza from the united states, with my then-eight-month-old son, we got stuck in egypt, unexpectedly. the moment we arrived we learned -- those familiar with the way the crossings work, they can close arbitrarily at any moment, unannounced, and indefinitely. so we learned upon arrival into cairo, that our crossing was closed indefinitely, and it was 55-day stay of exile. in cairo. and at that moment i had started the blog primarily to keep my husband in touch. it family diary, and by happenstance it turned into something else. became the chronicle of the journey, of waiting for the border to open and what that meant for us, for my son and i. and it -- over the years,

continued to blog about these kind of vary ordinary moments, which initially i didn't think anybody about. i thought everybody i writing about political things and i thought who wants to know this? ... >> and i asked her what she thought, and she said, our lives are incomprehensible. so over the years my purpose became, well, how can i help

make sense of this situation, and how can i transport people to gaza to draw it back to the human scale and do demonstrate that in order to understand occupation, effective occupation, one really needs to understand these banal and routine and ordinary moments for palestinians. and it is these quietest of moments that are the most difficult, and it's, you know, constantly been a struggle, well, how can i, you know, how can i try to explain that whether it's waiting for a permit to be approved to travel to the west bank or waiting for family unification to be approved by israel to enable my husband to travel with me, waiting for a border crossing to open. you know, i say frequently that as palestinians, we're always waiting for something. and so it's opinion a struggle, i how do -- it's been a struggle, how do i explain the key to understanding the palestinian situation, the key to understanding the effect of the occupation. so the book chronicles this

six-year period between with 2004 just before the israeli disengagement from the gaza strip in 2005 just until the most recent period. last year i was able to return to gaza in the summer of 2010 after a three-year absence in which i was physically unable, you know, i tried to go back. it was during a period of the absolute blockade that had been imposed on gaza from 2007 to 2010. and i tried, and i journeyed as far as cairo with my two young chirp and was detained by egyptian authorities who have played a critical role in blockading because saw. we were deported back to the united states even though i'm not a u.s. citizen. i wasn't able to go back for three years, and the journey of the book comes full circle in my most recent trip in the summer of 2010 and kind of looking at how things have changed. so it chronicles the six-year period and, ultimately, i like to think of it as a portal into gaza to help people understand

israel's occupation policies, especially as it relates to the average person. and really it's like i was saying, a window into understanding the violated but resilient lives we live as palestinians. and can it's a story about mothering -- it's a story about mothering, homeland, identity, war and, ultimately, survival. so i encourage you all to take a look, and, you know, we can talk more in the question and answer. >> great, thank you. wow, first two stuck right to the seven-minute rule. [laughter] we have lots of time. josh? a high standard has been set. over to you. >> we'll see how well that works. um, so i wanted to open this up by kind of relating an analogy. so last week when he was testifying before congress, david petraeus, who's the general that commands all u.s. forces in afghanistan, revealed that his son has just completed a tour of the war zone as, i believe, a lieutenant. now, to keep this in

perspective, this son, david petraeus' son, was about 12 years old on september 11th, 2001, and he has now progressed all the way through middle school, high school and all the way through college and is now fighting in the war that began that long ago. so that gives you some perspective of what we're talking about when we bring up afghanistan. this book, afghanistan journal, is more or less a chronicle of how i came to understand the war from a more or less critical perspective. when i first became aware of what was going on, was actually when i was living in kaszikstan in 2003 and met a family of afghan refugees living on the street in a city where i was teaching english. and this kind of piqued a little bit of interest that then carried forward into college where i ended up doing most of my academic work on things relating to central asia and afghanistan. after i graduated and began my exciting career in the intelligence community, that then morphed into developing a

more insider view of how the government is behaving in these areas. and especially how the military's behaving in this area. and one of the phrases that i use and the preface to this is -- and i keep repeating this -- no one cares. that sounds like a harsh and uncaring and, in a lot of ways, untrue statement. but in many ways it actually is in the sense that very few people care about afghanistan itself. and when you see these discussions in congress and within the dod and these discussions within the policy community and within the think tank community, there's not a lot of concern about afghanistan itself. there's a lot of concern about the united states in afghanistan, but not as much about the country. and one of the challenges that i was never really able to resolve over the course of this career that i had was resolving my genuine affection -- and i would call it a genuine love -- of afghanistan with the need to promote american interests there which did not always have afghanistan's best interests at heart. and this is one of, i think, the fundamental contradictions that lies at the heart of pretty much

any country's foreign policy. when you're meddling in someone else's affairs, ultimately, their well being is not going to take precedence. your well being is going to. so as this book proceeds, you can see this morphing from kind of a generic, hey, look, things are really messed up here, we need to try to get this right, getting progress i havely angrier and angrier. we're clearly getting this wrong. something is very obviously not right, and it ends up falling on deaf ears, and that's what eventually led to my separation, by and large, from the intelligence community, and now i'm working on the other side of things in the policy community. and to kind of give an illustration about how no one really cares or understands what's happening in afghanistan itself, i'm going to tell a really, really quick story about this. and it's about a number, a very special number, and that number is 30. now, going back to about 2005 or so, if you read the news about how many taliban we're killing off or, more specifically, how

many taliban the military says we're killing off. you'll see they die in groups of 30 at least once or twice a month, every single month for the last six years. this adds up to thousands upon thousands of taliban dying only in groups of 30, only in specific places where there's no one else to report on what happens besides the military. it's now happening in pakistan almost as often as it's happening in afghanistan. every other week you see taliban dying in the groups of 30. this doesn't mean anyone's lying about what's going on, and i don't want to imply that's the case because i think there's a tend si when you -- tendency when you critique the military's conduct in the world to assign mendacity to what they're doing. but by and large, they don't really know, and they don't have an incentive to know. and you can see this in anecdote after anecdote in afghanistan journal is that by not understanding and by not getting afghanistan as afghanistan instead of as a war zone, by not understanding it for its own

sake, you find yourself unable to actually understand what we're doing there to begin with. so it's self-defeating, by and large. so as we sit there and think about the war and think about afghanistan and how to think about it in a critical sense without assigning blame or assigning evilness or nefariousness to someone, i think it's important to keep in mind that, ultimately, when we -- and by we, i mean americans, almost all americans talk about afghanistan -- we're not really discussing afghanistan. we're discussing what americans are doing in afghanistan. and this is true when you read the news, it's true when you see something on tv, it's always about americans who all have names and ages and hometowns and back stories and then nameless afghans who may or may not have a name, may or may not have a hometown, concerns or family members. and this break between the humanity of our own people and the humanity of afghans, i think, is probably one of the key stories that emerges in the course of this book. and you can see it unfolding piece by piece by piece.

and that's probably as good a place, i know i have more time left than i need, but that's probably as good a place as any to end and makes for a good intro for discussion. >> great, thank you. thanks to all of our authors and speakers for raising interesting points that will lead, now, to further discussion. i want to use my limited prerogatives as moderator to ask each of them an initial question, and then we'll just open it up to the rest of you and see how it goes. um, chazz, you've described an american foreign policy establishment that has consistently performed poorly in a strategically important part of the world. but you haven't quite told us why you think we've done so poorly, say, compared to, perhaps, our foreign policy elsewhere. is it that we simply are incompetent on a global scale, or is there something about the

middle east that we get wrong or we don't draw on the right resources to get it right? what's, what's the back story to why the middle east has turned out to be so difficult, say, compared to -- you've dealt with asia, other parts of the world. could you give us a little insight into the policy process part of the problem? >> i think there's an element of incompetence and ignorance that runs through our policies everywhere. [laughter] we are, we are as a people singularly uninformed about much of the world, and much of what we think we know is, frankly, not right. but the middle east is a particularly challenging area because we have a combination of domestic prejudice and ignorance to deal with. we didn't invade iraq, for example, we invaded the iraq of

our dreams. none of what we thought was there turned out to be there. just now josh applied a similar metaphor to afghanistan. our approach to the israel/palestine issue which in many ways is the source of the rage in the region against us has been erratic at best and duplicitous at worst. and it reflects domestic american politics far, far more than it reflects serious foreign policy reasoning. so i suppose the answer to your question, bill, is that if you, if you know how to play pee knock l and you're on the tennis court, it doesn't help a lot. [laughter] >> i have to think about that one for a moment. [laughter] i think i agree. [laughter] never learned how to play by knock l, however.

for laila, there are a couple of things that are current in discussions about gaza that i would just like you to reflect on briefly, although i don't want to distract it, distract us too much from the theme of your book which is a much more human understanding of what's happening. but these are current political issues that, i think, do command attention. one is there's been an upheaval now in egypt next door which is almost certainly going to have some impact on how egypt relates to gaza, and i'd like to hear your initial thoughts on what that might be. and then in the last few days we've seen in both the west spank and in gaza some -- west bank and in gaza some demonstrations calling for unity which is kind of an interesting street theme to hear from both sides, and i wonder if you could, also, reflect a little bit on whether the current mood among palestinians in both the west bank and in gaza and, perhaps, in the diaspora lends

itself to a moment when the split between the different factions of the palestinian leadership might be coming to an end. >> yeah. well, let me tackle the egypt question first. palestinians were cautiously -- continue to be cautiously optimistic about what's happened in egypt. they didn't want to celebrate prematurely when the uprising was going on, but the moment it was announced that mubarak had resigned, they erupted in celebration. but they wanted to see, well, how is this really going to play out on the ground? will egypt no longer ally itself with israel in enforcing the blockade, not in terms of, you know, their peace accords and so forth, but will it, you know, renegotiate the agreement that is now expired that governs the crossing, the principle exit and entry point into the gaza strip which up until now has been jointly enforced and closed by israel and egypt, you know? will it begin to allow any palestinian to use that

crossing? up until now it has not because only palestinians with israeli-approved ids that can use that crossing. so they wanted the answers to all of these questions, you know, will it play a more crucial and fair role in brokering a unity government between the two palestinian factions and so on and so forth. so these are the kinds of things they're now looking to a new egyptian government to answer and see how that is going to play out. and as i was saying, the crossing is still not open to any palestinian, it's only open to palestinians with israeli will have-approved ids even after the fall of mubarak. so it's a positive effect, no doubt, but again, it remains to be seen how positive, will it really have changes that are, you know, very deep or just sort of superficial changes as regard to the palestinian issue. in the terms of the palestinian uprisings, i was continuously getting asked, what about palestine? when is their turn? i say who do you mean against?

because, you know, there's a government in the west bank with, there's one in gaza, and that has it own history and involvement of misadventures of the united states and, you know, the ill-advised involvement of the cia and so forth. or do you mean against israel? and then people won't always know. they'd go, oh, i guess against israel. people forget that palestinians sort of set the mark in this regard. there were the palestinian elections, the first truly democratic elections in the middle east which was the palestinian way of speaking up and actually changing a regime that had been in power for decades. but we all know what happened in response to that which is what i said the response was incomprehensible. we voted for change, and this is what we got. but now, you know, this is history, and be now palestinians see the only way they can actually, you know, be able to end the occupation or be, to be unified first. and so that's why they're calling for an end to the

palestinian disunity and a unification of the palestinian parties, and it continuously emphasizes, look, it's not like we're calling to an end of these parties, you know, they can stay, it's fine. in speaking with bloggers and so forth. but what we really want to see is an end to this division because it's not serving our purpose, it's serving israeli purposes. and the israeli prime minister in an interview to cnn yesterday said he is going to sabotage any effort or attempt to create a unity government. so it's clear having this unity government serves israeli interests, and the goals are to keep a division between dpaz and a and -- gaza and the west bank. i do think this is a prime time, and there is a window of opportunity, and the palestinian government's recognized it cannot remain divided like this for much longer. as a matter of fact, the palestinian president is visiting gaza, i believe, next week in order to try to finally end this disunity and to create a unity government between the two factions.

longer than -- >> no, thank you. that was great. josh, i have one for you and maybe it's foo big a question -- too big a question to handle in short compass, but we hear a lot about pakistan's role in afghanistan, and you didn't mention it in your initial comments, and i wonder if you could at least begin to shed a bit of light on that, and perhaps we can pursue it a bit in the discussion because it does sound like after we're gone, there's still going to be pakistan. >> yeah. >> they have deep roots in certain parts of the country. as do, probably, other outside countries. we are not the only external power that probably looks at afghanistan as a play thing rather than as the humans that deserve a better fate. >> yeah. it's actually interesting. there's a rather deep split within afghanistan itself over what to think of pakistan. i'd say a rather sizable number, if not an actual majority of

afghans, viciously hate pakistan. they blame the isi in particular, the inner services intelligence, which is the group that supported and funded the taliban when they were first taking over the country in the '90s. they blame pakistan for ruining their country. they blame them for visiting war on them. they blame them still for meddling in it and is preventing them from having a functional society. i didn't mean to lend the impression that it's nothing but us screwing up because there's a tremendous amount of back play or -- i don't even know what the right word is. but the pakistani intelligence services definitely have interests inside afghanistan. so do the iranian intelligence services. so do the indians. to a lesser extent, the chinese do as well. and all of these groups have different ways of jockeying for influence and power. a couple of years ago there was a huge bomb at the indian embassy in kabul that killed like 60 people, i mean, something like that. it was enormous. and the reason they were doing

that is because it was right after the completion of the tenth indian consulate in afghanistan. and for a country like afghanistan that doesn't have more than a half dozen cities or so, to be building ten consulates inside that country is ridiculous. i mean, it's completely out of proportion to what you would expect a normal interest in that country to be. but they were doing that because pakistan has an enormous presence in that country as well. and the reason many speculate at least is the taliban bombed the indian embassy is because pakistan wanted to respond to india's increasing diplomatic presence in the country. so the united states is not the only driver of instability there, and we're not the only ones who are supporting violent activity. recently, there's a growing crescendo of reports about iranian intelligence agents being arrested as well or about taliban groups receiving money and funding inside iranian territory. so we have that to contend with. russia has now, also, teamed up rather impressively with our own drug enforcement agency to be

running raids on opium-processing facilities in the northern part of the country. and unsurprising -- i should say surprisingly, this is inspiring the kind of resistance you would expect based on the russian attacks in the 1980s. they actually welcome the presence of russians, at least in the northern part of the country, as a response against the drug dealers that they think are also actively ruining their country. so, honestly, the question that you asked is its own genre of literature. [laughter] so i'm not going to be able to talk too in depth about it, but if we think about it in terms, it's not just the united states versus the taliban because there are, i think, 15 different militant groups that are actively launching violence inside the country. it's a system of violence of which the united states happens to be the biggest player. but not the only one. and, potentially, given the presence of pakistan, not even the most important one. >> wow. okay. we have lots of great themes on the table.

time has come for you to pose your questions, and in order to get this properly recorded, we have volunteers with microphones. so before you speak, i'll call on you in a second, but we want to get the microphone in your hand. so we have people down in the front who would like to ask a question. yes, this lady here. if you'd, please, stand up and ask your question. thank you. >> [inaudible] i am an american from an egyptian descent, so i ambit emotional about the issue. i heard nothing about al-qaeda which caused all our wars from none of you. for laila, i would love to hear the name instead of saying palestine, you say -- [inaudible] because it's the land of philistine, and most christians this has more meaning. so you can make it, you know, like they feel it better when

you say philistine rather than palestine. for mr. freeman, yesterday we attended a session about vietnam, and we started as americans. my husband is a vietnam vet. we started as americans romanticizing about vietnam and how the great people now and they are human, and they want the same things that we want. how are they different than the people, actually, in the middle east who really want the same things that we want? but his answer was for my question is that there is a big difference, vietnamese want what we wanted, but those people from the middle east would rather die so they can get -- he didn't mention the 72 versions, but he said they rather have whatever

in -- [inaudible] or however which i greatly disagree. he was a colonel in the military, respectful, you know? so what's your comment on his answer? >> laila, do you want to say anything, or do you want to just take that on? >> no, i mean, i think it's implied when i say palestine because arabs in my audience wouldn't understand -- >> palstina is latin, and that's where we get the name from, but it is the latin version of fill seen, and -- philistine, and it's continuity. i think your question has effectively been answered in terms of what people in the arab world want by the recent wave of revolutions which, i think, potentially may change that very biased and ignorant colonel's

view of the region. what we are observing is the belated end of colonialism in the middle east which is the one area of the world where it didn't die after world war ii and in the 1950s. the protectorates continued, that is leaders continued to seek the support of foreign governments for themselves and sustain their dependency on them. and what has happened is that the protectorates are no more. they might have been british or french, many of them were inherited by the united states from the british, but they're no more. there is no such relationship of dependency anymore where it existed. what the people in the region have demanded is the right to self-expression and to authentic

representation of their views in their governments. and they have shown that they can withhold the consent of the governed as well as grant it. what's most interesting about this in terms of the stereotypes to which you referred is that these revolutions have not been about al-qaeda. it has been entirely invisible or on the sidelines or actively rejected if you read the arabic chat room dialogue. it is not there. and it is, i think, humiliated by the absence of reference to it. iran has run around to try to be at the head of the parade, but it too is not a factor. even islamism, despite all of the hysteria about the muslim brotherhood in egypt and so forth which i think is extremely misleading or the mischaracterization of hamas --

i'm not a great fan of hamas, but i don't think it deserves to be mischaracterized in the way that it has been -- even the islamists have not played a significant role in any of these revolutions or bits of unrest. the dilemma for the united states just to round this out is that with our tardy and ineffectual and, frankly, inconsequential and, therefore, largely irrelevant responses to popular unrest, we have not ingratiated ourselves with the victors in these rev -- revolutions, and they have not forgotten who we were supporting and the cynicism with which we did it in the past. but by the same token, by failing to stand with our longstanding friends -- mubarak,

ben ali, perhaps others, well, i don't think ghadafi. i know him personally, but i don't think he's considered a friendment. [laughter] but, you knowing by failing to keep faith with our friends we have alarmed, disquieted and alienated our other friends in the region, the rulers in the region no longer consider us a reliable factor. so we have the worst of all possible worlds in which the revolutionaries and the rulers both distrust us, neither wants to listen to our advice some of which they find preposterous the rest of which they find cynical, and self-serving, and our influence is at an all-time low. >> question in the back.

>> mr. faust, not too long ago there was a flurry of news reports about the discovery of ores and minerals in afghanistan, and all of a sudden that's disappeared. is there a reason for this? is it an issue? is it going to be undercurrent like oil and water in the rest of the region? >> well, the, the underreporting about minerals was actually misleading because it was essentially repeating very public usgs survey of the country in 2003. they didn't really add a whole lot to it. it was -- i'm not really sure why that was a story at the time. it is true that afghanistan does have a lot of natural resources. they've never had the infrastructure to be able to exploit them, so they're one of the, i guess, few remaining areas. i don't know much about this, that haven't had their resources exploited in some way. one of the biggest issues as far as or that goes is a copper mine in the center of the country that china purchased a couple of years ago, and they are getting to the point -- i think they spent $3 billion for access to

this copper mine, paid it directly to the afghan government, the money's vanished. they're getting ready to start developing that mine, building it, in theory building a railroad to get it out, but the insecurity inside afghanistan is preventing any sort of meaningful exploitation of their resources. i am a deep skeptic of resource-driven arguments for why there's war there. you can read conspiracy theories galore about how we're in afghanistan for an oil pipeline or oil fields or something like that, and it's meaningless drivel. there's no evidence you'd do that. if you're an oil man obsessed with profit, there's no way in you'd want to establish a pipeline across afghanistan. they're getting rid of central asian oil as farce as they can. from that perspective, i don't think it's that big a deal. there's no conspiracy to steal afghanistan's gem stones or anything. the only real role that natural resources like that play in afghanistan is within the afghan government itself, particularly

in the east of the country. communities, their only real means of generating money is to either grow opium or export their natural resources. but afghanistan institutionally doesn't have a means by which they can lease or control access to those resources. so by default they krill eyes what would -- criminalize what would ordinarily be an economic behavior, educate ploiting your -- exploiting your resources and setting them aside for profit. you see almost as often as taliban, you see resource smugglers being branded as insurgents or organized criminals when they're really just merchants doing what merchants would do when you have a mine nearby. but from an international perspective, it doesn't. of. >> question from this gentleman here. >> does the world need a keeper of the moral compass? >> is that for anyone in

particular? >> all three. >> well, americans arrogated that role to ourselves, and some years ago our secretary of state at the time, madeleine albright, unilaterally proclaimed us to be the indispensable country. there's no evidence she consulted any foreigners about that. [laughter] and so i would, i would answer your question by putting it a different way perhaps; does the world need a good example? does it need a country that aspires to higher standard and tries to lead by example? i think it does. i think it used to have one in us. i wish we could return to those days. [applause] >> would my of the other possiblest -- would any of the other panelists like to add a

word to that? [laughter] okay, the woman in the back row, if you'd pass her the microphone. >> thank you. um, i have a question for ambassador freeman and a question for mr. faust. sir, ambassador freeman, you said incompetence, ignorance, uninformed about the world, and we have domestic prejudice. i have my two children here with me, one 15, one 20. what would you tell them, how would you advise them so we are no longer incompetent, ignorant and uninformed? in if you had the opportunity to be a combination of secretary of education, of state, how about president to the united states? [laughter] how would you, how would you change that? okay? the for my children and for the younger folk here. for mr. faust, i heard a couple of days ago mr. karzai said, enough, united states and nato, stop your actions in the afghanistan. i say that's welcome. i would love to hear your views on that.

and then one quick question for laila. [speaking in native tongue] sorry. the center of the universe how we like to refer to it. do you hope that with a new egypt, a democratic egypt that actually could play a better and actually real role when it comes to peace in the region for palestine? i actually believe mubarak was complicit, complicit in keeping the situation as bad as it is, as it was and is, sadly. thank youment -- thank you. >> chas, you want to start? [laughter] >> well, fortunately, i'm not running for office. [laughter] and i have a track record that demonstrates that if appointed, i will withdraw. [laughter] so, but having said that, i think the best advice would be to turn off the television or maybe get rid of it.

because it bears the same e resemblance to descriptions of reality that pornography does. it is -- [laughter] it is a, a force that does far less good than it should. and the second piece of advice i would -- it's a little late if you're 15. you've already gone through a fair amount of the educational system. but the advice i would give is that since we do live in a world in which we are only one of many peoples and we are destined to play a lessening role in that world in the years to come as others rise and hopefully we recover our sense of ourselves and regain some of the, of the virtues we have, i think, sullied, i think the best thing to do is to learn some

languages, do some overseas travel. better yet, study abroad, broaden your horizons. don't think that a life in america is indicateive or illustrative of what life is like anywhere else. it is not true that all people are the same. we think in very different ways, and that's exactly what makes life interesting in the end. [applause] >> and i should just add that -- [inaudible conversations] >> ambassador freeman lives up to what he urged. he speaks many, many languages including chinese and arabic, and i just learned thai and i imagine another half a dozen. so language learning is something he has undertaken very seriously. laila? >> well, let me just follow up on that. i was actually going to say the

same thing, travel. if you travel, take them with you. and my son as early as two months, i was taking him with me to gaza, egypt, lebanon. wherever i was going, he was with me, you know? and i would get criticized a lot on my blog, but it also made him -- even though he's just 7 now -- a more learned person in terms of global affairs than maybe the average american student, i want to say. l and just through his interactions and encounters and his -- i have a whole post in my book about called what do i tell a 2-year-old about a conversation i had with him when the crossing was closed and we were stranded in egypt for three weeks, and he kept asking me why is the border closed, and why are they not letting us go back home, and what is this ant? is ultimately, that turned into, okay, what can i do about it? and having conversations together about defeating this feeling of, you know, self-defeatism and then what can you as an individual write about it, speak about it, try to

change this reality that you don't agree with. and so, and that's kind of the chain reaction that being able to travel and see things for yourself can have. and so in if terms of -- i believe i answered the question about egypt's role earlier, but, again, yes, i mean, the hope is that egypt, a new egypt will play a more instrumental role, you know, in the palestinian issue, but also regionallyindependent of u.s. and israeli interests. and also, you know, focused on its own b interests, on egyptian interests rather than, whatever, buying subsidized u.s. wheat at the expense of allowing farmers to grow their own wheat and so on and so forth. but for sure, but for sure, also, in the palestinian issue. >> chas, you want to -- >> i'd like to add something on egypt because i think the -- egypt had sunk into a sort of senile repose over the last 30 years. it was not this actor in the region that it had been.

i think the revitalization of egypt and the development of a government whether it's democratic by western standards or not remains to be seen. the army is still in charge in egypt. but whatever government emerges, it will be much more deferential to the popular will. and much more authentically egyptian. in its pursuit of foreign policy. egypt happens to be blessed with what is certainly the best diplomatic service in the arab world and one of the best in the world anywhere. so i suspect that we are going to be reminded of an earlier era when egypt was very much a leader in if its region and, indeed, the source of a very appealing set of ideological principles whether you agree with them or not. you could not deny the centrality, to use your word,

that they gave egypt in earlier days. so what has happened is strategically far more important that many people, i think, have yet understood. >> i think you're absolutely right. >> let me add on one thing, sorry. i was going to say another important issue, most people don't realize most egyptians haven't been anywhere near the border, let alone visit gaza because they're not allowed to by the egyptian government. i guess, through, also, all the accords and different agreements they negotiate with israel. so that's something else. i mean, the hope would be that egypt would begin to allow its own citizens to visit gaza and go to northern sinai and so forth. >> josh? >> now for something completely different. [laughter] no, i mean, i to want to enforce the -- endorse the idea of traveling abroad as often as possible. even if it is just europe. well, because, seriously, most of my friends in college spent their time somewhere in western europe, and they got a lot out

of it. i went somewhere completely the opposite of that and got even more. the more outside of your normal experiences when you go abroad and for the longer period of time possible, the more you will get out of it, and the more enriched you'll be from the experience. so as far as hamid karzai goes, he is a really interesting bundle of contradictions. he complains about every six months or so about us being there and wants us to leave, follows that up immediately with begs us to stay and watch his back because he's afraid of being knifed. so i'm being a little flippant about it, but he's kind of reaching the point of self-parody on a lot of issues. he is simultaneously trying to cut back room deals to freeze out different members of the insurgency while publicly calling them his brothers while also complaining about how they butcher children while also saying he needs to make peace with them. he is simultaneously one of the most beleaguered beleaguered ane most corrupt and in some ways one of the more honest

politicians on the planet. [laughter] in the sense that he is very much in touch with, i think, a lot of frustrations that afghans feel at the last ten years of history for them where they feel like they were given a very raw deal in the '90s, which they were. and then they had this, i mean, i don't want to say flowering of hope because it's very bush, but they have this feeling of hope when we initially came in. and for the first several years that the united states was in afghanistan, things seemed good. violence was very low, their economy was prospering, and it was prospering in a legitimate way with actual agricultural exports and with the development of industry. and over the last six years that's been fading away, and it's been crumbling. and so i think when hamid karzai says i i need america out, i mean, he was saying that in response to a series of civilian casualty incidents in kunar which is in the northeast part of the country. and there have been a lot of civilian casualties in that one province, and i don't think anyone is sure why right now.

but at the same time he is doing this, his complaints before has resulted in a dramatic reduction in american-caused civilian casualties. so the u.n. just released statistics that while overall civilian casualties are up, the u.s. is causing fewer than it ever has both as a percentage and an absolute number. so our effect on the civilian population is less than it has been for, i think, five or six years. but at the same time there's growing frustration at our inability to really change the fundamental status of the war, and i think that's what karzai's playing into. as far as it meaning anything beyond that, i'm not sure. the talk on the american side about this 2014 date or the july 2011 date that has some meaning because it ends up shaping the perceptions and the choices that different leaders within afghanistan feel they have available to them. but in terms of it altering kind of the physical facts of how the war works, i don't think it's going to do too much. >> we have a question here if you could bring the microphone around.

>> i'd like to get some reaction to what happens with israel now, how do you extricate the united states' foreign policy and its domestic policy vis-a-vis israel? the king is very old in saudi arabia now, ambassador freeman. what is the impact of what's happened in this arab demonstration on the kingdom and the use of troops in bahrain? and you were complaining in your book quite a bit about a committee is, you know, a horse is made by committee, i can't remember the wonderful illusion, but you know what i'm talking about. >> camel. >> camel, there we go. >> camel, a horse leads by committee. >> thank you. i should have realized, we're in the middle east, aren't we? it's camel. [laughter] about the fact that america cared more about creating the

coalition to fight against saddam hussein instead of what the war end game should be and now we finally at the end of the rope for libya's freedom fighters find that we have a coalition which isn't going to do much, and our president has gone off to brazil to drink some good coffee. but i'm saying what can the world do now, and what could it have done differently? >> nice to get a question from someone who's read the book, but that's a lot of big questions. >> a lot of big questions. um, let me, um, let me say first with regard to libya that i think we missed a great opportunity when the gulf cooperation council followed by the arab league called for intervention. this was an opportunity to make common cause with the arab league in support of the very

people who are most dubious about us in the region. and instead of seizing that opportunity not, i think, to impose a no-fly zone because i remain unconvinced that this is very effective having watched saddam hussein roll up shia rebels in the southern iraq as we maintained a no-fly zone, i'm not convinced. but we could have provided intelligence support, we could have worked with arab special forces to put arab contingents inside libya to train and to organize and to help stiffen the rebel cause. we could have supplied weapons, and if we wanted to do that under cover of a no-fly zone, so much the better. we are acting very late. it is two minutes to midnight,

and i don't think anyone can say what the outcome will be despite all the brave talk. the question of bahrain i will just say king abdullah is, of course, ailing after back surgery. if you have back surgery, this takes quite a while to recover, and if you're in your very late 80s, it takes even more time. i'm sure he would have preferred to have stayed in morocco rather than go home and be in charge as difficult challenges arose to saudi arabia's south in the yemen and, more particularly, bahrain. the saudi and gcc -- meaning many this case kuwaiti and qatari -- interventions in

bahrain are, from their perspective, justified. the regime has been oppressed, very badly treated, and they have just grievances. but to permit the overthrow of the monarchy in bahrain has some of the protesters beginning to demand what immediately raised the prospect of similar insurrection in other city-states in the gulf. so there's a matter of self-preservation at stake. second, shiites in bahrain are 25 kilometers away, 14 miles in saudi arabia across the causeway, and the saudis will not tolerate the contagion that they believe would come from a shiite republic in bahrain. and finally, of course, iran has been now offered -- this is the negative part of it -- iran, the

saudi fear was that a majority rule in bahrain by the shiites would lead them to ally themselves with the islamic republic of iran. which poses as a protecter of shiite everywhere. and this would put an iranian base right off the saudi coast. whether that fear was justified or not, iran has now been offered a pretext for counterintervention to protect the shiites in bahrain. and interestingly, so has iraq which is now under shiite domination with some very nasty things being done with utter vindictiveness to the sunni minority in iraq. so we have just seen everything become far more complicated, especially because the fifth fleet, our fifth fleet is ashore in bahrain with its headquarters. there is a great deal at stake for even.

i believe what is happening since the gcc has offered a huge amount of aid to bahrain to plus up the living standards and help the downtrodden who happen to be shia. i believe that their view is a simple one. they do not agree with us that the best response to a mob is to appease it. they think that making concessions to mobs feeds their frenzies. it does not allay them. and, therefore, they see the importance of restoring order before carrying out a civil dialogue about reform. i think the question is not the reasoning, but whether they will follow through in partnership with the bahraini royal family and perhaps with some changes in the government which has been very pad ri led by the prime minister -- badly led bybe the

prime minister who's been in the power for 40 years. i think the question is whether they will follow through. and so as for israel, israel is making it own exit. as we speak. it is delegitimizing itself internationally, it is contriving it own isolation, and we are being pushed aside on this issue. on february 18th the united states exercised a veto in the security council against a resolution condemning and calling for an end to the settlements in the occupied territories. that resolution was drawn from american language. it was expressing our longstanding policies, and yet we vetoed it. we vetoed it for crass, domestic political reasons. more interesting element of this, and i will now end since others should have a chance but

you asked so many questions -- [laughter] the more interesting part of this is that resolution was sponsored by 130 member countries of the u.n., and it was voted for by all 14 other members of the security council who made strong statements in support of it including the british. there is no other way to interpret this than as a massive vote of no confidence in american leadership on matters in the middle east. that is how it is seen internationally. this issue will be revisited in september, the result will, i think, be even more definitive when the general asemiby takes up the matter. so the sad thing is, you know, i wish israel well. i think there have been many opportunity for peace for israelis. it's a matter of not just regret, it's really tragic that

overachievement on their part in terms of land grabs and the like has put them in a position where it's going to be very hard to sustain that state over the long run. >> we have time for about two more questions, and then i'll have a little wrap-up with each of the speakers. the woman down here. >> um, i was just, i was just imagining the meeting after the meeting, and i wondered if we, be this might be a part of your plan, bill. but if panelists had questions with each other or perhaps a question of a different panelist. >> we'll have a little chance at the end for them to make wrap-up statements, and helena will actually get the last word, yes. over here. >> um, i assume it's necessary for most powerful countries to

from time to time exert power -- >> yes. >> -- and influence in this other country. having heard all the difficulties and failures today, what -- is there a model in the past or present in the united states or somewhere else that could be applied to some of the problems you all have talked about? what would be a way to succeed with at least one of these? does some other government come up with something? do you have experience with something like that? >> i would say if i'm to start off on that, that the key to success generally is the development of grand strategy by which i mean a combined application of political, economic, informational, cultural and military means. not one to the exclusion of the others. the militarization of our foreign policy has become its greatest weakness. if you, all you have is a bomber, everything looks like a target.

but that is, is not effective as we have repeatedly seen in the recent past. there are many problems hard not amenable to solutions. there are some that require a military solution, but it's a rather limited set. the second point i would make is that we are entering the world -- you can see this in the middle east now quite clearly, but you can look at latin america or east asia or europe and see the same pattern there -- in which regional problems are increasingly being handled at the regional level without dictation from the u.n. in new york or washington or any overlord at all. it's interesting in the libyan case that we are providing logistical and pension intelligence support rather than putting ourselves on the front line, and it is the countries of the region, arab and european,

throughout the mediterranean, who are responding. i think this is the pattern of the future. it requires a very different mind set on our part to be effective. final point you asked, is there a model? i believe there is and that is the model of the british who had permanent interests but no permanent friends and who were flexible and who made a point of not getting involved in large land war or putting their troops in jeopardy, but handling many, many problems by adroit duplicity and the use of naval power. for a country like the united states with a lot of smart people, that should not be impossible. >> thank you, chas. i've agreed with everything you said dependent i -- except i have some problems about the

wisdom of the british and the way they divided up the middle east. [laughter] it kept me in business for a long time, but i sometimes wonder whether that was -- >> they have thanks us repeatedly for foolishly accepting the arrangements they set up. [laughter] >> right. josh and laila i'm going to give you each a chance to have the last word, and then helena has something coming up. >> it's actually funny. i have a slightly different perspective on the british mastery of their empire. because in central asia by and large, especially as the british tried to secure the northwestern border of india, i'd say it's characterized much more often in yale your of being outmaneuvered. they were fake for overreaching, i mean, afghanistan is the most pace one but not the only one. britain invadedty peat in 1905. there are a lot of mistakes they made in overreaching their

military for the sake of imperialism that i think we should be careful to avoid in the future if we do reach out to them. but they also do things good. when someone was assigned to be responsible for, say, the northwestern part of india. they were assigned for 15 or 20 years. and they moved there, they lived there, they developed a personal stake in being there. the longest any agent is ever signed to afghanistan is 18 months, so when you only live somewhere for 18 months and your family isn't there, you're going to make very different decision than if -- i'd also broaden this out, and this could kind of be one of my closing statements. i don't say this explicitly in "afghanistan journal," but one way that i found has done a lot to explain why the u.s.es have a very difficult time grappling with the current foreign policy challenges that it faces is that in a way these are problems discussing themselves in new

ways. all of the institutions that we have in government are essentially hold others from the 19th century. they're top-down, they're not networked well. so when you're dealing with a state department that still can't figure out how to divide the world up into bureaus, when you have a defense department that takes eight years of warfare to decide only then it's finally time to allow people to specialize in the area where you've been at wore for eight years. when that happens, when you have such a long lead time and a long response time and the only swns is extraordinarily democratic, and it's slow-moving issues. you're going to, just by design, see failure. i think it's inappropriate to lay the blame on my one person or institution. the system we're stuck with is showing itself inadequate to

manage all the problems that it's being faced with. >> laila, i'm not sure what the transition to you will be, but you get the last word. [laughter] >> i guess changing times to go back to the theme of helena's publishing firm. and palestine is central to that many ways, and it will continue to emerge, i think the issue of bag stein especially if and when there is a unity government formed, how will israel respond, how will the united states respond? that's going to present a whole new set of challenges. and, again, understanding palestine is key to understanding the middle east and what's going on there now, and it is if you think of a snap hot were kind of zooms in the right now and focused on what's happening in the here and now, and i like to think of my book and, i think, a lot of the books we heard today as a way of

kinding so manying out -- zooming out and what emerges is a very systematic and constant israeli policy in the case of my book that really hasn't changed who has been in power. the policies are always the same, and it is really an effort to stifle indefinitely the peace -- indefinitely the peace process, and is these actually quotes from the, you know, words of israeli politicians that the disengagement was meant to be formaldehyde and so on and so forth. so, again, understanding these systematic and constant israeli policies is key to also understanding what's going on today and how -- what the future will look like, i think, in the region. ..

>> some of the authors who touched upon it through their work. this weekend on booktv we take you to downtown indianapolis for a look at the new kurt vonnegut memorial library. >> kurt vonnegut was perhaps the greatest american writer. he was a world war ii veteran. he was a hoosier. he was a thatcherite. he was a political activist.

he was a husband. he was a father. he was a friend. he was a friend to his fans. he would write back to his fans. he wrote more than 30 pieces of work, including plays, novels, short stories. some of his more familiar books are "slaughterhouse-five" and which is perhaps his most famous. rekcus the champions, perhaps cradle -- breakfast of champions. and vonnegut always brought in his midwestern roots, and often wrote about indiana and indianapolis specifically. and if i may read a quote, many people ask me why should this vonnegut library be here in indianapolis? and i have many different answers, but then i found this great quote that says, all my jokes are indianapolis. all my attitudes are indianapolis.

my adenoids are indianapolis. if i ever severed myself from indianapolis, i would be out of business. what people like about me is indianapolis. so we presented the green light to go ahead and established the vonnegut library here in indianapolis. we have an art gallery, and museum room, a reading room, a gift shop. and i would like to share details about these things with you today. this is a kurt vonnegut timeline. if you would allow me i would like to read the quote at the top of this beautiful painting which was created by the artist chris team, and by a vonnegut scholar. and both of these individuals live in louisiana. and the quote reads, all moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. the tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just

the way we can look at a stretch of the rocky mountains, for instance. they can see how permanent all the moments are. it's just an illusion we have here on earth. that once a moment is gone, it's gone forever. it's something that is unique about our timeline is we actually start on the right side and move to the left rather than the left side and move to the right. one thing we want to mention about this quote, we hope that vonnegut would know that while he may think, may have thought that once a moment is gone, it's gone forever, we like to think that the moment of kurt vonnegut will live on forever here at the vonnegut library. he went to cornell university. he was studying chemistry. he did not plan to go into architecture like his father, but he did think you would move into a science career, and

discovered at cornell that he was not very much interested in doing that. so he enlisted in the army during world war ii. i'd like to point out a moment here on the timeline that's very important in the life of kurt vonnegut. and that is 1944. edith vonnegut is dying from an overdose, probably intentional of alcohol and sleeping pills. vonnegut enters combat in your. he is captured by germans in belgium during the battle of the bulge. soon he is writing in a boxcar with other american pows to dresden, a supposedly safe chairman city unlikely to be bombed. so dresden was this beautiful cultural city that was not a military target. as vonnegut rode in on a train, he was able to if you despicable city. then he was placed in a slaughterhouse for the rest of

the present awards were held. his slaughterhouse wasn't "slaughterhouse-five." over here we have an exhibit that we call for dresden exhibit, that is really his world war ii experience that became so important in his writing and his worldview later in his life. i'll start with his -- a photo that was taken right after he was released as a prisoner of war. along with fellow prisoners. we also have his purple heart that was donated by his son, mark vonnegut, to us. he received the purple heart for frostbite. and kurt vonnegut was embarrassed to have received the purple heart for frostbite when so many of his friends had suffered from other types of physical problems and disease. we have a signed first edition

of the book "slaughterhouse-five." this is important because "slaughterhouse-five" is probably the most well-known book written by kurt vonnegut, of the 30 some pieces of writing that he completed, this was possibly the most famous. >> why? >> why was "slaughterhouse-five" famous? so vonnegut, let me give you a bit of history about what happened to him in germany. and my impressions of why it affected people so much. vonnegut, as i read, he was taken to this slaughterhouse. while he was in dresden, the allies bombed dresden. and so his own countrymen, as well as allies, bombed this city. it was a horrible bombing. they literally -- is a firestone -- firestorm. 10,000 people were killed. these were women and children

and old people. vonnegut, one of his tasks as a prisoner, was to go out and remove the bodies, you know, from the burning buildings, and he also was required to bury the bodies of women and children. and that affected his life tremendously. he came back from his world war ii experience being completely against the war. he was searching for a peaceful resolution to conflict, and supported diplomacy and other approaches to solving problems. i will also point out a photo that was taken after he came back from the war. he got marrio of vonnegut who was from indianapolis as well. this photo was taken on their honeymoon, and as you can see he is in uniform. vonnegut and jane had three

children, mark, edith and nanette. and then many years later his sister alice died just a day or two after her husband had died in a freak train accident. alice had four children, and three of them came to live with the vonnegut family. so they had quite a large household, seven children. and vonnegut at that time was writing books that come at the time were less familiar, but he has published several books and articles for magazines, as well as working in job as a car salesman for sob. -- for saab. the extent about what happened to him was tremendously difficult for vonnegut. it took him about 20 years to be

able to publish the book, "slaughterhouse-five." jane, his wife, had encouraged him to write it. she worked as his editor on the book. she asked questions and got clarity on issues that helped him to retrieve a lot of those memories that he had repressed. because of the family situation with the addition of more children, and the success that was coming with the publishing of "slaughterhouse-five," his marriage with jane was rocky. his daughter, edith, had mentioned about a month ago that that experience and the publishing of the book, and all that seen brought to vonnegut contributed to their marriage dissolving. and at that time, vonnegut had

met the photographer, jill crimmins. and eventually married jill crimmins. she was his second wife, and was the only other person he was married to during his lifetime. we will move over here to what we call the political activity exhibit. and vonnegut continued to talk about his interest in finding peaceful solutions to conflict. i think that's another thing that made him very popular during the vietnam years and after. this photo which was given to us by "the new york times" was taken during the first gulf war. and there's vonnegut out there at columbia university, you know, i'm sure it was a large

crowd, because even through his dying day, vonnegut would attract a large crowd. i have been told he was like a rock star coming into his different speeches and a large auditorium, always filling the auditorium's. so here we are in the art gallery portion of our library. i'd like to take you over here and show you a vonnegut quote that he signed that was given to us by this artistic collaborator, jill. it says i don't know what it is about hoosiers, but what ever you go there was always a two-year doing something very important there. this quote was in the book, cat's cradle. and it's a very funny exchange that the main character has with a fellow traveler on a plane. and that fellow traveler gets this goal. next we have possibly his most

famous piece of artwork, the sphincter. vonnegut, in his humor, he associated the asterisk with this anatomical feature. and we actually had used this asterisk in other pieces of art exhibit, including our timeline, which you may have thought had stars in the sky. they are actually vonnegut's asked us into the sky. we also have life is no way to treat an animal. this is the tombstone for his famous character, kilgore, who appeared in many, many of his books. and it is understood that kilgore trout is kurt vonnegut himself. and