It's with enormous pleasure and we are very lucky to have to steal some time on Cyber Roberts.
These are clearly within the hospitals, the president of Trinity College.
You may not know that he had a lifetime service, 38 years working with the British diplomatic service, driving home to his time here at Oxford.
And the sheer number of postings is very, very impressive.
Paris, Lebanon, Luxembourg, Canberra, Vanuatu.
He was then actually in London, then the head of the foreign press department, head of counterterrorism minister,
the embassy in Madrid sheltering the person, the ambassador in Belgrade during the Bosnian war and of course, then the Kosovo operations.
He then went on to Dublin as ambassador,
particularly full time because the signing of the Good Friday agreement and he wrote as ambassador there until he was 26 and he was also
has become an honorary chairman of archaeology opponents of Rome for five years and is still president of the Oxford Rugby Union Club.
You may also, of course, I'm not aware of all this work,
but he goes on to my involvement with this new edition that's coming out shortly on such a diplomatic practice.
You said that the manuscript is coming out to coincide with one of our three in January 2017.
I think that's right. But he's also about to release book, which was not necessary proof of my former position, but is now on Milosevic.
And that will come as nations later this year to sort of thank you very much, indeed and talk to us on war in Vietnam.
Thanks, Robert, for that introduction. It would have delighted my father and my mother would have believed it.
He also ran through a whole series of my postings.
You may wonder why there are so many. Quite a lot of people in the Foreign Office specialise,
but I think the Foreign Office concluded that I've done enough damage to bilateral relations in my first visit, that they didn't risk a repeat.
But no, it was a long innings. Rob mentioned that I was in another life long ago the head of the Foreign Office's Counter Terrorism Unit,
which was a newly created post at the time, quite, quite unlike any other Foreign Office job that brought you into contact with bodies.
You wouldn't, as a diplomat, normally expect to encounter from intelligence agencies and to Special Forces.
And I almost felt I had a posting to Hereford at one stage in my first few days in the job,
the Church of England special envoy Terry Waite went missing in Beirut, which added to my list of ports of call.
I used to spend a lot of time at Lambeth Palace talking to the Archbishop of Canterbury, his team,
to find out what had been going on and why Terry Waite had taken himself off to Beirut.
In the most propitious of circumstances and getting getting Terry Waite out of the clutches of Hezbollah proved a tough nut to crack,
and it fell to my successors to achieve it.
But at least we were reasonably confident that in the absence of an abortive hostage rescue attempt, he was unlikely to be killed.
We knew roughly what Hezbollah wanted in exchange for Waite and the other Western hostages at the time.
Because in prison in Kuwait, where a group of Shia terrorists known as that Don,
was 17, who were in many cases related to Hezbollah as head of security,
a man called Imad Mughniyeh, who was killed in Damascus by an Israeli car bomb in 2008.
But basically, we knew that our hostages were being held as a bargaining tool to secure the release of the these 17 in Kuwait.
We had other terrorist threats to deal with. Of course, the Palestinian terrorist brand, Abu Nidal was extremely active in those days.
And again, we knew that its terrorist attacks were aimed at forcing Western governments to impose territorial concessions on Israel.
As authors of the Balfour Declaration.
The UK was regarded as particularly culpable for the creation of the State of Israel, the nemesis as the Palestinians saw it.
And there was of course, the IRA.
British withdrawal from the island of Ireland was the straightforward demand in exchange for which the IRA said we could have peace.
That was then. Now we have two terrorist groups.
We have al Qaeda, which, while extreme, is at least comprehensible in that it aims to are largely territorial.
The removal of all Western forces from Muslim countries, the destruction of the State of Israel,
and the overthrow of corrupt leaders in the Islamic world who dare to place manmade law above Sharia.
And then we have Islamic State or ISIS,
whose theology is strictly and literally based on earliest Islam and the twisted interpretation of the prophet's writings of 1400 years ago.
Islamic State has no interest in seeing a peaceful outcome of the struggle between its pure form of Islam and what it sees as crusader forces.
There are no concessions we in the West could make. No withdrawal of forces which would temper the bloodthirsty US.
Last June, the ISIS leader declared the return of the caliphate with himself as the new caliph.
Among other qualities, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi belongs to the Prophet Muhammad's tribe, the Karadsheh, an essential requirement for the caliphate.
That explains why the caliphs of the Ottoman Empire were not always recognised by Muslims as Caliphs.
Once a caliphate is declared with a legitimate caliph, all Muslims who recognise the caliphate are,
according to Islamic State's Reading of Islam, obliged to come to live there and swear allegiance by to the Caliph.
The Caliph himself cannot make permanent peace. He must wage jihad at least once a year.
Nor can he recognise borders.
Islamic State take a literally apocalyptic view of the future where the armies of Rome and of Islam will meet in Syria at Dabiq,
which is also the name No Coincidence of Islamic State's online journal at Dabiq,
as anticipated by the Prophet and were the final victory of Islam will take place.
The instruments of terror used by Islamic State reach back into a medieval,
even biblical world, where executions are carried out grotesquely by beheadings, crucifixions.
Burying and burning. Unbelievers alive.
Mass shootings.
The justification to the extent that there can possibly be one, comes from the Koranic verses that talk of striking off the heads of unbelievers.
But the main aim is to shock and awe the West and by its crude barbarity to attract,
rather than repel recruits among disaffected and deluded young Sunnis worldwide,
delivering victory and salvation and a form of empowerment, a grim sense of identity,
identity and strength, which they don't feel they enjoy in the West.
So the videos of executions by Islamic State are deliberately gauged as a as a sort of outreach program,
appealing to young recruits who, far from abhorring the group's brutality, are attracted by specifically by its brutality.
They go beyond Osama bin Laden's doctrine that when people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse.
al-Baghdadi's victory and through the victory through terrorism, signals to friends and foes.
Not just that Islamic State is a winning horse, but it is conveying the message, Get out of the way or you will be crushed.
Join our caravan instead and make history. The victims are not bargaining chips, as in the days of yore.
In the days of Hezbollah, for instance, they cynically tried to exchange a convicted Islamist terrorist for a Jordanian pilot who had been shot down.
In reality, the pilot had already been murdered, burned alive weeks earlier.
However disgusting and however much in breach of every international convention,
one could at least see some perverted logic in executing an enemy combatant.
But executing people for who they are, not for what they do, however, is a whole new level of depravity.
Christians, she, Shia and other apostate Muslims such as Yezidis have all been brutally murdered and some of their women sold into sex slavery.
The latest horror the other day involved ISIS releasing pictures showing two allegedly
homosexual men being embraced by militants before they were stoned to death in public.
The mass executions a couple of months ago of 21 Coptic Christians on the shores of
the Libyan Mediterranean was an example that provoked a furious response from Egypt.
Though some may cynically claim that the murders have just provided the al-Sisi regime in Cairo with an opportunity
to crush fundamentalists in the neighbouring country and provoked also an outcry throughout the Christian world.
It also appears to go against Islamic tenets which in the Ottoman caliphate allowed Christians to live in peace and practice their religion.
Provided they pay the tax. The GCR what marks ISIS or Islamic State out from other ultra purist Muslims such as the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia,
where Islamic State's roots are indeed to be found, is the important distinction that Islamic State sees itself as surrounded by unbelievers,
just as was Muhammad in Medina, and therefore justified in visiting the most extreme punishments prescribed in the ancient texts beheading,
crucifixions, slavery, etc. on apostates and non-believers confirms the leading Islamic State spokesman.
Put it put it succinctly We will conquer your Rome, break your crosses and enslave your women.
Some argue that Islamic State's ability to organise so quickly and extend their power structure so
widely owes more to former members of Saddam Hussein's Baathist entourage left bitter and unemployed
after the US decision to dissolve the army and the Baath Party in 2003 and able to draw on
Saddam's pro Stalin inclinations to create a regime addicted to totalitarian domestic espionage.
While this may explain how the Islamic State, guided by old members of the secular Saddam regime,
were able to acquire and consolidate so much territory and power so quickly.
The reality is that Islamic State also needed a strongly.
Orthodox religious call to actors, as one might put it, a weapon of mass attraction for disenchanted Sunni youth inside and outside the region.
The outflow of maladjusted, disaffected young Muslims has really taken off with the declaration of the caliphate.
Several thousand foreign Muslims have emigrated to join it in the months since its proclamation,
including an increasing number of young, even teenage girls anxious to marry Islamic State fighters.
One young woman from South London tweeted that she wanted to be the first female jihadi to kill a western hostage.
The celebrated, if that is the right word,
recent example of the trio of teenage female would be jihadis from East London illustrates graphically the influence of social media,
which plays a pivotal role not only in radicalising putative jihadists through propaganda, but also in offering them practical advice on travel,
evading control, and then also portraying a glamorous picture of life inside the caliphate.
The reality, as these unhappy souls may have already belatedly realised, is horrendously different.
Physical danger, sexual abuse and submission to the point of slavery.
Slavery may soon temper their enthusiasm.
Many immigrants to the caliphate set are willing to sacrifice their lives,
which is just as well as foreign fighters are often the first choice of suicide bombers.
Mohammed Emwazi, also known as Jihadi John, may have evaded that fate by volunteering to be chief executioner of Western hostages.
Now that his identity is out, he may find himself more literally the dead man walking than he claimed to be five years ago,
as he sensed that MI5 were closing in on him.
But every day appears to bring revised accounts of the numbers, always revised upwards of young jihadis leaving Western countries to sign up.
How we deal with this war in our own midst is one of the most urgent challenges facing Western governments,
particularly those with a substantial Muslim population. To re-educate those who have been indoctrinated will be formidably difficult.
But externally, it's one of the paradoxes of the current situation in the Middle East that the West and in particular the United States,
bears some responsibility for the emergence of a new terrorism.
This may seem harsh, but let us look at the facts.
I said some years ago, not eight years ago, I think, in what were meant to be remarks under the Chatham House rule,
but which ended up being front page news worldwide, that I thought George W Bush was al Qaeda's best recruiting sergeant.
And so it proved. But George W wasn't alone.
Looking back, since 1980, America has bombed, invaded or occupied no fewer than 14 Muslim countries ranging from Iran,
Libya, Lebanon and Iraq to Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen and Pakistan and of course, Syria.
This has been in part an attempt by the US to fill the vacuum left by the departing British from east of Suez.
And we bear our own share of responsibility, not least in shaping the modern Middle East according to the tenets of the infamous Sykes Pico Agreement,
which must surely now be in its death throes and may not see out its centenary in 2006.
But the use of military force to effect regime change has proved a consistently spectacular fail at failure.
It's always premised on the Wilsonian idea that a new democratic nation will emerge from the ashes of the military conflict.
Unfortunately, the experience has been instead that regime change has led to a power vacuum and instability,
which is most easily filled by radical extremist Islamists.
Iraq is the locus classic case where the Iraqi government's failure to provide a minimum of competent and
just government opened the door to Islamic State who didn't even find the door manned by an Iraqi army.
Largely content at the time not to engage.
Regime change in Libya has brought about a divided country with a strong Islamist presence in the capital,
Tripoli, while the more moderate successors to Gaddafi are holed up in Benghazi.
Meanwhile, the idea of the Taliban playing no part in the future governance of Afghanistan seems to me fanciful.
Another country which entertained US armed intervention.
Somalia has lacked a proper government for decades and is one of the many sources of instability in the Horn of Africa.
It is also one of the primary sources of would be refugees now so vulnerable to the perils of the Mediterranean crossings to Italy.
Yemen, too, is in a parlous condition. Nigeria, Mali, Niger and now Cameroon, while not being country, is subject to Western invasion or intervention,
are increasingly exposed to Boko Haram or Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb,
all helping to create a crescent of instability from the Atlantic coast of Africa through to the Gulf and on to Afghanistan and Pakistan.
When considering what to do about the new terrorist threat, it's easier to decide what not to do.
The neocon solution. Military intervention on the ground has been tried and found wanting in virtually every theatre which has been practised.
President Obama seems to have learned the lesson that invasion and occupation in the Islamic world inevitably fail.
He's probably now grateful that he didn't follow his initial instincts to get involved in Syria on the ground.
He's tried a different approach in the shape of air and drone strikes.
There've been 600 bombs dropped in Iraq and Syria on Islamic State in the last month alone and Special Forces raids.
These two, however, need to be executed with caution to avoid alienating further the Islamic world.
And drone strikes, too, can cause blue and blue incidents.
As with the death by drone strike of the Western hostages, Warren Weinstein and Giovani Lo Porto revealed by President Obama last week.
If Western military activities certainly have the boots on the ground, variety is unlikely to pacify the greater Middle East.
Should we be examining further ways of pressuring local governments to handle the threat posed by Islamist terrorists?
Certainly a complete Western withdrawal from the Muslim world will reduce and remove
some of the toxicity which is currently fuelling Islamic terrorism and jihadists.
We should therefore, I think, practice a twin policy of containment, protecting our own borders,
attempting to contain the problems of the greater Middle East within the region, while encouraging the moderate governments,
which counterintuitively now include Iran, to put the Sunni Shia conflict back into the genie bottle to the extent that it is possible,
and to use their military resources to confront Islamic State on the battlefield.
Containment as a policy to handle the Soviet Union in its most aggressive form worked surprisingly well for 40 years and largely kept the peace.
But it ultimately worked by promoting the dissolution of the Soviet Union from within.
Is there a chance that a similar policy might bring a kind of uneasy peace, if not within the troubled region itself,
then certainly as far as the streets of London and Washington are concerned.
Might it also have a solvent effect on Islamic State?
That is not underestimate the problem. Despite recent coalition advances, it would be rash to predict the early demise of Islamic State.
It and its allies still control at least 40,000 square kilometres and choose
about 15,000 square miles of Iraq and Syria area roughly the size of Belgium.
Despite the recent losses of about 20% of their territory, the territory they still hold includes cities like Mosul,
Fallujah and Tal Afar in Iraq, Raqqa in Syria, oil fields, dams, main roads and border crossings.
While much of its financial support individually came from individual in Arab Gulf states, today,
it is a largely self-financed organisation earning millions from the oil and gas fields it controls,
as well as from taxation tolls, smuggling, extortion and kidnapping.
The offensive in Iraq has also been lucrative, giving it access to cash held in major banks in the cities it has taken.
Not so long ago,
Islamic State took the town of al-Baghdadi with gruesome reports of 45 members of the security forces and their families being burned alive.
And all this only a few miles from an air base used by United States Marines.
Whether the regular, ritualised killings and mass executions will eventually sicken, even the most gung ho jihadists is still an open question.
More hopeful, the occasional reports from Iraq and Syria of desertions, perhaps prompted by an awareness that Islamic State is not invincible,
witness its failure to take Kobani on the border with Turkey from the Kurdish Peshmerga fighters.
And the evidence that coalition air strikes are reducing its strongholds, allowing the Iraqi Shia forces to take back Tikrit and surrounding areas.
Iraqi militant military leaders are now vowing to move this summer to liberate Anbar Province, a sunny Sunni heartland in western Iraq.
But the militants still hold vast swathes of territory, including more than half of Anbar province.
But we should take some comfort from the fact that the Islamic State is landlocked and surrounded by hostile states.
The Iraqi government, Turkey and the Kurds. Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states.
Some of the Gulf states who've been accused of paying down guilt to Islamic State reject the claim,
pointing out that formally they are part of the anti-Islamic State coalition.
We in the West should work hard to ensure that their contribution is not merely one of lip service.
Should encourage these countries to provide active money and support as part of the Second Awakening to the opposition to Islamic State within Iraq.
To both Kurds. And to the tribes in Iraq's westernmost and largest, largest province of Anbar.
The moderate Sunni states should be encouraged to swallow their distaste for Iran and work with Tehran to encourage Shia
militias in their opposition to Islamic State and increase interest from outliers like Hezbollah to take up the challenge.
Even the Assad regime in Damascus may become part of this strange group of bedfellows.
So what is needed from the West is the role of facilitator between the groups who, while antagonistic towards each other,
have a greater stake in halting and reversing the onward progress of Islamic State.
Turkey has a key role to play and should be encouraged further to prevent the movement of new recruits into Islamic State territory,
as Turkey is at present one of the key conduits and probably one of the best channels for military equipment.
This policy of containment should at least prevent and ideally continue to roll back the expansion of Islamic State,
an entity which is not without its own internal problems.
And that must be part of the West's strategy to promote the undermining of Islamic State from within.
President Obama has opted for a multilateral approach in places like Libya, Syria and Iraq,
and the more he can involve regional states in this multilateral approach, the better its chances of success.
One of the problems and dangers, of course, is that President Obama will find himself attacked both by those in the Republican Party
and America who see anything short of a forceful military action as shameful appeasement,
particularly if it involves dealing with the likes of Iran and the Assad regime and
by Democrats who are reluctant to authorise open ended airstrikes and drone attacks,
lest as they see it, they constitute the thin end of the wedge.
On the other hand, given the disastrous results of military intervention,
I've already touched upon Obama's more realistic and cruel assessment of where US interests lie may ultimately prove to have more popular support.
I asked a Lebanese friend recently how we should deal with Islamic State.
His answer was unequivocal. Airstrikes.
No Western boots on the ground but arm the Kurds massively encourage,
advise and support the Iraqi government forces and pressurise Turkey to seal their border with Islamic State territory,
to deny them further access to arms, fighters and money.
But if we are successful in putting in maintaining such a coalition, they can effect a constant reduction of Islamic State territory,
confronting them with strong local forces and perhaps partially my Lebanese friend, the involvement of some limited Western special forces.
This may pay the necessary dividends to demonstrate Islamic State's vulnerability without territory.
As the American academic Graeme Wood has recently pointed out, Islamic State is hamstrung.
He says caliphates cannot exist as underground movements.
Take away its command of territory and all those oaths of allegiance are no longer binding.
The Caliphate believes in an organised, structured society observing the strictest implementation of Sharia.
It has no wish to be a guerrilla army like Al Qaeda.
Tony Blair's former chief of staff, Jonathan Powell,
recently stated in an interview that we should recognise that we are going to end up talking to Islamic State.
So he says the sensible thing to do now is to open up a back channel,
as we did with the IRA back in 1972, a channel which can be used at some stage to negotiate through.
But this seems to me a wildly unrealistic suggestion.
Islamic State is so unlike any other terrorist organisation that territorial ambitions know quite literally no bounds.
But to think in terms of a negotiated settlement with them sounds like a pipe dream.
It pains me to say it both as a former diplomat and to contradict another former diplomat in the shape of Jonathan Powell.
But I can't see any circumstances in which diplomacy can play a role in any contact with Islamic State.
Our diplomacy should instead be focussed on bringing together, supporting and encouraging regional actors to collaborate in excising this cancer.
Thank you very much.