untold hours to pull this audience together, and the swiss government, the open society institute, and hinrich, who have made today's conference possible through their generous financial support. the carnegie endowment is deeply grateful to all of them. and most importantly, i want to thank all of you for joining us. a day like this, obviously, depends on the -- on those who have traveled in some cases great distances to join us, and we are particularly grateful to them. and we are delighted to have all of you here for what i think will be an important day from which we will all leave the wiser. so with that said, it's my pleasure to turn the floor over to the head of our middle east program, marwan, who is moderating this first panel. welcome and enjoy your day. [ applause ] >> thank you very much, jessica. before we start, let me just take care of some administrative, logistical issues. i want to remind everybody, please, if they can have their cell phones off and to use your translation machines, you have to turn to 6 for english and 8 for arabic. that should be easy. okay. we're starting t