general petraeus was there, general satler, i was there with general abizade and you see some video of me walking around in fallujah. but even then, correct me if i am wrong, the reason many sunni tribal leaders were working with the u.s., u.s. taxpayers were putting literally millions of dollars of cash into their pockets to buy them off. is that right? well, that s exactly right. we bought them off, we hired them, we retained them. and the idea was that once we left, we passed them on to prime minister maliki. he would put them on government payroll, and thus create loyalty to the baghdad government among the sunnis. he did nothing of the sort. he has really ruled the anbar as a kind of alien territory. and that s really a tragedy of this. and then come the syrian rebellion. come the winds from syria. come the sunni rebellion in syria, i think we were bound to get to this point.