Thank you very much. I should clarify it. I don't want to oversimplify or overgeneralize. There is some anecdotal evidence that young Tunisians are disproportionately represented in ISIL. It's startling for a country as small and as homogeneous as Tunisia that over 3,000 young Tunisians have made their way to ISIL. We have some anecdotal evidence that at least some of them were Nahdha supporters; they were supporters of Rashid al-Ghannushi, who is as close as you can come to a moderate reformist Islamist thinker, and they were disillusioned that there wasn't more immediate change in their feeling about their relationship to the state.
I think the west tried very hard to be helpful in the first year of the Arab Spring. There was a big infusion, the Deauville partnership, and all these ideas of what we could do. Reality is that the flow of aid, job creation, support for the private sector, etc., couldn't come fast enough or on a large enough scale. In the particular case of Tunisia, we're just about to release a report, like the ideas of the Marshall Plan, on what we could have done in the Arab Spring. The reality is that Tunisia is the closet to a success story and it's still on track, more than any other Arab country, but its own new parliamentarians didn't know how to change the legislative environment for economic action. They failed to open up the banking system, to create an enabling environment for new economic initiative, that a statist mindset was still in place.
I think there's still work to be done, but the sad truth is that, because of this media information age we live in, people very quickly decided that it wasn't working. That's what happened in Egypt. They didn't have the patience to let some of these transformative activities play out. I don't blame the west for failing. In addition, I would say the west was very clear that we wanted to respond to Arab requests. We didn't want to decide for them what their policy should be. In the case of Libya, we waited way too long because we were waiting for a Libyan government that wasn't competent to ask for help, but we said that we were not going to decide what they needed until they asked. They couldn't ask; they didn't know how to ask. There were some missteps there on both their part and our part early on.
We should not give up on the Arab Spring. I still think that the Arab Spring will, historically, be a turning point in the willingness of Arab societies to stand up and say that they want a greater voice. It doesn't mean we're on an easy path to democracy, but I do think state-society relations in the Arab world are changing. We're just at the beginning of that process.