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Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came.
He saw us.
He died.
We ain't killing they army.
We killing them.
We be on DNA like say our name, been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing the great Jason Ditz, managing news editor of AntiWar.com.
That's News.
AntiWar.com.
He writes about everything that matters all day, every day at News.
AntiWar.com.
Seriously, check it out.
Welcome back to the show.
How's it going, Jason?
I'm doing good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing good.
Let's talk about Iraqi democracy.
First of all, did I read the headline right that Muqtada al-Sadr's list is ahead in the elections?
Yeah, that's right.
It's been incredible because everyone kind of took this election for granted that you have Iran and the US pretty heavily behind the same block, which is the victory block of Prime Minister Abadi.
Everyone just kind of assumed, oh, well, he just won the ISIS war and he's doing pretty well, and he should pretty easily retain the plurality and then form a government.
But it really hasn't happened.
In fact, Abadi's block is third place as of right now.
We don't have final results yet, but they're getting beaten pretty badly.
Muqtada al-Sadr, who historically has done just okay in the elections as a smaller block that either is a party to a coalition or a vocal opposition group, is overwhelmingly the majority in Baghdad and is winning four provinces out of the 10 that are called so far and looks to be getting the plurality pretty handily if things stay the way they are.
Oh, so he won't have a majority.
He'll have a plurality because there are enough different factions.
But then under the Constitution, he will have the first chance to form a new government then?
Or not Sadr himself, but guys on his list, right?
Right, right.
Sadr isn't actually running for parliament.
But effectively, it's him because they're all his allies.
Was this an election just of Iraqi Shia-stan, or did they get to vote in Mosul, Ramadi, Fallujah as well?
No, this appears to have been an election that includes the Sunni part of the country, unlike last time around.
Most of the preliminary results are in the Shiite part of the country.
Oh, sweet.
John Hagee's talking at the Israeli embassy opening right now.
Holy crap.
Boy, they brought the crazies out.
Robert Jefferson and good old Cornerstone Church Hagee there, man.
All right, I'm sorry.
I'm diverting from the point.
Just goddang CNN out of the corner of my eye.
Iraqi election results, Horton.
Pay attention.
Okay, sorry.
Go ahead, Jason.
Well, the Sunnis did vote.
We don't really know how they voted.
Largely, it probably is going to be...
Well, I hate to say it doesn't matter because, especially with Sadr, he tends not to have a great deal of support from the other Shiite blocs.
So a decent performing outcome for, say, the Alawi's secular party or for one of the Sunni blocs might make them part of a government.
But of course, population-wise, they're just too small to make serious inroads into being a plurality of any sort by themselves.
Yeah.
Now, so you mentioned that the Iranians and the Americans both backed Abadi, the currently serving prime minister there.
And so I was wondering about Maliki, because he ain't dead and gone, right?
Just pushed out.
And so what's his relationship with Iran like these days?
What place did his group get?
Well, we don't know what place he's in.
He's not in the top three.
Because he has his own separate state of law party still, right?
Right.
Right.
Because Abadi was originally, you know, Abadi and the Dawa party were part of state of law because Maliki was a Dawa party leader before him.
But Maliki split and kind of envisioned himself making this miraculous comeback and becoming prime minister again.
Which, he retained some popularity right up until about a week before the election when Grand Ayatollah Sistani made a very unusual move for him.
He usually stays well clear of politics.
And he issued a statement through one of his aides just ripping Maliki.
I mean, not calling him out by name, but saying that, you know, all these politicians of the past that have already tried to unite Iraq and failed, we certainly don't want them to perform well in the election.
And it looks like that's pretty well killed his candidacy.
I mean, he'll probably get a few seats on his list and he'll probably stay in parliament.
But I think the days of Maliki ruling Iraq are probably over.
Now, so, you know, I saw this and I kind of was, well, I don't know, a little bit shocked and concerned, Jason, when I saw that Amiri's group is in second place.
So that means that's not just a politician from the Supreme Islamic Council.
That's the leader of the Baata Brigade.
That's Mr. Power Drill himself there.
And his group is in second.
Is that right?
Right.
And that's kind of a surprise, too, because Abadi had really tried to get anybody that was sort of a leadership position in any of these militias, including the Baata Brigade, try to get them to step down from their positions to choose either one or the other.
They're either a militia leader or they're the politician.
And some of them gave lip service to that, but largely they ignored him.
And it appears not to have mattered to the voters that Amiri is still right up there.
And Amiri might be a more palatable candidate to both Iran and the U.S. than Sadr is.
Yeah, well, I mean, and that's the ultimate irony of this whole damn thing since 2003, Jason, right there, ain't it?
That America prefers the Iranian-backed factions to the one Shiite leader who actually gives a damn about trying to get along with the Sunni Arabs in their defeat, even, and he helped defeat them.
But because he wants to limit the influence of Iran and America, and so America would instead subject the Iraqi people to greater Iranian influence, as long as it ain't that bastard Sadr who refuses to do like he's told.
Whereas the Iranian-backed factions are always willing to split the difference and work with Iran and America.
Right.
And the U.S. government has tended to justify that in the past by just saying, oh, he's a Shiite, so he's Iranian-backed anyway, which isn't the case at all.
I mean, he's long been a thorn in the side of Ayatollahs in both Iraq and Iran because his family is so wildly popular, and he really does have a lot more influence than his rank would suggest as a cleric.
Well, and so, you know, to go back, I mean, if we go back to, say, 2005 and what have you, the controversy there was that he would denounce Skiri, or Iski now, or whatever, the Supreme Islamic Council, and the Dawa Party, saying that because of their influence with Iran, or Iran's influence with them, that they want this strong federal system, as they called it.
Meaning, take Baghdad, but then just keep the south and east of the country and not really try too hard to dominate the west.
Just cut them loose, basically.
But we've seen what happened with that after America and its allies helped to bring on the insurgency in Syria, how that policy really backfired on the Iraqi Shia, on their government there, for not having the west of the country under control, leaving it wide open for the Islamic State to come and seize power there for three years.
So, you know, I was talking with Elijah Magnier, and he was saying, well, they've learned the lesson from that, that no more of this strong federalism, that they need, you know, they're going to have to do something to govern the west to prevent that from happening.
But so then that raises the huge question of, you know, how in the world and which Shia leaders are willing to actually treat the Sunnis with any fairness whatsoever?
You know, it certainly wasn't Maliki, and I guess they say that Abadi hasn't been quite as bad as Maliki in his sectarianism, but then again, he led this massive war against Sunnistan in Iraq War III, against ISIS there.
And then, ironically, it's this Shiite cleric, Sadr, who's kind of this working class kind of, you know, tough guy, rather than one of these, you know, fine robes wearing, you know, Iranian-backed, scary guys, who seems like he probably would be the most willing to try to come to a reasonable accommodation with them, and could, at least, have the credibility to, if he chose to, or does have the credibility to, if he chose to, say to the Iraqi Shia that, listen, we've got to do this and figure out a way to get along into the future, rather than just keep fighting and get away with that.
You know, which, clearly, at least in the past, the Dawah guys haven't wanted to do.
So, I don't know, man.
I'm actually a little bit hopeful about this.
And, you know, him and, I know you know, his death squads, you know, in the Mahdi army, they, you know, committed horrible war crimes, along with the Bata Brigade, in the sectarian cleansing of Baghdad, back during the worst of the surge and all of that.
But, before and since then, he's at least made a lot of seemingly pretty sincere overtures to try to, you know, make up and get along.
So, I don't know, man.
Obviously, I'm ranting and raving a lot on your interview there, but what do you think about all that?
Well, I think you're right, but my concern is that the Shiites, in general, the ones that were in the government before, learned a lesson from the ISIS war, but they may have learned the wrong lesson.
I mean, they did sort of leave the Sunni Arab part of the country alone, to a point.
But, when ISIS really started making their inroads was when Maliki started launching crackdowns against Sunni opposition, because he didn't fulfill some of the power sharing agreements from two elections ago, when he was supposed to be, you know, two elections ago was sort of...
2010, right?
Right.
That was sort of the last gasp of, well, in retrospect, the last gasp of the US-Iran dictated Iraqi government.
Maliki didn't perform that well at all in that election.
Alawi performed much better.
The Supreme Islamic Council performed a lot better.
But, ultimately, you know, they had a few coalition talks that didn't accomplish much, and then the US and Iran both just kind of got behind Maliki and said, well, everybody else fall in line.
Maliki will, you know, decentralize power substantially from himself.
Because a lot of the complaints about Maliki at the time were, well, he's the prime minister, he's his own interior minister, and he's his own defense minister, so he's got full control direct control of the military and all the security forces in the country, and he's basically running the country like a dictatorship.
And the US and Iran said, well, that'll stop within a few months.
Just fall in line behind him and he'll start divesting power.
He'll give the Sunni Arabs some key posts in the government, and he'll give the other parties key posts in the government.
But he never did.
And we started seeing public protests, especially in the Sunni Arab cities.
We had massacres in a couple of those cities when Maliki sent security forces there.
And that brought it to the point where any central government presence in some of these cities, especially the ones in Anbar province, they were basically kicked out.
And that was really when ISIS went from being just a presence in those cities to effectively ruling them.
So I think the lesson should be that you can either rule those cities sort of nominally, like a lot of countries do with their tribal areas, that they're legally part of the country, but they're really not.
Or you can try to come up with some sort of more equitable arrangement, but you really can't just take a part of the country that's almost a third of the population, at least pre-war, and say, oh, well, we're going to just rule this area with an iron fist and any sign of resistance is going to be met with military force.
It just doesn't work.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, yeah, that's the thing, right?
And to think that, yeah, it's good old Muqtada, the leader of the Mahdi army, is going to be the guy who has the insight that, look, we're going to have to treat them fairly and have a kind of accommodation rather than just dominate.
And, you know, it seems like, you know, the Iraqi military and police forces, I don't know exactly their shape right now, but it doesn't seem like in the years, you know, between the American withdrawal and the rise of Islamic State there, that they really had the power, the ability to dominate those areas.
You know, nominal control was about the best that they could do, right?
I mean, I guess I saw a thing by David Enders about how they pretty much did have, you know, government control in Ramadi for a time, at least half of it or something.
But, you know, I remember Patrick Coburn coming on the show a full year before the fall of Mosul saying that, yeah, all the Iraqi army soldiers, these Shiite soldiers, they're AWOL from their posts in Mosul.
They're gone because they feel like they're way out on foreign territory.
It's not Iraq.
It's Sunnistan out there, whatever they call it.
And that they didn't have, you know, reliable enough supply lines.
And so they were just saying, forget it, man, and retreating back behind Shiite lines and refusing to even show up for work there.
So they already had the ghost soldiers problem in the first place.
But these were the ones who were the actual soldiers were saying, forget this, man, I'm going to get killed out there.
And we're turning around going home.
So, you know, I don't know.
And I guess so this gets us back to the election.
And so what's going to happen here?
Are the Iranians and the Americans going to conspire against Sadr?
Or what do you think is going to go on?
Well, I think they'll try.
And they always try.
But we're going to have to see how this actually shakes out.
We're supposed to get final results in the election sometime later today.
And we'll see how close Sadr's list is to getting a majority by itself.
I mean, no one's going to get a majority.
That just doesn't happen in Iraq.
But if they're close, they can probably cobble together a majority coalition just by, you know, offering some incentives to Sunni parties or secular parties or the Kurdish parties and come up with something.
And the ability of the U.S. and Iran to block that would be very limited.
If they need one of the other two major parties, Abadi's party or the Amiri list, that very well could be blocked.
And you could see Iran and the U.S. keeping the big Shiite parties away from Sadr to ensure that he can't come up with a majority government and then hoping that one of the other two will get a shot at it.
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All right.
So then, you want to talk about Palestine for a second here?
Sure.
What's the count right now for today's massacre?
It's in the 40s last I saw.
Oh, I see.
Top of the page right now at antiwar.com.
52 dead, more than 1,000 wounded.
I think 1,900 wounded, Eric said.
That doesn't necessarily mean shot, but tear gassed or whatever else.
Hopefully not run over with bulldozers.
So, yeah.
And then it's also this morning they did the ceremony for the unveiling of the American Embassy in Jerusalem.
And it's Nakba Day.
Can you believe it?
They literally scheduled the thing for Nakba Day to unveil the embassy?
I mean, I guess I shouldn't be too surprised.
I wonder if that means that they didn't care at all, it didn't even occur to them, or that they were just like, yeah, exactly, let's rub their noses right in shit, you know?
Well, I think that's really what it is, or what it boils down to as far as the whole rest of the world is concerned.
From the U.S. perspective, I think it's, you know, Nakba Day is also meant to be Israeli Independence Day.
I mean, those holidays don't always...
Oh, yeah.
Okay, I guess it makes sense.
I didn't think about it like that.
I need another cup of coffee.
Sorry.
Those holidays don't always overlap because of different calendar systems, but they're meant to be the same day.
And they're meant to represent the same thing, Israeli independence and the expulsion of Arabs from a whole bunch of cities.
But, so I think from the U.S. perspective, it's not that they went, oh, Nakba Day, this will really stick it to them.
They're saying, oh, this is Israeli Independence Day, we can show solidarity with Israel.
And I think to the extent that some U.S. officials may have been aware that, oh, this is also Nakba Day and it's going to look really bad, that they probably don't care.
I mean, beyond the fact that it's probably going to make protests worse this year than usual, and clearly already has because of the death toll, I think they see it as like, well, we're effectively on Israel's side in all this anyway, so where's the harm in just making that clear again?
Yeah.
Well, and so, you know, there are a lot of people who really don't understand this at all and put this in terms of, like, well, you know, who's another country to tell us whether to have our capital in Washington, D.C. or in New York City or something like that?
So explain, Jason, what's the big deal anyway?
Well, it's sort of weird.
Israel's capital was West Jerusalem when they declared independence, or Jerusalem if you want to just call it Jerusalem, because they did at the time.
And it was accepted by a lot of countries.
And there were embassies in Jerusalem.
And it wasn't a big deal until 1967 when Israel conquered the West Bank and East Jerusalem and effectively annexed all this other territory into the city of Jerusalem.
And Jerusalem since 67 has been growing pretty precipitously and pretty absurdly for what it is.
I mean, you've got a very urban city that's been around for thousands of years, and there's farmland that's not really anywhere near Jerusalem except as like a distant, distant suburb that suddenly Israel declares, oh, this is part of Jerusalem because Jerusalem is eternally ours and it's part of the annexed territory.
So that's sort of their way of expanding their border is to say, well, this is Jerusalem now.
Yeah, I think so.
And once they did that, especially with the East Palace or Eastern Jerusalem, it angered a lot of countries because they're saying, well, you can't have your capital city be half occupied territory.
So a lot of countries at that point said, no, we're not going to recognize this as your capital city anymore.
And we're going to move the embassies to Tel Aviv, which is why up until right now, all the embassies were in Tel Aviv.
Yeah, you know, I saw this clip yesterday of an interviewer, I don't know, on the BBC or something.
It must not have been the BBC because they were talking with Norman Finkelstein, and I think this was just a pretty typical type example where the guy was talking about Jerusalem this, Jerusalem that.
And Finkelstein says, just look at the way you frame this.
It's pure Israeli propaganda.
You know, East Jerusalem does not belong to Israel, according to all international law and all the different international court of justice rulings and this, that and the other thing.
And all along, East Jerusalem, you know, or as you said, since 67, is occupied territory.
And so that's the significance here is that America is legitimizing this, you know, huge step, because of course, East Jerusalem's where all the religious sites and stuff are too.
So for the Muslim holy sites are.
Right.
And it's not like they're literally building the embassies in East Jerusalem, of course, they're still building them in.
Symbolically, they're precluding the idea that the east side is ever going to be the capital of an independent Palestine.
They're putting that myth to bed, basically.
Right.
Right.
And President Trump has said as much that he's, while other administration officials have said, no, the fact that we're moving our embassy doesn't have any legal ramifications for how we feel about final status.
Trump has said in some of his complaints about the Palestinians not being for his peace process that, like, hey, I took Jerusalem off the table to make this all easier.
And he's argued that, like, and you guys still aren't coming to the table.
So you're just being mean when in reality, I mean, if he took it off the table in his own mind, he just took it from the Palestinians because it was a Palestinian claim that he's suddenly saying doesn't matter.
Wow.
I wonder.
He really is just completely confused.
Right.
That's not just being cold.
You know, that's being completely lost as to what the hell is going on around here.
If he's going to categorize that as doing them a favor.
Right.
That doesn't sound like, you know, Bill Clinton BS.
That sounds like Trump just lost in a fog.
Right.
Jesus Christ.
He's envisioning himself at a business deal.
And that's this is.
Yeah.
But his map in his head is all wrong about who's doing what and where.
Right.
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, he's he's got a very few.
He's got a very basic list of like, oh, here's what the Palestinians want.
Here's what the Israelis want.
Let's hammer out a deal like this was some sort of business arbitration.
And it's a big list.
So he goes, well, Jerusalem's right up there.
So let's just take that off the list and it'll all work out.
And the Palestinians aren't claiming East Jerusalem as their capital to be mean or to be difficult or because it's an economic point for them.
It's it's a historical claim that they have a lot of validity to.
And it's also you've got the holiest Islamic site in Israel.
Slash Palestine is right there.
So.
I mean, this transcends a business deal.
For them and and Trump just doesn't get the idea that anything like this could transcend a business deal like this, that a claim is more important than just, oh, well, we can throw a little money their way or promise them some aid.
And that'll just gloss this this part over.
Yeah.
And by the way, before we begin, you can just forget about having Jerusalem as your capital.
So that way we don't have to bicker about that.
We'll just be honest about one thing right up front here.
This is going nowhere.
So, yeah, well, good for him.
Right.
And the Trump administration, we see this time and again with them when on those rare occasions when they engage in diplomacy, the their offers are always economic based.
But they're also often very unrealistic, not to totally sidetrack the discussion, but Mike Pompeo's talk with North Korea is, well, if you give up your nuclear weapons, the United States will make you economically on par with South Korea.
And that's I find that pretty shocking that they would even suggest that they could do that, let alone believe they could do that.
And Pompeo making the Sunday News circuit is saying, oh, well, there'll be no U.S. tax dollars involved in doing this.
The administration imagines they can take impoverished, starving half the time North Korea, give them no money and turn them into an economic rival for one of the richest countries in the world as just preposterous.
But that's that's the way they think.
Well, at least it ain't Jeb or Hillary, right?
Right.
I keep thinking that.
I do mean it, but dang, does it have to be this clown?
I don't know.
And Hillary we saw just last week talking.
Declare war on China?
Well, she was critiquing Trump and she was like, well, I disagree with him on Iran and North Korea.
And she's like, well, I wouldn't have pulled out of the Iran deal, but I sure wouldn't be talking on North Korea effectively.
So it's like, yeah, we'd be picking a fight with North Korea instead of Iran.
That's that's funny.
I did.
I had missed that part of it.
And then she was saying, yeah, no, China is the real menace.
You know, I saw this article.
I guess I should have posted on interwar.com.
Robert Blumen sent it to me and it was Caitlin Johnstone.
And she was, I guess, you know, basically it was a recap of her Twitter mentions.
Not specifically, but just how things were going.
And she was talking about how the liberals are good on Iran and are condemning Trump for getting out of the Iran deal and rashing up tensions with Iran.
But then the conservatives' interventions are good on Syria and encouraging Trump to back off Assad and this kind of thing.
And she's saying, you idiots.
And of course, supporting hawkishness on Iran.
Whereas, and the liberals support hawkishness against Assad because, you know, evil Assad and Russia and this and that.
So they're, you know, and she's going, it's the same damn war, you idiots.
How lost in partisanship can you people be?
You know, it's crazy.
You know, the only reason we're picking on Syria is because they're friends with Iran.
OK, there, I added two plus two for you.
Right.
And that's sort of, well, I hate to say it's the most glaring hypocrisy in U.S. foreign policy because that's a pretty long list.
But the difference between U.S. attitude towards Syria and the U.S. attitude towards Iraq is incredible because they're both on the side of the Iranians.
The U.S. tends to back the same groups the Iranians back in Iraq.
And we saw in the ISIS war, the U.S. backing Shiite militias that were fighting ISIS in Iraq.
And then the minute they crossed the border into Syria to fight ISIS there, then they become the enemy.
It's really incredible.
Hey, are the Hazaras we back in Afghanistan going to fight for Hezbollah in Syria and Iran in Syria?
Hey, I remember, and everybody check the archives, go back to 2012, and there's me and Jay Seditz talking about this exact same phenomenon.
Only in that case, it's Obama's giving drones to Maliki to use to chase al-Qaeda guys across the border.
Where they're bad guys in Iraq, but they're good guys when we get them to Syria.
They're fighting against the Shia-backed Assad regime there.
What fun.
That was before the rise of the Islamic State as even a state.
That was what caused it.
Right, and it's a lesson never learned, and it's a policy that spanned administrations and never gets questioned.
It's just America's stance on the Iraq-Syria region is that Iran is bad until you get to the city of Bukamal along the Euphrates River.
Then everything changes.
Once you hit that border, then everything reverses.
Crazy.
You got a minute more?
Let me ask you another thing.
Sure.
What's up with the Israel bombing Syria all the time?
Are they trying to start a war?
What are they doing?
That was my initial assessment was that yes, they were trying to start a war with Iran.
Israeli military officials were saying time and again whenever they would attack Syria, even though they wouldn't publicly admit that they just attacked Syria, well, the targeting is against Iran.
Iran's going to retaliate against Israel any minute now, and everyone needs to be ready for this big fight.
And Iran wouldn't retaliate, so Israel would just keep poking the hornet's nest.
Until they finally said, well, 20 rockets got fired across what Israel terms the border, which really isn't the border with Syria.
It's just the border between the Syrian Golan Heights and the Israeli occupied Golan Heights.
But they said, oh, this is Iran.
So then they started bombing even bigger targets in Syria, and they hit dozens of sites.
And Iran insists it wasn't them.
And Hezbollah has kind of suggested it was them, although they haven't completely confirmed that.
So my tendency is to think that this retaliation Israel finally got from Iran was actually just some Shiite militia.
Yeah, I always wondered about that, whether Iran even went for it.
Because I saw one statement where they said, shoot missiles?
Hell, we're not even in Syria.
Which I thought was kind of funny, because I guess I'm under, I don't really know for sure, but I'm under the impression that yeah, they are in Syria.
But I thought, you know, as far as playing things down, that's playing them all the way down there.
Like, oh yeah, we don't want to have a war with you.
And certainly, like, what position could Iran possibly be in to have a war with Syria from, I mean, have a war with Israel from Syria?
I mean, it's basically impossible.
They'd be crazy to go for it.
It makes a lot more sense under the Israeli narrative than it does under the reality of the situation.
Iran does have some military personnel in Syria.
Officially, they're mostly or exclusively advisors, which should be familiar to anyone watching what the US does in these countries, because they always present themselves as trainers and advisors, too.
Certainly, some of these Iranian forces do get into combat once in a while.
They try to stay back as best they can because they don't want to have big casualties reported in the media.
But the Israeli position is, oh, Iran has 80,000 fighters in Syria, which is based on all these Hazaras and Hezbollah and all these Shiite militias from Iraq.
We're just going to call them all Iranians because they're Shiites anyway.
And then we'll say, oh, Iran has this huge Shiite force in Syria.
Sort of like David Cameron's 70,000 mythical moderates out there fighting all comers.
Right.
They try to simplify this, boil it down to the West and Israel, no less than the West, don't really understand the difference between an Afghan Hazara fighting in Syria and someone from Najaf fighting in Syria and an Iranian soldier fighting in Syria.
They just see Shiite and they see enemy.
And trying to simplify an incredibly complex Syrian war means grouping a whole bunch of stuff together and calling it one thing.
Yeah.
80,000 sounds high anyway, even if you count every Shia involved in that.
Right.
Including the Syrian ones.
Right.
That's probably how you get to 80,000 is you go, oh, well, we've got civil defense forces that are just Syrian Alawites protecting their own town that have taken up arms to keep ISIS or whomever out.
And they're getting thrown into this as well.
Then you might come up with 80,000.
But, of course, these guys aren't going to go marching abroad into Israel or anything.
They're neither prepared for that nor is there any ideological basis for any of them to do that.
They're there to protect some Shiite cities and some Shiite religious sites from Sunni takeover and in ISIS case outright desecration.
Because if ISIS takes over an important Shiite holy site, they're going to raise it to the ground.
All right.
So now what about the Americans and the Turks at Manbij?
The Americans are embedded with the Kurds there.
The Turks invaded, kicked them out of Afrin, I guess, in westernmost Syrian Kurdistan.
Right.
But then started marching east.
And that's the last I know.
But that's a couple of weeks back.
Right.
And really, it's more than a month back that they started making this march.
And not a lot has changed.
There's talk that Manbij is going to be resolved by the U.S. and Turkey somehow.
Turkey's impression is that means the U.S. is going to kick the Kurds out somehow.
The U.S. certainly has given no impression that they're even thinking of kicking the Kurds out.
Let alone that their small number of troops embedded in a Kurdish held city would really be able to just expel the Kurds outright.
But that sort of forestalled the fighting between Turkey and all these other NATO nations that have troops in Manbij.
But nothing's really been resolved.
And they're just still kind of sitting there waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Yeah, man.
Well, so I thought that one was kind of funny where I guess Erdogan asked Putin for permission.
Like, hey, will you pull your planes back so I can attack these Kurds?
And Putin was like, yeah, OK.
Because what an easy way to pit the Americans against the Turks when really, you know.
And this is all the Americans doing in the first place as we talked about.
Help and support to rise of ISIS in the first place.
Then they had to fight this whole war against them.
So they embedded with these Kurds and put themselves in this adversarial position against their Turkish allies.
So all Putin has to do is just open up some airspace and just go ahead and not really do a thing.
Just let things come to a head there.
So I guess let's hope it doesn't get worse.
What a crazy policy, man.
Bunch of madness.
All right.
Well, geez, am I hitting all the wars here?
There's some other wars, but I'll let you go, dude.
Thank you, Jason.
Sure.
Thank you for having me.
Appreciate it a lot.
That's the great Jason Ditz, you guys.
He writes all day, every day at news.antiwar.com.
He's the news editor there at antiwar.com.
And really on all the wars, all day, every day.
It's just great.
It's the very best and you need it.
So go look at it, news.antiwar.com.
And you guys know me, scotthorton.org, libertarianinstitute.org when they work.
Antiwar.com, I'm the opinion editor there.
And get my book, Fool's Aaron.
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Thanks.
