Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites 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, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, saying three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Alright you guys, introducing Charles Glass.
He is a writer, journalist, broadcaster, and publisher.
He's the author of the books, Tribes with Flags, Money for Old Rope, The Tribes Triumphant, A Northern Front, An Iraq War Diary, and Syria Burning, A Short History of a Catastrophe.
And you might remember we talked with Charles a few months back about the great Julian Assange and his persecution.
And then Sam Husseini at Accuracy.org, the Institute for Public Accuracy, had put out this press release that included some links to a couple of articles by Charles about Syria.
And this is some of the best stuff you've ever read about the Syrian war.
I've already ordered your book and I'm actually glad that we had a little delay this morning.
It gave me a chance to reread this piece in Harper's, which I'm sorry I missed when it first came out.
It certainly would have been the spotlight at Antiwar.com.
This thing is absolutely incredible.
Tell me how this ends at Harper's.org from last January.
And the occasion here, of course, Charles, is that Tulsi Gabbard and Joe Biden and some others are getting into it about America's Syria policy.
And Gabbard has said that, you know, the real betrayal of the Kurds started back before when the Obama administration, with the help of and at the insistence of many prominent Republicans, too, embarked on backing the jihadist side of the war in Syria.
And Biden said, well, that's not true.
We were never seeking a regime change.
We were only trying to protect the poor people there.
And then, yeah, so you have a take on that, I guess.
Well, Biden himself has a take on it.
He said publicly that he wanted Assad to be deposed, as did Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, as did President Barack Obama.
They all stated that America's objective was to remove Assad, that is regime change.
You know, there's a famous clip, I play it on my intro sometimes, of Hillary Clinton on CBS News from February 2012.
And the reporter is asking her, why aren't we doing more to overthrow Assad?
And so she's defending Obama's policy of doing as much as he's doing, but not more than that.
And she says, listen, Ayman al-Zawahiri has endorsed the revolution in Syria.
Are we supporting al-Qaeda in Syria?
And then she says, Hamas has endorsed the revolution.
Are we supporting Hamas?
And she obviously is like, it's a figure of speech.
She's not saying, are we directly sending tow missiles to al-Jolani?
But she's saying, are we essentially helping our enemy's position in order to spite an adversary?
That wouldn't be very smart, right?
So there was really a lot of recognition, a lot of discussion in real terms about what was happening, even at the time.
You quote Robert Ford a lot, the ambassador to Syria.
They were, on one hand, really frank that, yes, this is what we're doing.
But, you know, at the same time, were very insistent that they had to continue to do it for years and years and years.
Well, it was the policy to depose Assad without using American troops in combat in Syria.
And so they had to find third forces.
And the best fighters against the Syrian army were the jihadists.
The so-called Free Syrian Army was not terribly effective.
It didn't have the same degree of dedication.
It didn't have the financing that the jihadists had from Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
So it was at a distinct disadvantage.
And then the numbers, because they had the money, of the jihadists grew.
And the Free Syrian Army didn't, although the Free Syrian Army still exists in name.
Even as we speak, it's fighting against the Kurds and some Christians in northeast Iraq.
But it is itself very heavily Islamicized now.
Well, and, you know, here's the thing about it, too.
I almost get the idea from reading your Harper's piece here this morning that, I mean, the Democrats, they really are as dumb or as ignorant, kind of, in their discussions and in their decisions here, as they are maybe more than they are cynical.
Where, I'll tell you what I mean.
From this perspective, all through 2011 and 2012, we saw what was going on the whole time here.
And we're not alone.
There are a lot of people who were getting it right at the time, in real time, the whole time.
And, in fact, when the State Department in 2012 came out and said, listen, al-Nusra is just an alias, that was their word, an alias for al-Qaeda in Iraq, in Syria, that, from this perspective, the whole idea was, OK, so that's it.
The American people's only priority is to stop bin Ladenites at all costs.
Anything that's helping bin Ladenites, that is our highest priority, is to not do that.
Right?
But then the way you write about it here is, the worst the al-Qaeda presence was in Syria, it's not that the administration was saying to themselves, nah, that's all right, as much as they were invoking that as the reason to pour more support into the so-called mythical moderates here, so as to somehow marginalize the jihadists, even though the jihadists were already far in the lead of dominating the tone and the tactics and the strategy and the entire insurgency.
Well, there were many instances of moderate rebels who were trained by the U.S. in Turkey and Jordan, who crossed over the border, and as soon as they got over the border, were either captured by jihadists or joined them, and used their weapons and training for the benefit of the jihadists in the great jihad to depose Bashar al-Assad.
And the reason they wanted to get rid of Bashar al-Assad, by the way, was not what the young demonstrators in Damascus and Daraa and Homs in the first months of the uprising, the nonviolent demonstrators, were demanding democracy.
These people were not demanding democracy.
They wanted to get rid of Bashar al-Assad because he was not a Sunni Muslim religious leader.
They wanted to replace his secular dictatorship with a theocratic dictatorship, rather like the one that was funding them in Saudi Arabia.
Well, and you know, sometimes even the hawks, like at the Foundation for Defensive Democracies, you have Bill Roggio and the Long War Journal there, Thomas Jocelyn, and those guys, they're really hawks, but they're hawks enough on al-Qaeda that sometimes they would look at this Obama-McCain policy in Syria and go, well, geez, I don't know, guys.
I mean, sure, list all the bad things about Bashar al-Assad, but these guys are loyal to Zawahiri.
And here's footage of FSA, quote unquote, with TOW missiles fighting on the battlefield with Jabhat al-Nusra against the Syrian government, the same time, the same place.
I mean, you're talking about two different divisions of one army here, really.
And so what are we doing?
And that was early on that even the hawks were saying stuff like that.
Well, the policy from the beginning was a bit schizophrenic.
The objective, apart from the mythical objective of getting rid of Bashar al-Assad, the objective was no one ever had an idea what was to replace him and if that would be better or worse than his regime.
Clearly, a jihadist takeover of Damascus would have been catastrophic and much, much worse than the dictatorship that was in place or that is still in place.
It is much stronger as a result of what's happened.
The jihadists that they had come into Damascus, they were very badly organized.
They would have fought amongst themselves, and they could have reduced Damascus to what the mujahideen reduced Kabul to when they came in in 1992 after the Russians had left and fought amongst themselves for years, fought amongst themselves so much that the Taliban was created simply to get rid of them and to control Kabul and make it peaceful again.
I mean, a very brutal kind of peace, but at least the people in Kabul didn't have to listen to shelling and shooting every night.
Hang on just one second.
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Well, so there's a reporter named Mitchell Prothero, who back at that time was writing for McClatchy newspapers.
And it's funny because he was kind of for all this stuff at the same time that he was admitting essentially the reality of the whole thing, taking essentially the position of the more honest members of the Obama government.
And I remember the way he put it then on the show was that, hey, Al Nusra plays well with others.
And then you actually have a quote here from, I forget if it's Robert Ford or one of these guys in the Obama government saying that, well, geez, because Al Nusra would fight and get along with all the other rebel groups, then that unfairly tainted all the other rebel groups with their extremism.
And yet it was just kind of ignoring that.
But they were the dominant faction.
The other groups had to work with them more than they had to work with the other groups.
And they always were the dominant faction in the war from at least 2012 on.
Isn't that right?
And they've changed their name.
They're now called Haitham Hashem and they're still the dominant faction.
By the way, they were together with the people who formed the Islamic State.
It was a rupture amongst their leadership that created the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, ISIS, and Jabhat al-Nusra.
They had exactly the same ideology, but they just had differences of personalities.
So one group left northwest Syria and went off to northeast Syria and tried to take over large areas of the Kurdish zone and Raqqa, Sunni Arab city.
And then, because many of them were Iraqi and originally came out of al-Qaeda in Iraq, went into Iraq and seized a third of Iraq, which then compelled the Obama administration to come in to put an end to ISIS because it was threatening the American protectorate of Iraq.
While they were behaving as they were behaving in Syria alone, no one in the U.S. objected.
But when they brought that jihad to Iraq and threatened the Iraqi army, Iraqi government that the U.S. had set up, then they became concerned and they reacted accordingly.
And they slowly but surely helped Kurds and Iraqi Shia popular mobilization units to drive ISIS out of Mosul, its main stronghold in northern Iraq, and also helped the Kurds of Syria to take away their territorial base in Syria.
They haven't entirely eliminated ISIS.
ISIS still does operations in those areas, but they don't control any territory anymore.
Now, there's so much to go over here, and there's such a great piece, never mind the whole war, but just in this article there's so much here.
In 2012, I was interviewing Flint Leverett pretty often back then.
Him and his wife, Hillary Mann-Leverett, have both kind of dropped off the face of the earth, I think.
But they wrote the great book, Going to Tehran, and they're former National Security Council staffers, and he was a former CIA officer and analyst.
And I remember, summer 2012, saying to him, well listen, if Qatar and Saudi and Turkey are doing all of this, and the CIA is coordinating it all, as according to the New York Times, isn't that just deniability?
I mean, I understand that Obama obviously was reluctant to really get a regime change.
He could have sent one B-52 to get a regime change.
I mean, he got one with air power in Libya.
He clearly was reluctant to go that far.
But at the same time, he could have just made a couple of phone calls and said to the Turks, the Saudis, the Qataris, this is what we don't want to do.
And he could have called John Brennan over in Langley and said, this is not what we want to do.
But instead, he goes, well, I don't know.
I guess we'll coordinate everyone else arming these guys up.
And at the time, I asked Flint Lever, isn't this just deniability?
Isn't this just like hiring the Israelis to sell missiles to Iran for us?
But nobody's confused.
Nobody thinks that Ronald Reagan didn't sell the missiles to Iran just because Israel was in the loop.
And then he said to me, yeah, that's exactly right.
It's just deniability.
Otherwise, this is, of course, America's the superpower.
And if our CIA is running the project, then what?
Our CIA is running the project, right?
I mean, Biden, the clip we were referring to, Biden blames it all on the allies, too.
Oh, you know, we wanted to help the people.
But then our friends, the Turks and the Saudis back the terrorists.
Well, Biden gave a famous speech in which he did accuse the Turks and their countries of going too far.
But the U.S. was aware of what was going on from the beginning.
And Obama signed off on Operation Timber Sycamore, which was the CIA program to arm and equip rebels to fight in Syria.
But most of those rebels were committed Islamists.
Now, but so back to the the cynical slash stupid part of it, right?
I mean, how much of this is, well, for example, on the question of, well, geez, there really are a lot of Al-Nusra guys.
And that's why we really need to step up support for their best friends in the world, the moderates, in order to somehow marginalize them and increase the power of the moderates.
That in the article, you say that that was the position, as recounted to you by all of these people involved on the National Security Council and in the cabinet, that, I mean, were they really telling themselves that?
That, never mind Assad, that the best solution to the problem of Al-Nusra would be to support the FSA more?
I mean, they really believe that?
Because that does sound just like cynical arming of Al-Qaeda treason to me.
Well, unless they were lying to me, they did believe that.
And one of the problems was that almost without exception, none of these people making decisions about the future of Syria had ever been to the country.
I think only Rob Malley had actually visited Syria.
The others had never been there and didn't understand the nuances of Syrian society, didn't know who was related to whom and why certain people had left the regime because of purely personal grievances or why the regime was oppressing certain people because they had conflicting business interests, why certain tribes fought for Assad and others fought against him in the desert, with little understanding of all of the complexities of life in Syria and no appreciation at all for the fears of the minorities, the Armenians, the Arab Christians, the Yazidis, the Ismailis, all of the non-Sunni population, and the Kurds as well.
The fear is that they had what would happen to them when rebels who had a purely Islamist ideology came into their areas and either killed them or expelled them, and what that would mean for the country if people like that took over.
I just think because the people making the policy didn't know the country but were somehow, because they ran a superpower, allowed to decide the future of that country, it led to this disaster.
And they all, I mean, I have to say to their credit, they all recognized it was a failure.
They failed to change the regime.
They failed to break the links between the regime and Iran and the regime in Russia.
In fact, they ended up strengthening those ties.
And they've left Syria now with a very strong Iranian-Russian presence, but also Syria that is economically destroyed, its social fabric unwound, and the physical plant of the country, large sections of it, just gone.
Factories destroyed, hospitals gone, bombed by both sides.
The school, many schools gone, whole villages wiped out.
The country is going to take a long, long time to rebuild itself.
And this is all a result not just of American policy but of American and Saudi and Qatari and Russian and Iranian and the participants themselves, all of them together combined to make this disaster.
And the people who have suffered are the Syrian people, half of whom lost their homes.
I mean, half of the entire population lost their homes.
And many fleeing the country and many displaced within the country.
And now with this latest Turkish invasion of the northeast, anywhere between 200,000 and 300,000 people have had to flee their homes.
So the Turks plan, if they are to be believed, they plan to put Syrian refugees living in Turkey in those empty houses that don't belong to them and in areas where they don't even know.
And the refugees in Turkey don't want to go to those places.
And the people who've lost their houses don't want strangers moving into their houses and not being able to get them back.
Yeah, it's a completely crazy plan.
Do you think they're really going to go through with that?
And then if they did, wouldn't those Syrian Arabs eventually just go back to the cities where they're from?
Especially if that area is brought under the control of the Syrian army, which Patrick Coburn was on the show the other day and explained that the YPG is now joining the Syrian army.
They got a serious handshake deal going on there, where both sides have agreed to integration now again.
The problem is that if the Turkish army continues its occupation of those areas, this Turkish army is not going to let those people back.
Any more than the Israeli army let Palestinian refugees back after 1948.
Yeah, and that was what Coburn was saying too, that they really, they do want to change the shape of the border there and expand, you know, move Turkey's border south into that zone.
But I guess you think that's most likely the result?
In which case they'll get away with it.
Yeah.
Well, you think the Russians or the Americans could talk them out of that?
I mean, if the Syrian Arab army fills in that gap instead of the YPG, then can't that be good enough for Erdogan?
You'd have to ask Erdogan that.
His consistent pattern has been he doesn't trust anybody except himself.
And he clearly is ignoring the United States now.
I mean, when he first spoke to Trump, he seemed to get a green light from Trump.
And then Trump changed his mind, as he often does.
And imposed economic sanctions.
But the economic sanctions have not stopped Erdogan yet.
We'll see.
I mean, Erdogan will be speaking to Putin again, and we'll see if the Russians can negotiate something.
But that involves predicting the future, which I'm not really in a position to do because I'm not speaking to Erdogan myself or to Putin or to Trump.
I understand.
Yeah, you do real first person, firsthand source journalism, not punditry and speculation here.
So I didn't mean to get off too far on that.
I just feel if I did the speculation, I'd get it wrong.
Yeah, well, that's okay.
Reluctance is fine there.
I will note that this morning, the story is that the ceasefire is holding, but Erdogan is demanding that the Kurds withdraw further.
And so it's, you know, we're right at a midpoint and see what happens kind of thing.
The Kurds will probably not want to withdraw because if they leave, then they're leaving their civilian population.
They're defenseless.
And that's not a desirable thing for something called the People Protection Unit to do.
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And thanks.
By the way, if we zoom back out to the strategy of the Obama government.
I mean, your Harper's piece really begins with when the Trump people got there and opened the Middle East policy file cabinet, the thing was empty.
And there was no overarching plan for here's how we're dealing with Iran.
Here's how we're dealing with bin Laden nights.
Here's how we're doing whatever Netanyahu says or whatever it was, it wasn't there.
Is that really right?
Well, as you see, I quoted two sides of that.
Trump people said that there was nothing there.
And the Obama people said that they left many documents about what's going on in the policy box.
You just you pay your money and you take your choice.
Yeah.
It kind of makes sense to me.
I mean, if you remember when Chuck Hagel resigned.
Apparently, it wasn't just that it was over Syria.
It was that because he was complaining that he didn't know what the policy was.
Are we overthrowing this guy or not?
Are we back in this group or that group?
Will someone please speak English and complete sentences to me?
And the answer was no.
And so because I guess Obama wanted to cut this midpoint and please everybody.
But without, you know, really accomplishing anything either way.
And so, you know, and it always seemed like a mystery at the time, right?
Here he is making a deal with Iran.
Well, at the same time, he's trying to, you know, wage this war against their friend Assad just for being their friend.
You know?
The policy was schizophrenic and it was never very clear.
That's true.
I mean, Obama regarded the agreement with Iran on the nuclear issue as one of his great foreign policy triumphs, which you could say it was.
It was a very it was an effective and well-enforced agreement.
It would stop the Iranians from obtaining nuclear weapons.
But the U.S. is now withdrawn from it.
So anything, anything can happen in Iran.
And the Syria issue is still unresolved.
I mean, Syria is resolved in that Assad is one.
He stays as president of Syria.
His army controls vast areas and most of the population of Syria.
So it's decided, but it's not over because the fighting is still going on in those areas where the Turks are.
And it really is the Turks that are keeping Assad out of the Idlib province where Jabhat al-Nusra, Syrian al-Qaeda, HTS.
Out of Idlib and Afrin province and northern Aleppo province.
It's quite a large area in the northeast, all along the Turkish border, almost to Aleppo itself.
It's a very large area.
And there are an estimated 60,000 fighters, Syrian and foreign fighters there, most of whom are Islamists.
Many of whom are now being deployed in the northeast against the Kurds.
And who have no love of the Kurds, actually hate the Kurds, and will behave accordingly.
And that was when you mentioned that they had expanded into Afrin.
That was because of the war last year, the fight last year.
When the Turks, it's not the Turkish army.
They're using the mythical moderate terrorists and the al-Nusra to do this dirty work against our allies, the Kurds.
Yes, but they're backed up with Turkish Air Force and Turkish tanks and Turkish artillery.
Right.
Yes, of course.
And, you know, I was just remembering the other day that it was when Tillerson had said in the beginning of 20, the beginning of 2018, January 2018, Tillerson said, we're never leaving Syria and Kurdistan.
We're going to stay there to protect them.
And it was at that point that Erdogan went to the Russians and said, see, you know, they're going to stay and back up the Kurds, just like I said they would.
So now will you please pull your air cover back so that I can move my troops into Afrin?
And Putin agreed to that.
And that was almost a year before Trump announced the withdrawal the first time that then he his military balked at and he backed down on.
Right.
Do I remember that right?
That seems to be more or less the sequence of events.
And the U.S. did not interfere with the Turkish occupation of Afrin and the elimination of the Kurdish fighters and many of the civilians there, which was probably a precedent that the Kurds should have taken on board much sooner than they did.
Because when they went to Assad this week, this past week, begging for help, it was from a position of weakness.
Had they done it while the Americans were still there and hadn't yet announced their full withdrawal, they could have probably negotiated better terms with Assad from a position of strength.
But the U.S. denied them that possibility.
And also Rex Tillerson saying that the U.S. is going to stay there forever.
This was not a very wise thing to do either.
I mean, you don't commit yourself to remain at somewhere forever.
You leave yourself open to all sorts of possibilities or even an insurgency against you, as has happened to the U.S. Marines in Beirut in 1983.
They should have been seeking a viable exit strategy that could allow the U.S. forces to leave, but still leave the Kurds protected.
But they didn't do that.
And do you have a good pulse on why?
Is it because of faction fighting inside the government where if we start negotiating a sustainable exit, then that means we're leaving?
And then the other side says, no, no, but we can't leave.
So we don't want a peaceful resolution.
And so we end up leaving, but with a bloody resolution instead.
Well, I mean, I would assume that if you make it clear that you want to find a way out, but you won't leave until you've got protection for the people who fought beside you, then that should be fine for everybody.
But they didn't do that.
Yeah.
Well, but it's not fine for everybody because it's not really about the Kurds, right?
That's all bait and switch.
It's not even about ISIS.
It's about Iran.
As you said, more powerful and more influential in Syria than ever before.
Well, the U.S. treatment of the Kurds going back many, many years has always been that they use them and then get rid of them and let them suffer the consequences of U.S. policies happened in 1975.
Having supported a Kurdish insurgency in northern Iraq against Saddam Hussein for three years, they got the agreement that they wanted from Saddam to cede part of a waterway to the Shah of Iran.
And once that was done, they pulled the plug on the Kurds and Saddam went in and massacred them.
And they fled into the mountains again.
And it was terrible.
And in 1988, when the U.S. was siding with Saddam in the Iran-Iraq war and Saddam gassed the Kurds of Halabja, the U.S. denied first that it happened.
And then when it was proved by a journalist named Gwynne Roberts that it had happened, they said, all right, it happened, but the Iranians did it, not the Iraqis.
And so they let the Kurds down then.
And then in 1991, when George Bush Sr., at the end of the Kuwait operation, called on the Iraqi people to rise up and overthrow the dictator, they did rise up, the Kurds in the north and the Shiites in the south.
And when it looked like they were going to be successful, because they captured most of the country, the U.S. gave them permission, gave Saddam permission to use his helicopters against them.
And that began the slow demise of the Iraqi rebellion.
And thousands and thousands of Shiite Kurds fled to the neighboring countries.
And just again and again, the Kurds have discovered that they are expendable.
The U.S. uses them and then abuses them.
Now, a fine point there.
In 1991, in the uprising, were you talking de facto or was there a direct communication to Hussein that you can use your helicopters?
Go ahead.
But it wasn't even a wink-nudge.
But it wasn't even like, hey, you can keep your helicopters.
It was, you can use them to kill the Kurds with.
You can use them to move around the former battlefields to collect equipment or do reconnaissance or something.
Anyway, they were allowed to fly.
And they fly, they flew.
And I was in Kurdistan in northern Iraq at the time.
And the day after Schwarzkopf had given them this green light, I was watching Iraqi helicopters dropping barrel bombs on Kurdish villages.
There's no question about what happened.
And if the U.S. misinterpreted what Saddam was going to do with those helicopters, they could have ordered them then and there to stop and reimpose the no-fly zone.
But they didn't.
And it went on for a whole week.
And people were fleeing.
And by the way, the Kurds were terrified that those barrels were containing chemicals and not just explosives.
Because they'd already suffered chemical, chemical weapons attack from Saddam.
And it was horrible.
And that's in your book, The Northern Front?
Yes, it is.
Okay.
Well, I'm ordering that today.
That's...
Well, I'm writing a book about the terror wars right now.
And I have a whole section on that.
And I can't omit this.
So, I don't know when this thing is ever going to be finished.
But I'm really excited to read that firsthand account from inside Syrian Kurdistan at the time.
That's incredible.
Iraqi Kurdistan.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Yes, of course.
Iraqi Kurdistan, I must say.
Man.
And then I'd be willing to bet you're good on Bill Clinton's support for the Turkish war against the PKK in the 1990s.
Can you talk about that at all?
The Turks were, at that time, killing as many Kurds, maybe more than the Iraqis were.
And that was...
The U.S. gave full support to that.
There should have been...
I mean, by the way, the PKK itself did not behave that well either.
They brought a lot of trouble to the Kurdish population among whom they lived, and an inevitable Turkish military response.
But there could have been other ways of handling it, including negotiations with Kurdish leaders.
But because the Turkish government, and this is pre-Erdogan, the old Turkish government, simply did not recognize the existence of Kurds.
They called them mountain Turks.
They didn't allow them to speak their language.
They didn't allow them to have any kind of... to have their own culture.
They made their lives hell in the southeast.
And that's why many of them left the southeast and went to live along the coast and west with Istanbul and other places.
Now, does Erdogan have an argument now, a credible one, that if you had an independent Rojava there, or a very, very autonomous Syrian Kurdistan on the Turkish border there, that that would be, as the Americans talk about in Afghanistan, a safe haven for PKK terrorists on the other side of the border?
I mean, you have to admit that Erdogan has a case.
The YPG was created by the PKK.
And this is not a... he's right about that.
Most of them are indeed Syrian Kurds, but many of them are Turkish Kurds who were taking advantage of an opportunity to establish at least one place.
And they did a lot of good things in northeast Syria because their ideology was secular and they believed in equality of women and many things that are not permitted in traditional society.
But they are... it's very hard to tell the difference between the YPG and the PKK.
And he's right about that.
But that doesn't mean that you can go in and destroy a whole area and ethnically cleanse it.
And also, by the way, Erdogan a few years ago had a ceasefire with the PKK in Turkey, and there were negotiations going on.
But in order to win the elections, he canceled the talks and launched a war against them.
So he broke this on himself.
Yeah.
And that was...
I'm sorry, can you remind me what year that was?
It was just two or three years ago, right?
It was the last... the previous elections.
And I can't remember now.
I don't have my notes in front of me.
It was pretty close though.
It was just a few years ago that we're talking about.
It was just a few years ago.
And now... oh, let me ask you this.
This is just a finer point.
But I wanted to follow up with you on this.
You quote one of Obama's guys, Phil Gordon, saying that when the Arab Spring broke out in Tunisia, that America helped with the overthrow of their own guy, Ben Ali.
And I wanted to ask you whether that was just spin?
Or whether that was actually true, that they gave up on Ben Ali too and forced him to leave or something like that?
If they forced Ben Ali to leave, that's news to me.
I don't have a full interview in front of me.
I think I just used that one quote.
And I didn't... because it wasn't relevant to Syria.
I didn't go into it in great detail.
No, the French in particular supported Ben Ali until the day he got on the flight.
They were still sending equipment to his police to put down the demonstrators.
And the U.S. went along with the French policy in Tunisia.
Yeah, that's what I thought too.
He was just sort of claiming that, you know, so he could say, yeah, we took the side of the rebels in the Arab Spring.
I mean, the good thing about Tunisia, the smart thing about Tunisia, there were no rebels.
All the demonstrations were peaceful.
The only people who were not peaceful were Ben Ali's police.
And Tunisia has a small army, which is also a very good thing for any country.
So he didn't have quite the mechanisms of repression that the other Arab dictators had.
So all he could do was leave.
Yeah.
Okay, good.
Well, I wanted to clarify on that.
I know it's kind of a minor detail in the scheme of things here, but pretty important.
All right, well, listen, I've got your Syria book in the mail and ordering your Iraq book now.
And I cannot recommend this thing in Harper's highly enough.
It's from this last January 2019.
Tell me how this ends about the war in Syria.
It's as good as anything you guys have read about it in one take there.
Thanks very much for your time on the show, Charles.
Appreciate it.
Thank you very much.
Good talk.
Good to talk to you.
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.
