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, but we killing them.
We be on CNN 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 Patrick Coburn, Middle East correspondent for The Independent, independent.co.uk, and he's the author of the books Chaos and Caliphate and the Age of Jihad, as well as Muqtada and other important books before that.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Patrick?
I'm doing good, thank you.
Great, good to talk to you again.
Very happy to have you here on the show.
And so, I don't know if you noticed this or not, but yesterday Senator Rand Paul mentioned your work on the House floor in a speech.
Did you see that?
I didn't see that, actually, no.
That's very interesting.
Yeah, it was, the context was in quoting the WikiLeaks of Hillary Clinton talking about Gulf support for the Islamic State, even after they were the Islamic State.
That's right, yeah, it's one of the most, many striking things of what WikiLeaks released, that there was this, you know, very State Department memo that she had, saying that the main support for Islamic State was Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States.
Something that Washington certainly wasn't saying in public, you know, and it was vitally important because, you know, that's what really got ISIS off the ground.
Yeah.
Well, you know what, I want to talk all about Iraq War 3 and all these different things, but let's go ahead and talk about WikiLeaks a bit here for a minute.
There's so much important stuff going on, and you recently wrote a piece sticking up for Julian Assange and for WikiLeaks.
You want to talk about that for a minute?
Absolutely, yeah.
I think everybody should be talking about this.
I think that this is, you know, one of the most important sort of threats to free expression that I've known in my career.
You know, Assange released all these government documents.
Many of them showed, you know, what the real government, U.S. government policy was, what they saw the real policy was of foreign governments.
You know, there are many others.
One could point to that there was one from the U.S. Embassy in Yellin saying, commenting, this is quite some time ago, but things haven't changed, on the idea that the Houthis were a proxy of Iran and supported by Iran, saying, really, there isn't much evidence for this, and there isn't any evidence for this, and these guys are getting their weapons not from Iran, they're buying them on the black market, or they're getting them from the government army, which sells them and then pretends that it's lost them in battle.
So it's full of revelations, and I think the way that one can judge how important these are is the sort of persecution and endless pursuit of Assange, the way he's now in jail for publicizing these articles, which appeared in these documents, appeared in the New York Times, The Guardian, and many other places.
But generally, they've been pretty shy of that definitive sense of this, but in jail.
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Now, do you think that there's any chance that public pressure in the UK could prevent him from being extradited to the US?
I think it does have an effect, because, you know, initially, I think there was a rather disgusting, to my mind, attacks on Assange by other journalists, that somehow he wasn't a proper journalist.
Well, he produced these amazing revelations, that's what journalists are meant to do.
You know, then there were, you know, that he wasn't, that he was a narcissist.
Well, there's a lot of those around.
Is that a great crime?
You know, it's true.
It scarcely balanced what he'd done, and what's happened to him since.
More recently, there does seem to be, you know, gradually, quite a lot of journalists seem to be realizing that what's happening to Assange could happen to them.
You know, it's the same, you know, one sees this pursuit in country after country.
We've seen it in Turkey, you know, we've seen it in Egypt, you know, this growing persecution of journalists, and suppression of free speech.
And if Assange is extradited to the U.S. and put in jail there, you're going to see a tremendous blow to free expression.
And there's a real qualitative difference there.
I mean, already, the persecution of whistleblowers inside the government is completely out of control.
But the conflation of the recipient of a leak, who then publishes that, with the person who actually did the leak, as in the Assange espionage indictment, is a huge step.
This is what I call the Turpification of Law.
You know, this is what happens in Turkey.
If you publish anything which is critical of the government, well, who is critical of the government?
Well, terrorists are critical of the government.
So you criticize the government, you're a terrorist.
Which has led to over 70 journalists being put in jail, and the total suppression of the free press in Turkey.
Yeah, I'll have to remember that one.
The Turkification of American Law.
And back to what you were saying, too, about the quality of these leaks, you know, it's not just, hey, the New York Times got some stories out of it, but there must have been 10,000 stories that have at least some reference to the WikiLeaks, if they're not entirely based on those State Department cables and those Iraq and Afghan war logs.
I mean, those are everything.
In this last decade?
Yeah, if you want to know about these wars, these are the things you have to read.
If you want to know about American foreign policy, you have to read them.
These are much closer to the truth than what you can read in the mass media elsewhere, because this is what the government really says.
It's also complete nonsense, you know, to say that this is a breach of security, lives are put in danger.
I remember, you know, this first broke.
I was in Afghanistan, and so happened I was seeing an American official, and he was sort of saying, what's the coding on these documents?
And I put, you know, sort of information, and he said, oh, well, of course, that's not a real security threat.
Because these were, you know, what Chelsea Manning leaked, these were widely distributed.
And the reason being that different parts of the U.S. government hadn't known what the others were doing during the Iraq war, so they thought better people could plug into a general bank of information.
But they also, you know, saw that they weren't going to put that deeply secret there, with so many people who could access it.
They said it wasn't a threat of foreign governments finding this out, which would have been quite easy, because the fact that the public could find this out, that's what pretty frightening, but it still does.
Yeah, isn't that telling, too?
All right, well, so, and including the Afghan war logs, of course, is a big part of it.
So there's my segue to Afghanistan.
Two big things going on there.
First of all is Zalmay Khalilzad, the neoconservative, has been appointed as the special representative to negotiate an exit with the Taliban.
The Taliban are also talking with the Afghan government in talks in Moscow, separately there.
And both of these things, and the fact that Khalilzad is still carrying on with this thing, and it's gone on for a while, it seems to indicate some real seriousness there.
At the same time, the military seems to be unashamedly trying to belay that order, and they're saying that no, ISIS-K, old Pakistani Taliban guys, I guess, and ex-Taliban fighters in Afghanistan, they represent an international terrorist menace that's going to attack the United States from Afghanistan, and so we have to stay to prevent their establishing a permanent safe haven there.
What do you think?
Yeah, I mean, that's the U.S. military also, you know, and the same thing in Syria, wanting to stay.
You know, usually they've got their way in the past, they seem to get their way in Syria.
You know, will the same thing happen in Afghanistan?
I would have thought a good chance.
Well, what do you think about ISIS-K?
Are they separate, worse than the Taliban, sworn loyal to Baghdadi?
You know, they have some significance, but, you know, not that great.
You know, there's a contradictory message coming from the U.S. military, which is, one, you know, we've defeated ISIS, you know, the caliphate no longer exists, we've won this great victory, yet they want to keep it going as a sort of potential threat to justify U.S. military presence in Syria and Afghanistan and elsewhere.
So at one moment, you know, these guys have been wiped out, and the next moment, you know, they're coming over the hill.
So, you know, we're seeing this again in Afghanistan.
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Well, and what about the talks?
Do you think that it's possible that the Americans and the Taliban, and I guess the Afghan government in Kabul, could come to some kind of, more or less, ceasefire and hold the lines where they are and establish some sort of workable peace, or it's going to be civil war until one side is done losing?
It's difficult to see how, you know, that would work, you know.
Afghanistan is so broken up, you know, into different areas, controlled by the government, controlled by the Taliban, controlled by nobody.
It's difficult to see this happening.
It does, you know, show the consciousness that nobody's winning this war.
But it's difficult to see it working in the long term.
Well, I mean, certainly the concept of defeating the Taliban militarily has been taken off the table permanently.
All factions seem to agree on that when they talk about it.
They say there must be a political settlement, but, like you're saying, everything is so out of balance or the power even non-existent in some areas and this kind of thing that it can't stand up.
The status quo can't hold.
And so we can't leave without, essentially, our guys losing or at least suffering major consequences for losing our support.
And so there's not really a way to do it that looks good.
And so, easier to stay, I guess.
Yeah, you know, the whole Afghan thing, you know, everybody who gets involved in Afghanistan regrets it.
I mean, outside powers, the British came to regret it.
Partly because there isn't a central government to overthrow.
So, you know, power is distributed, fragmented throughout the country.
You know, it's an incredibly long time since, I remember in 2001, being stuck in a village south of the Panjshir Valley just north of Kabul.
And a few months later, Washington and everybody else was announcing the final defeat of the Taliban.
When I followed them south to Kandahar, it was very evident at that time that they were going home.
They hadn't really been defeated.
And, you know, the assumption, what happened then, you know, has produced this, you know, 18 years of war, a sorrowful war.
Is it now going to end?
Well, wars have gone on that long.
They build up their own momentum.
They build up a war economy.
People have got an interest in the war going on.
So it's difficult to see it stopping soon.
Yeah.
Well, one thing is, I was talking with Matthew Ho, the former Marine and State Department whistleblower.
Oh, sure, yeah.
And he was saying, you know, one thing about the current situation, if you compare it to the 1990s, is that in the 90s, the Taliban had the support of America, at least the tacit support of America.
I don't know about direct support, but certainly the approval of the Clinton administration for the Saudis and the Pakistanis to back their takeover of the whole country, the capital city and the rest, too.
And they said so in testimony and all.
It's in the book.
So they don't have that this time, right?
So it would take, to Matt, he said, he thought that without the Pakistanis there to back them to the hilt in an attempt to take the capital city and the rest of the country over, that they might refrain from doing that.
They might realize they don't really have the support for that.
In other words, possibly, something like the current lines could hold.
Because they've bitten off about as much as they can chew, and they know that they can't take over the rest, really.
Yeah, that would be kind of realistic, but the fighting will stop, you know.
Right.
You know, that's been fairly clear for some time, but the fighting still goes on.
You know, it was evident also, you know, that so long as they were defended by Pakistan, you know, this normal, normal sort of semi-open border, that the Taliban were going to stay in business.
And so long as we had corrupt governments in Kabul, which is what we've always had.
But I think that that's realistic, that there is a sort of stalemate, but unfortunately it's not a peaceful stalemate, it's a sort of military stalemate, in which the fighting still goes on.
Okay, well, in terms of American public relations, and an excuse to leave a set-up in order to disentangle at least the U.S. from the conflict, not that that would resolve it, but what about the idea of trying to mimic something like the awakening situation in Western Iraq in 2007 and 2008, where you say, okay, Taliban, you get rid of the Islamic State, and we'll recognize the fact that we'll call them the foreign fighters.
They are kind of Pakistani at their core, Tariqi Taliban guys.
We'll call them foreign fighters and say, as long as you get rid of them for us, then you can make up with us, and then we can find the door.
Yeah, I think actually the Iranians were trying to do that with some success, to get rid of the Islamic State in that area.
Could they do that?
I suppose they might.
You're saying in that area, near the Iranian border?
One time in Iraq, well...
You're saying near the Iranian border, they were working with the Taliban against the Islamic State there?
We're working with the Taliban at one moment.
Bear in mind, the awakening movement in Western Iraq ended up, by unit, being unsuccessful.
It worked for a time.
But it's very difficult to eliminate ISIS.
Would the Taliban really do it?
It's still somewhat up in the air.
Yeah.
Although it really did, as you reported at the time, in real time, step by step, it really took America and Allied support for the Sunni-based insurgency in Syria to blow up into the Islamic State in Iraq.
The status quo was pretty bad before that, but the jihadists didn't really come to prominence until America really made it that way with Chapter 2 of that thing.
So, I don't know.
Still just an analogy anyway, but yeah.
Sure, yeah.
One of those are many miscalculations made.
Yeah.
Well, and they're still making it.
I interviewed Peter Ford earlier, a former UK ambassador to Syria, and he was saying that our Gulf allies are still backing the, essentially the Al-Nusra Front, HTS, they call themselves now, in the Idlib province in Syria.
Yeah, I mean, you know, that's the case.
Turkey is essentially backing them.
It's one of the strange things that happened in the last few months, is you have lots of publicity on ISIS losing its last stronghold in eastern Syria at the end of the caliphate, and nobody paying much attention to the fact that there is an al-Qaeda-linked organization.
It's its own sort of principality in northwestern Syria.
The difference is, of course, that these guys are in opposition to the terrible Assad and the horrible Russians.
So, I guess they sort of get a pass on this.
Yeah, the Sunni-based insurgency are the bad guys on the east side of the line, and they're still the heroes on the west side of the line.
Moderate rebels, I guess.
And now, you know, Peter Ford said that I'm not exactly sure of the source of this, but he was saying his number was 70 to 80,000 of these guys, essentially, under the umbrella of the al-Nusra Front there in Idlib province.
Does that sound right to you?
Yeah, that's the figure that's around.
Hardcore fighters, maybe a bit less.
But, you know, it's a very high number.
And it's a population of 3 million.
And, you know, a lot of these are fighters who have transferred from other parts of Syria.
So, you know, this is the last stronghold.
Yeah, but that's broadly correct.
And so, that whole situation is rock and hard place and this and that.
So, you have the Syrian army and the Russian army, and the Syrian army is attacking at the southern part of Idlib province.
In fact, Ford was saying they've gone a little bit further than he was expecting them to go so far.
And the Americans are complaining and saying, stop bombing our friends in Al-Qaeda there.
We can't stand that.
But then, you know, as you were talking about, the Turks, right there on the northern border, they're still supporting these guys to some degree, protecting them.
And, you know, they're still resisting them.
But so, is there any kind of resolution to this that you could describe what you think it might look like is going to happen here?
What happened was that you had two groups in there.
You had the HTS, which was formerly Al-Nusra.
I keep changing their name.
But essentially, the Al-Qaeda linked groups.
And you had another group that was really controlled by Turkey.
But earlier this year, the Al-Qaeda linked group wiped out or eliminated the Turkish linked group earlier this year.
So, it's the Al-Qaeda linked group which is dominant in that area.
And now it's been negotiating with the Turks.
And it's got closer to them.
It's coming under pressure from the Syrian army and the Russians.
But it's all, you know, it's such a cat's cradle there.
The Russians want to push forward, but they don't want to do so at the price of losing their alliance with Turkey.
Hang on just one second.
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Yeah.
So, what do you think Erdogan thinks his plan is?
People don't know.
It doesn't seem, I guess, it doesn't really seem to have a plan.
The Turkish policy has been pretty, pretty terrible since 2011.
Now, when this first started happening in Syria and elsewhere, you know, if the Turks had not backed, essentially backed the jihadis, backed the sectarian uprising, if they had, you know, at that time Turkey was much more of a democracy and so forth.
It had a lot to offer these areas, but it backed sectarian Sunni groups in an area where much of the population is Shia or Kurds.
You know, this was, Turkey could have done a lot of things there, but if they tell the population, the policy has been disastrous and more and more sort of sectarian, basically fueling a religious war.
All right, now, so, let's talk about Iraqi politics for a minute here.
It seems like they're, well, the first major question is resolving the political situation in the predominantly Sunni areas of Western Iraq.
And whether they can be successfully integrated into the government in a way where they're no longer essentially just left out to dry, as certainly they felt they were.
And in practice, I guess they really were by the Nouri al-Maliki regime.
But so now in the aftermath of Iraq War III, and the destruction of the Islamic State, is the Baghdad government trying very hard to put the sectarian, you know, differences aside, regardless of their vast, you know, superiority in terms of power in the government?
And are they trying to be magnanimous at all?
And figure out a way to reintegrate the West?
Yeah, I think that's something that's, has been very present in Iraq for a long time.
You know, they're kind of winners and losers at the moment.
You know, from the main sort of striking force of the Sunni was ISIS.
They've been essentially defeated.
They're still there.
You know, there are packets of them out in the desert.
There's a wasteland in western Iraq, Anbar province, which is about one-third of Iraq.
And, you know, they're picking off or kidnapping or killing, you know, Shia who come to the area, you know.
Lone travelers, guys, truffle hunters, a lot of truffle hunting in that area, a lot of truffles in that area.
The top guys, if they're Sunni, they charge them a certain amount of money, if they're Shia, they kill them.
So it's, you still have that going on.
The Sunni in Mosul, their biggest city, you know, partly in ruins, they've been defeated.
But the plus point in Iraq is, despite all this, there's less military action, less killing going on than there has been for about 40 years.
You know, I first went to Iraq in about 1977, and then from about 79, 80, Saddam took full control.
We were on the Iraq war.
We had continual crises and emergencies, wars, sanctions, civil wars, more wars for 40 years.
And that has sort of ebbed for the moment, maybe long term.
It could be they're kind of worried about what happens between the U.S. and Iran.
Will that pump things up again?
But for the moment, things are a bit better.
You don't have the same level of violence that you had in the past.
Of course, Iraqis look around them, and because there's less violence, they know just what a wreck the place is.
Lack of water, lack of electricity, lack of everything else.
But, you know, for the moment, it is better.
But going back to your point, will they, you know, will they, I sort of doubt there'll be very much of that.
I think really kind of the Shia have won for the moment.
And that's the key political factor.
Yeah.
Well, which just spells chaos, right?
Because it means that there essentially is no real state in Western Iraq, just like the situation was in 2012 and 2013, where it's sort of the...
There was an army, you know, it was in Ramadi, you know, which had been very badly, essentially had been very badly sort of smashed up.
You know, a lot of that's been rebuilt further along.
ISIS had massacred a lot of tribesmen.
But the Iraqi army was in pretty full control.
I wouldn't say it was anarchy there.
I'd say that they had fairly tight control of these areas along the river.
In the long term, it's difficult to maintain that, because, you know, this is a vast area.
People can hide out in the desert, wait for a bit, and then come back inside.
Well, and then there's the question, too, of the Gulf states again, and how much money they're willing to pour into Sunni insurgency there.
That's the pattern all over the Middle East.
That's the kind of tragedy of it, you know, that you have.
You know, from 2011, what did we have?
We had an uprising in many countries, you know, in Egypt, in Libya, in Bahrain, Yemen, Syria.
But, you know, the great contradiction there was that you had an uprising of people who wanted liberty, democracy, and a cut of economic benefits.
And who was it backed by?
It was backed by Qatar and Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchies, who were the last thing they wanted.
These were the last absolute monarchies on Earth.
The last thing they wanted was democracy or freedom of expression or anything like that.
So it was always sort of naive to imagine there was going to be a good outcome of this.
You still have that throughout.
We've just seen this in Sudan in the last few days.
The army suddenly moves against the protesters.
By all accounts, they did so after they were given encouragement to do it by Mohammed bin Salman, by the Crown Prince in Saudi Arabia.
The predominance of these Gulf oil states, the inability to fund people in Sudan or Syria means that these wars can go on, but it's very difficult for a popular uprising to succeed.
And when it looks like doing so, it tends to get taken over by the most regressive elements.
Alright, so, and now you mentioned about American tensions with Iran and one of the things, of course, it's almost a joke at this point, is, of course, America's our national security state, I guess, their resentment at Iran for inheriting all of eastern and southern Iraq as a result of Iraq War II.
George W. Bush fought a whole war for Iran's, not just the Shia, but for the Supreme Islamic Council Iran's best friends in all of Iraq the expats who lived in Iran for 30 years, many of them.
And so, the Americans are always kind of trying to figure out a way to use their money and weapons as leverage to get the Iraqi government to lean more toward them and further from Iran.
And, of course, they may be Iran's best friends, but they're not just sock puppets, right?
They have their own interests, the Iraqis.
Yeah, that's exactly right, you know.
They do that.
If you push an Iraqi Prime Minister too far, if the U.S. pushes an Iraqi Prime Minister too far, he looks like sort of getting too far into the American camp in a country we don't, which is...
The main fact about Iraq is, you know, that it's two-thirds Shia, the same as Iran.
There are differences with Iran, but those are the two big Shia states in the world.
They're not going to move that far into Iran.
If you put too much pressure on an Iraqi Prime Minister as they did last year, if he looks like moving too far from the Iranian position, then he's going to fall.
And, you know, that's still the situation.
You know, the funny thing about this, what Trump and Pompeo and the others say about Iran sort of expanding its influence and so forth, the Iranian influence tends to be high or is capable of being expanded in areas where, you know, have big Shia population or Shia control.
So that's in Iraq, there's a rather different type of Shia, the Houthis in Yemen, Lebanon, with Hezbollah, Syria is mostly Sunni, but the Uighurs are Alawites or any kind of Shia.
They can't really operate much beyond that.
But when the U.S. acts against what it says is acting against the U.S., Iran, in these countries, it's sort of going to war with the Shia community in general.
And also, you know, the decision has already been reached in these places.
It's obvious Assad's going to stay in Syria, it's obvious the Shia will run out in Iraq.
The Iranians are on the winning side of these places.
Nothing much that the U.S. is going to do is going to change that.
Right.
And although it seems like, well not although, but because not just the Da'at Party and the Supreme Islamic Council, but even the Prime Ministers, Jafari Maliki and now Ahmadi, I mean, these guys are all essentially the compromise between America and Iran for who the Prime Minister of Iraq should be, is sort of how this has played out all this time.
And so I can see why the Americans kind of resent that, that the Iranians have benefited so much, but they should be fair enough and see the irony in it and be a good sport about the fact that it's all their fault in the first place.
And since they support the same groups, you know, they could use their influence I don't know, it seems like Patrick, as far as I know, that the Iranians really have supported in Iraq War II especially a much more sectarian agenda than say Muqtada al-Sadr, right?
As you wrote about then.
It seems like there's room there for America to put pressure on the Iraqi government to be a little bit better about their victory against the Sunni here, maybe in a less sectarian way than the Iranians prefer.
But that doesn't ever seem to be their agenda, really.
That's do-gooder rinky-dink stuff, Samantha Power said.
Yeah, I think it's true, you know, when you look at it, since 2011, it's all been a disaster.
You know, you look at Syria, you look at Libya, at one moment, high hopes in Egypt, after the fall of Mubarak, but it's far more of an authoritarian state now than it was under Mubarak.
I think that the US is capable of keeping things simmering in Syria, Assad hasn't quite won, or he will win, on the idea of weakening Assad.
That's kind of been the policy for six or seven years, but look at the disasters that have followed from that, a normal surge of immigrants out of Syria or out of Turkey into Europe.
ISIS was able to fill the vacuum there.
Trump comes in, but, you know, the policy doesn't change that much, and it still has all the old weaknesses, and no lessons drawn from the disasters of the last, how long is it now?
20 years?
Yeah.
Alright, so one last thing, if you've got a minute.
Sure.
So you had reported back in 2015, the internal Saudi politics behind the start of the Yemen war, and how young, 29-year-old, then 29-year-old, Mohammed bin Salman was the new defense minister and deputy crown prince, and he essentially launched this war, Operation Decisive Storm, they called it, in order to boost his own credentials inside the government, and I guess it worked, right?
He moved, he pushed his cousin out of the crown prince spot, and took it for himself, and emerged as the power in Saudi, so I wonder now, do you know, are there any politics in Saudi that are trying to stop this guy from killing all the Yemenis at this point, after more than four years of failure?
He just pulled back from the US, you know, he's got away, got away, got away with it so far, he wanted to expect a quick victory then, so it is a slightly lost interest in Yemen, after they failed to win a quick victory.
The most of you know, Mohammed bin Salman's you know, ventures abroad have been pretty disastrous, you know, kidnapping the Lebanese prime minister for a bit, that wasn't a great idea, but neither are al-Khashoggi in Istanbul, you know, now we'll see, the confrontation with Iran, between the US and Iran, they're pretty worried about that, but what are they going to do about it?
So, in Yemen, yeah, they failed in 2015, he thought, you know, this is going to be a clashy victory, won by the, by the new ruler, it just hasn't happened.
But so, there's really just no counter-incentive at this point, the Trump administration certainly is backing him, I know that the Congress is trying to stop it, but so far, that's not going anywhere.
But, you know, I think it would be much better to go over Trump, over Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf, and so forth, and go after him over Russia, I think there are many more things to be dug up there, you know, it's, the, it's a much more comparable policy.
But, you know, we'll see what happens.
Yeah, well, you know, I think this is important too, that, which it just goes to show the absurdity of the situation, unfortunately, but, you know, if they're, they're really talking about impeaching him for obstruction of justice on a high treason charge that it turns out he got a no bill on, he hadn't done anything, the whole investigation came to nothing, what a hoax, but if they really think he's that dangerous, and they really want to get rid of him, the thing to do would be to charge him with war crimes in Yemen, which are absolutely indefensible.
Oh, Yemen, the connection which they know about Khashoggi, when did they know it, you know, these are real events.
Somebody is, you know, murdered and dismembered, you know, a war has started in Yemen, you know, there, you know, a military regime, you know, a military regime is supported in Egypt, you know, the protesters are massacred in Sudan, these are real things they could go after, you know.
It was always incredibly hazy, what was the real allegation, what were they supposed to have done, and so forth.
Right.
You know, from the beginning, I must say, I always thought that, you know, it was crackers.
Yeah, of course.
But the thing is, too, is it would be a great opportunity if they were really serious about removing this guy from power.
They would have to go after the Democrats, too.
And that would prove, really, that they meant it, that it wasn't just some kind of partisan witch hunt.
You know, a lot of Trump's policy in the Middle East is not much different from, you know, the one that Obama was pursuing before, and Hillary Clinton said that she would pursue if she had won the election.
After all, it was not Donald Trump who was president in 2015, and it seems like, in fact, now it was two years of Obama and two years of Trump.
That's the perfect thing to charge them both for.
And then...
Yeah, well, hold our breath.
All right, well, listen, I really appreciate your time on the show.
I'm at 5,000 interviews today, Patrick, and probably a hundred and something of those are of you.
And I'm really appreciative of all the time that you've shared coming on the show to share your expertise here, so I really do appreciate it.
Thanks for all your intelligent questions over that period.
All right, well, you have a good one.
Appreciate it again.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
All right, you guys, that's Patrick Coburn, Middle East correspondent at The Independent, and, of course, wrote Chaos and Caliphate, and The Age of Jihad, and Muqtada al-Sadr, and a bunch of other books before that, too.
All right, y'all, thanks.
Find me at LibertarianInstitute.org, at ScottHorton.org, AntiWar.com, and Reddit.com slash ScottHortonShow.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan, at foolserrand.us.
