Ambassador Dan Kurtzer

And therefore, the leadership was not reflecting the mood of the people.

And it's also quite possible that the Arab Emirates, United Arab Emirates, weren't pushing from the beginning.

They certainly have been supportive of the continuation of the war.

One of their leading think tank experts, Anwar Gargash, said the other day that this war can't end with Iran remaining a military power.

And that obviously reflects their anger at what has happened to them as a result of the war.

You know, Arab attitudes towards Iran will certainly harden in the short term.

But even as their reliance on the U.S.

for their defense remains intact, they're going to have to figure out how to deal with Iran other than relying upon the United States to periodically go to war.

And I don't know what form that's going to take.

I don't see the Middle East today as being at an inflection point.

Almost all of the social and economic ills that beset the people in the Middle East have beset them for decades without much change.

And one of the first talks I gave at Princeton was on the conditions in the Middle East that seemed impervious to change.

Corruption, crony capitalism, poverty, the discrimination against women in education and employment, authoritarianism.

My talk in Princeton came at a time when the UN Development Program was going through an exercise of having people from the Middle East try to define what was wrong with their societies, not having outsiders do that.

but kind of looking in the mirror.

They started that in 2002.

By 2006, they had done, I think, the second or third study.

And I could give that speech today.

There's been very little change in any of the metrics that were being suggested in these studies.

They particularly focused on three deficits in Arab societies, a deficit of freedom, a deficit of what they called knowledge,