[Aaron David Miller, Vice President & Distinguished Scholar, Woodrow Wilson International Center For Scholars & Author:] And clearly civilians are going to be caught up in what is going to be a fierce and incredibly determined struggle. Then there's the question of humanitarian flow and refugee migration. So I think the big losers, just as in Syria and Iraq, will be the people of Syria and Iraq. I don't think there's any question about that. What the coalition forces can do in order to mitigate or anticipate and prevent these losses it's hard to say right now.
[Brooke Baldwin, Cnn Anchor:] We'll get to what Petraeus said. Let's back up. Mosul was captured by ISIS, it was 2014, a thousand ISIS soldiers to some 30,000 Iraqi troops. Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, the head of ISIS, announced the creation of the caliphate at the Grand Mosque in Mosul. That's the last two years. Why is it so significant now?
[Miller:] I think for symbolic reasons alone. The reality is ISIS is going to survive Mosul. But the reality is if you can deprive the Islamic State of its main asset, which is control over territory governance, the capacity to recruits to a place, and however bitter the experience may be to offer an alternative form of governance, you deny the Islamic State a caliphate. You demonstrate that they are, in fact, a nasty ideological organization driven by hatred and propaganda. And you can begin, it seems to me, to invincibility and inevitability that seems to have provided by this proto-terror state with an extraordinary message and that's what needs to be done. That's not going to deal a bitter blow to its ideology, its capacity to inspire disgruntled individuals in Europe and other places and in the region as well, but deny them the caliphate in Mosul. And, you're right, I mean, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi announced the caliphate at the Grand Mosque. Mosul is a hugely important city, as you pointed out, two million people before 2014. It has the largest single Christian population of any Iraqi city. And it stands as a potential symbol of a new Iraq, of a kind of multicultural Iraq with a sectarian economy. Now that's a dream right now but it carries great and tremendous value, particularly for the Iraqi government that has yet to demonstrate its competence and capacity. This is the largest single operation that the Iraqi military has undertaken, clearly, since the American invasion in '03.
[Baldwin:] Which would lead to the question, to your point, you have this actual battle, you have this ideological battle, and if and when it finally is over and falls, to General Petraeus' point, we have to go. I just want to tell our viewers, what about afterwards, the competence of Iraq to move forward. Aaron David Miller, please come back. As always, we appreciate having you on. Thank you, sir, so much.
[Miller:] Thank you, Brooke.
[Baldwin:] Thank you. Coming up next, back to presidential politics. A new batch of WikiLeaks. What it reveals about the Clintons' relationship with Al Gore, specifically this election cycle. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton traded jabs at a charity dinner last night. Got some pretty big laughs, but Trump also got booed, repeatedly, for ignoring the dinner's tradition. We'll have the highlights and the lowlights next.