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, bitch, say it, 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, y'all.
Introducing Reese Ehrlich, foreign correspondent.
He writes for The Progressive and has a widely syndicated column we run at antiwar.com as well.
And his latest book is called The Iran Agenda Today.
The real story from inside Iran and what's wrong with US policy.
Welcome back to the show, Reese.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well.
Thank you very much.
Happy to have you here.
So late last week, you wrote this thing we ran at antiwar.com.
Turkey plans attack on Syrian Kurds.
Well, and here we are last night, the president announced he was pulling all US forces back out of northern Syria.
And I guess essentially abandoning the YPG to Turkey's tender mercies there.
So I guess I'll let you catch us up on the latest from your perspective there.
And then we'll dive back into a little bit more of the context here.
Sure.
I just returned from Istanbul where I was doing reporting on this question.
And it's clear that Turkey wants to wipe out the Kurdish population of northern Syria if they can get away with it.
What they plan to do is send in troops to a so-called safe zone.
That is an area that they've declared unilaterally.
And then move in Syrian refugees living in Turkey to take over the land or the homes that used to be inhabited by Kurds.
And it's the first steps in a process of ethnic cleansing, if you will, or ethnic transfer.
It goes by different names, but it's just as vicious.
But the reaction of the Kurds and particularly of the SDF, the Syrian Democratic Forces, they're not going to lay down and take this easily.
There's going to be guerrilla warfare going on.
The Turks think they'll be able to come in, occupy the area and mop up the Kurdish fighters.
But it's not going to be so easy.
And the US will have been responsible for starting yet another war.
Well, certainly the YPG are at the height of their powers now compared to what they've ever been.
I don't know exactly how high that is, but they control.
They're well-organized and they've got political support.
And they've been fighting against the Islamic State with the aid of the US military.
The stakes will be different with the Turkish military having a conventional force and not having the backing of the US.
So there's going to be a lot of casualties, a lot of civilian deaths.
Well, so everybody is saying, I mean, essentially everybody's saying the same thing, which is how terrible this is.
But so what are the other alternatives?
Because I know that you don't think that we should keep American troops there to be a safe zone as much as you're opposed to Erdogan's plan to resettle a bunch of Syrian refugees there to create a civilian population of Arab's safe zone.
You could call it that, which sounds crazy.
And as you say, sure, to provoke all these consequences.
I guess the obvious thing, and I think we talked about this before, the obvious thing, right, is to let the Kurds make a deal with Assad so that the Syrian Arab army would fill in that gap at the border and they would provide the safe zone.
In other words, the Syrian state would be the Syrian state, but the USA won't have that most obvious solution of all, right?
That's absolutely correct.
That is the logical solution is to allow Syrians, including Syrian Kurds and Syrian Arabs, the government and rebels, to negotiate a political settlement.
Now, that's not going to be easy.
I don't have any illusions about that.
Because Assad is not real happy about giving up power, whether it be to Kurds or anyone else.
But under the circumstances, given the possibility that Turkey is now going to become a permanent occupying power, you know, when they talk about sending in troops, they're not talking about just for a short period of time to do X, Y, and Z.
You know, they're looking long term, and that's the Syrian government's disadvantage, obviously.
So, yes, the Kurds and the Assad government should sit down, possibly with mediation by the Russians or the Iranians, probably the Russians more likely, and reach a political settlement, which would then undercut any justification Turkey has for taking over the territory.
But I wanted to kind of—there's an interesting quote from Trump that was quoted by AP that I wanted to read to you and to distinguish between what I would call an anti-interventionist view and Trump's version of isolationism.
He says—this is quoting President Trump—'I held off this fight for almost three years, but it is time for us to get out of these ridiculous, endless wars, many of them tribal, and bring our soldiers home.
We will fight where it is to our benefit and only fight to win.' So, he's not really advocating anti-interventionism.
What he's advocating is selective use of military force where he thinks the U.S. military can prevail.
And particularly interesting is his reference to tribal wars.
You know, this is the argument that comes up every time the U.S. has lost a war.
Oh, what did we get involved for?
These tribes, these religions, these different ethnic groups have been fighting for generations.
And, of course, who would expect us to be able to do anything about it?
In reality, the war in Syria has nothing to do with tribal differences.
It has to do with political power, economic and political social power by those in power and those seeking to displace them.
And tribes have nothing to do with it.
So, that's my disagreement with Trump.
I think if I was somehow in charge of U.S. policy in the region, I would tell the Turks, we are pulling our troops out of Syria and Iraq, for that matter.
But if you send one troop across the border into northern Syria, we will come down on you like a ton of bricks with economic sanctions, political, diplomatic pressure that will make your life miserable.
And you, like everybody else, like the Russians, the Iranians, the Israelis and everyone else who is bombing or occupying Syria, have to get out.
And that would be a first step in that direction.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, like you said, there's no real need for threats at all.
The Syrian Kurds, and we saw this as soon as Trump initially announced a withdrawal last December, which the military canceled, that the first thing that happened was the representatives of the YPG went to Damascus and said, hey, you guys want to stand in between us and Turkey?
We could live with that.
Which is obviously, they prefer that to annihilation or whatever's coming next, which is going to be an absolute massacre.
But so, is it too late for that at this point?
For that deal to be struck now?
Nothing is too late.
Well, it's too late if the tanks are already rolling across the border, it's too late.
Well, the tanks roll across the border and they can roll back again.
Well, yeah.
It all depends on how things go politically and militarily.
Yes, will this current invasion by Turkey spur additional talks with Damascus, between Damascus and the Kurdish forces?
I hope so.
I genuinely hope so.
But if it doesn't, then there's going to be some military fighting.
And when Turkey finds itself in a quagmire in northern Syria that it can't get out of and troops are being killed and the costs are mounting, the Turkish economy is in bad shape, separate from the new war that's about to be waged.
And then I think we can see some possible reversals in Turkish policy.
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Well, I mean, it just seems like when it's so obvious that we can negotiate a peaceful conclusion to this, it's just that the Americans aren't willing to concede to Assad, I guess.
That what?
That his government really does have a monopoly on force in the country.
It's a country.
It's a sovereign nation and we don't have the right to intervene there in the first place.
We weren't invited.
And now we got to go and admit that he won the war that we started.
That's essentially the case.
And what, you know, Syria is, the U.S. initially wanted to get rid of Assad and have united Syria under a regime that was at least sympathetic to, if not actually outright pro-U.S.
That was never possible.
But nevertheless, that was the U.S. goal for a while.
When that turned out to be impossible, the U.S. would rather see a fractured Syria with different countries controlling different parts of the country, keeping it in constant turmoil and therefore not as much of a threat to the U.S. oil company as in others with interest in the region.
And now, is there a possibility that this is somewhat of an empty threat by Erdogan?
I mean, is he so overconfident he's just going to roll his army right into Syrian Kurdistan and attempt to do what with them?
Push them back by a few miles to create this buffer zone full of Arab civilians that he's going to transplant there?
The whole thing sounds completely cockamamie.
Well, it is, but that doesn't mean it's not what his plan is.
Well, yeah.
It won't be the first time an international leader has miscalculated.
No, this one I'm fairly confident of because I interviewed quite a few people when I was in Istanbul, pro-government, critical of government forces.
And yeah, they have this illusion, not unlike the U.S., by the way, that Turkish military might can come in, quickly defeat the SDF forces militarily.
And then when you bring in international or Turkish or other aid, again, where it's going to come from and who's going to pay for it is never specified.
And then you transfer the Syrian refugees now living in Turkey, many of which, if not almost the large majority of which, are Syrian Arabs.
And you move them into the Kurdish area and you either give them houses that used to be occupied by Syrian Kurds or you build new structures and effectively do the same thing.
So you isolate and kill off or drive out the Kurdish population and repopulate the area with Syrian Arabs.
It's an old scheme that's been tried previously in Syria and various other parts of the region.
It never really works.
It's not so easy, it turns out, to displace people who've lived in a place for centuries.
And the plan has numerous flaws.
First of all, the military fight is not going to be as easy as they predict.
Nobody is going to commit funds internationally.
The Turks are going to have to do this completely on their own.
And the Syrian refugees living in Turkey are not going to move voluntarily into a hostile environment in a part of Syria they didn't come from.
So on pretty much every level, the plan is doomed to failure.
But that doesn't prevent them from believing it at the moment that it will actually work.
All right.
So now you talked about how the Americans had to confess to themselves, at least finally, that their policy didn't work, wasn't working and probably shouldn't work because who was to come next after the Assad regime would fall and this kind of thing.
But so the Turks have had some sort of reckoning as far as that goes, too, in terms of, I guess, they still back whichever of the forces in Idlib, but they're not really trying to overthrow the government in Damascus anymore either.
But so how and if I understand it right, the way it looks, Assad is in not much of a position of strength.
So he'd be happy to cut a deal with the Turks, wouldn't he?
Won't they talk to him?
Well, it's complicated.
Let's take a little bit of history.
When the popular uprising began, Turkey in Syria, Turkey was one of the first countries to break with international consensus and call for the overthrow of Assad.
At that time, the Turks were backing the Muslim Brotherhood branch in Syria.
And they had I interviewed them in Damascus and they were being strongly supported by the Turkish government.
The Turkish military was taking refugees who were streaming across the border from Syria into Turkey and training them to become soldiers in the Free Syrian Army.
You remember the FSA?
And this was part of a plan to ultimately have a government in Damascus without Assad, but sympathetic to Turkey.
Well, that didn't work out.
Turns out the Muslim Brotherhood didn't have the support that the Turks had hoped.
They switched alliances to more extremist groups that were affiliated with al-Qaeda and Islamic State at a certain point.
And they basically opened their borders so that all these ultra right wing militants could flow from Turkey into Syria to fight.
And I actually took a plane internally in Turkey to the city of Gaziantep and then back to Istanbul again.
And on the plane were these right wing militants from Libya who had just finished fighting in Syria.
It was on the airplane, on a commercial air flight.
So, you know, there was no secret that this was going on.
You could go to the Turkish-Syrian border and see both foreign fighters and Syrians flowing across the border to fight in Syria.
Well, that one didn't work either.
Those forces we know tried to have some strength or had some strength at a certain point.
They've been defeated militarily and politically, isolated largely in Syria.
But there are now one set of rebel fighters in Idlib province, which is in the northwest part of Syria.
And that's kind of the last readout of the forces that Turkey has been supporting.
And you're absolutely right.
The Turks no longer think Assad is going to be overthrown.
But they have sufficient military assets in Idlib that they can cause a lot of difficulty and a lot of disruption.
So is it possible that once the invasion takes place, particularly if it looks like Turkey is succeeding militarily, yes, everyone may give a call to Assad and try and agree to some kind of a quid pro quo or a modus vivendi where both sides can agree to the Turkish troops staying in northern Syria.
I have to say, however, that that kind of agreement is highly unlikely.
Assad does not want foreign powers occupying Syrian soil, and understandably so.
And the Russians don't want it and the Iranians don't want it.
So now whether they will fight the Turkish troops, that's another question.
But in the long run, in the medium and long run, I don't think there's going to be any viable agreement between Ankara and Damascus.
So, in other words, regardless of American intervention and, you know, I guess pressuring the YPG to not deal with Assad for the last year in this kind of deal, that aside from that, they have enough of their own problems.
I guess I don't understand why the Turks are still backing Al-Qaeda in Idlib province at this point.
Why not let Assad go ahead and finish that part of the war?
And why not just go ahead and cut a deal with him to put the SAA on the border there so that Turkey doesn't, quote unquote, have to invade to suppress the YPG?
Well, it comes down to the fact that, A, Turkey wants to have some kind of strong influence in what goes on in Syria, and B, Turkey considers the YPG to be more dangerous than Al-Qaeda.
And when you realize that, then their policy actually makes sense.
Well, and so what's the truth of that anyway?
I mean, I think we've talked in the past about how they're not as communist as they used to be, and they're not as violent as they used to be.
But the PKK is still a problem for the government in Ankara, right?
Oh, yeah.
But right now, I mean, there's plenty of things wrong with the PKK.
And I've written about this in my book Inside Syria.
I've written numerous articles about it.
And if you want, we can go into that in more detail.
But basically, the PKK, or the Kurdistan Workers' Party, is a revolutionary group on the left that is calling for autonomy within Syria, and they're calling for autonomy within Turkey.
They're not calling for separatism.
They do not engage in the kind of terrorist tactics that you see from the Islamic State or the Al-Qaeda.
They're the kind of terrorists that the U.S. and others accuse when you don't like somebody who's engaged in armed struggle.
And they are using classic guerrilla tactics, which you can agree or disagree with, but they're not terrorists.
Well, in years past, they would set off bombs in cities, but usually, and not kill anyone, right?
Right.
That was the case.
Sort of like the Basque separatists, they kind of phone in a warning, everyone get back, we set off a backpack bomb or something.
They did bombings like that.
And they also, more recently, in recent times, they haven't targeted civilians at all.
They've targeted military, government buildings, that sort of thing, which is classic guerrilla war tactics.
Again, which you can agree or disagree with, and it usually depends on whether you like the group or not.
But they are not, I mean, look at what Al-Qaeda does.
They intentionally bomb, blow up mosques.
They blow up places where civilians congregate in order to terrorize people, in order to drive people out.
And the PKK does not do that.
They're fighting for a vision of autonomy within the countries where they live.
And you can agree or disagree with that being a good idea.
But they're not terrorists.
However, the Turks would rather ally with real terrorists, specifically the Al-Qaeda affiliated group in Syria, because they seem to serve Turkish interests for the moment.
It's not unlike what's going on in Yemen, where, you know, the U.S.
Well, wait, before Yemen, though, I guess I don't understand what purpose is being served by supporting al-Nusra up until now.
Whatever they change their name to.
Right.
Right, to Rahul Shah.
The Turks do it because they're desperate to have some fighting force that can stand up to the Syrian army, the Russian and Iranian forces in Syria.
And right now that's the al-Qaeda affiliate.
That's what it comes to.
It's a pure.
I guess I still don't get it.
I mean, what what leverage do they really get?
They they have the Idlib province is a little mini Islamic state under al-Qaeda control there.
But and so I get that that what helps keep Assad off balance.
But then and then what?
Well, you have raised an interesting question.
And by the way, I'm certainly not trying to defend the Turkish policies here.
No, of course not.
No, no, no.
I understand where you're coming from here.
I'm just trying to get your your insight into the motivation of Erdogan here when it seems like Erdogan and King Salman and King Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu.
They thought they were going to get a great al-Qaeda coup in Syria, but it didn't work out because Iran and Hezbollah and Russia came to Assad's aid.
And so the American al-Qaeda side of the war lost.
So what's the point of continuing to back this essentially rump Islamic state in Idlib province all the way through 2019 at this point when the rest of the war is over?
From Assad, sorry, from Erdogan's perspective, this helps him now give him greater leverage in terms of fighting the Kurds, who are his real perceived enemy.
In other words, he can use the al-Qaeda guys against the Kurds.
He can use them against the Kurds and he can use them against the Syrian army.
And as he did in Afrin, too, right, a year ago.
Yeah, if the Syrian army is preoccupied fighting in Idlib, they're not going to take action against the Turkish troops invading in northern Syria.
There you go.
That's Erdogan's logic.
This is what I was trying to get at.
And now I understand that makes perfect sense.
Not that it's the most obvious solution to the problem or anything, but I understand the logic of it from his point of view.
Every single player in this game is miscalculated.
You know, the Russians sent in their troops and airplanes.
They were going to be out in a matter of months.
And they even announced their withdrawal.
People tend to forget this, but Putin announced the withdrawal of his troops.
Funny thing.
I guess they had a hard time finding the border because they never withdrew.
In fact, they've got two permanent, virtually permanent military bases there.
Iranians, same thing.
Israelis, few alleged pinprick targeted bombings.
They've bombed Syria hundreds of times, sent in assassination squads.
Nobody has been able to carry out the plans that they—and, of course, the U.S. role of sending in troops.
No boots on the ground.
Obama, remember him?
No boots on the ground.
Suddenly we have boots on the ground.
Now we have them being yanked out by Assad.
How much do you think the battle experience of this, you know, more recent generation of Hezbollah is worth?
You know, like you're saying, Israel bombs a couple of missile deliveries, but then at the same time they're prolonging a war where you now have all of these hardened Hezbollah guys who before only pretended back at their training camp and now are experienced fighters.
Well, what the big difference is, is that Hezbollah has been transformed from a largely guerrilla army defending its own territory in southern Lebanon into an expeditionary force capable of fighting as a regular army.
And that's a huge, huge difference.
And that's a direct result of the war in Syria, because the Hezbollah had to go into a foreign area, that is, Syria.
It's not their homeland.
They had to coordinate with air force, air attacks, both by the Syrian and the Russian governments.
They had to coordinate with a standing army in Syria.
And so they are now basically an auxiliary regular army capable of fighting in other parts of the region as well as in Syria.
Not to mention, they're going to put up a tougher fight against Israel the next time there's some kind of a confrontation there.
But David Wormser said that if we expedite the chaotic collapse to Syria, well, that'll weaken Hezbollah.
It'll be great.
I defy anybody to go back and find the original justifications for sending troops or bombing in Syria.
And I defy anybody to find something that actually happened the way that aggressive power claimed it would.
Nobody.
Even then, in coping with crumbling states back in 96, Wormser said, look, if we do these regime changes against the Ba'athists in Iraq and in Syria, yes, it's true.
It might spread bin Ladenite Islamist terrorism, but that's a small price to pay for getting rid of these states there.
No big deal.
Don't worry about it.
Right.
The guy who became Cheney's foreign policy advisor.
That was the same justification for backing the Mujahideen in Afghanistan.
Look what happened in Afghanistan.
You know, I can actually, I mean, all other things being equal, in the mind of a Republican foreign policy apparatchik, I can see why that makes sense from their point of view in 1996.
But then there's Kobar Towers and the Africa embassies and the USS Cole and then September 11th.
But then they don't reevaluate that exact same set of assumptions before they go on and carry out the rest of the agenda, for God's sake?
No, there's this amazing ability in Washington to disassociate one policy from another.
That is, oh, Afghanistan, that was a great success because the Soviet Union collapsed.
Oh, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, oh, that was a great success because we got rid of an anti-U.S. dictator.
And then everything that happened afterwards, oh, well, that's because the terrorists, blah, blah, blah.
You know, there's absolutely, nobody ever draws the lines.
No one ever connects dots between U.S. policy and its aftermath five, 10, 20 years later.
It's always you do the cutoff line that disassociates your policies from the consequences.
And both Democrats and Republicans do that.
And that's how largely these new aggressive wars are germinated, because people say, oh, we've got this crisis, we've got to deal with it and we're weak.
If we don't do something, we've got to do something.
And then even multiple crises at the same time, too, not even just the cause and effect from one domino to the other.
But you have a situation where not just Iraq War II helps cause the war in Syria by creating the rise of the Islamic State, al-Qaeda in Iraq, in the first place and all that.
But in the years 2011, 12, 13, you have America still on the side of the Shia fighting against the Islamist terrorists in Iraq and essentially just chasing them across the border into Syria.
We're on the Syrian side of the line.
They're the heroic moderate rebels resisting the tyranny of, guess who, the Iran-backed government that we hate so much there.
And they acted like this is perfectly fine.
It makes absolute sense.
You noticed there's no hypocrisy in U.S. foreign policy, just consistency.
That's what they claim.
Hey, listen, I want to talk about real quick what you said about Trump's position here, because I agree with you that what he talked about in that tweet was, I wouldn't call it isolationism.
I think it's a flavor of interventionism.
What he's trying to do there, and I don't think we've seen him follow through on this anywhere yet, so don't get me wrong like I'm getting carried away.
But what he's describing is essentially identifying national interests more narrowly, whereas Bush said, oh, we're going to cause a world revolution and abolish all tyrannies, in other words, all governments who resist us.
And all this just wild and expansive program, he's saying we need a more narrow one.
He's not saying anything like we fight only in self-defense, as you're saying, a non-interventionist position.
He's not doing anything like that.
But he is trying to say that, you know, aren't you with me if I want to get out of all these wars?
And if he's smart, that's his only path to reelection, is if he can say, you know what, the CIA hates me, but you know why they hate me?
Because I ended the following four or five wars and still got a few more to go.
That would be how to do it.
And he's not like that.
He's not going to do that.
But anyway.
There's no question that he's using the legitimate anger of the American people against these foreign wars for his own purposes.
That's right.
It's just politics.
He never meant it.
I'm not sure.
You know, I'm not sure that he's actually redefining American interests anymore.
Normally, look at Saudi Arabia.
We're staunch supporters of Saudi Arabia.
Why?
Because they provide oil and they buy American arms.
Yeah.
That's the kind of national interest that every Democrat and Republican have advocated in the past.
The difference is Trump is much more up front.
Right.
Well, in fact, though, that's an example, right, where, you know, again, we're talking about Donald Trump here.
This is all completely, you know, morality has nothing to do with it.
He's just saying, yeah, we get something out of Saudi.
We have an oil relationship.
We have a financial and, you know, arms manufacturer relationship.
What do we get out of being in Afghanistan and Syria?
Nothing.
Right.
That's the way he sees it, where these are transactional in the sense of they cost a lot and we get nothing for them.
And whereas our alliance with Saudi Arabia, he makes sense to him in purely pragmatic terms, even though you and I know that financially speaking, it's absolutely not worth it.
And, you know, morality wise, absolutely not.
But the problem with Trump is that he's all over the map.
So at one point he was arguing that we have interest in Afghanistan because they've got valuable minerals.
Remember that?
I mean, I think they were trying to convince him of that, you know, for a minute.
But I don't think he really buys that.
But anyway, the point is that he's so paper thin that he doesn't really have any sort of doctrine.
He just sort of feels this way sometimes.
And that's not enough to see it through.
That's not enough to carry it out and really demand that.
Admiral, I said, sail home.
He's never going to do that.
Yeah, I agree.
And every time he announces some plan to reduce troops or something like that, the Pentagon and his advisers come out against it or slow walk it so that it doesn't happen.
So I'm tired of trying to figure out what's in Trump's brain.
It's what his actions actually do.
What does he actually do?
And as of today, we have more troops in Afghanistan than we did under Obama.
As of today, we have more troops in Iraq than under Obama.
And Somalia.
And, you know, we're involved in the wars in Yemen, et cetera, et cetera.
So for all the rhetoric, for whatever his intentions may or may not have been, the situation is worse than it was under Obama.
And it was horrible under Obama.
I think it's fair to say that the CIA preempted the danger that they saw in this president, which I think they were naive, as naive as the people who believed in him.
They were naive to think that he really meant anything that he said about scaling back our role in NATO or pulling out of the Middle East or any of these things.
They should have been confident in their own ability to rein him in the easy way without having to trump up all these charges against him and all of this stuff.
But they sure did rein him in.
That's their words, right?
That's what the FBI told CNN.
Well, we figured our job was to rein him in.
Okay.
Well, it looks like they've pretty much got that taken care of.
Yeah.
And it'll be interesting to see what they do should Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren win the presidency.
We're going to see the deep state operating in the other direction to undercut whatever policies they have.
And neither of them are, you know, very solid, but they're certainly, you know, lean more dovish than him.
Yeah.
I would expect them to both bend easily.
In the eyes of the FBI and the CIA, they're going to present a big threat to the established policies, even though I agree with you, I don't think in reality they are.
Are you amazed?
You've been at this longer than me, no offense, but hey, do you believe that the CIA shot Jack Kennedy in the face?
And is it really the case that like these guys, the CIA, they're this brazen where they just, they don't give a damn if the American people elected somebody.
They got their own policy and they'll do what they want.
Well, I will tell you this.
I do not believe that the Warren report accurately portrayed what happened in the assassination of Kennedy.
And specifically, it took place when J. Edgar Hoover went to the members of the commission and said, we have evidence that the assassin had ties to Russia and that this assassination may have been the result of a Russian plot.
And when the commission members heard that and realized that if they came out with that officially, it could lead to a war between the US and Russia, they cooked up all these cockamamie theories about the crazy bullet and everything else in order to make it look like it was a single assassin.
That I'm convinced of.
What I'm not convinced of, and maybe you or others could enlighten me, is how a conspiracy, how they could have actually assassinated Kennedy in the way that they did, that is proposed, you know, three people.
Well, I mean, you know what?
That's always one that I never really got into because I just figure it's an unprovable case.
I always assumed that the military and the CIA did it, but I never made a hobby horse out of trying to prove it or figure it out, really.
The real question to me is just, is it shocking at all that the guys that run the CIA think that they are a separate and co-equal and or perhaps superior branch of government to the president?
That they can be this far out of line the way they are now?
Yeah, no, I think there's no question the CIA, FBI, and other similar agencies, they look at themselves, look, we're going to be here, presidents come and go, liberals come, liberals go, conservatives come, conservatives go.
We stay here.
We have to protect the national interest of the United States, despite the intentions of these politicians.
I think that's the mentality that prevails.
And we see it in stark relief now, but it was, you know, it was manifest previously.
Same thing with killing Kennedy, probably, right?
It's, look, we're the heroes.
We're doing what has to be done here to protect this pantywaist from giving the whole game away to the commies.
Yeah.
You know, they're the good guys.
They have to do this, they think.
Hey, Rhys, let me ask you one more thing here real quick about the protest movement breaking out in Egypt against America's guy Fatah al-Sisi there.
Well, it's very significant that these protests broke out seemingly spontaneously, apparently by at the call of a exiled Egyptian political leader.
And people came out in the streets.
There's a great deal of anger at the al-Sisi dictatorship, both because of the economic situation as well as the repression of all democratic movements.
I think it took a huge onslaught of the military and security forces in Egypt to try to suppress the demonstrators.
I think it's an indication that there is trouble bubbling from below.
We're liable to see it erupt again in the months and days and months ahead.
Yeah.
Well, and do you know, is there kind of a thumbnail estimate or that's not a ballpark estimate of how many people have been killed since the coup in 2013 in terms of street protests and or dissidents rounded up and shot, that kind of thing?
I don't know those statistics.
I'm certainly in the hundreds of people.
If you count people killed, wounded and arrested, that it goes into the thousands.
Yeah.
And, you know, I've read from time to time people are saying that, hey, you thought the dictatorship under Hosni Mubarak was bad.
It's nothing compared to this, I guess, in reference to the surveillance and the torture and what have you.
Is that your understanding, too?
Yeah, it's my that's my understanding.
It's much worse under LCC than it was under Mubarak.
And it was very bad under Mubarak.
Mubarak, by a combination of brute force and political sophistication, if you will, he would cut deals with the Coptic Christians.
He would cut deals.
I mean, he would make deals with sectors of military.
You know, he would play one interest group off another and convince people that he was even if they didn't like him, he was the best that they were going to get.
Now, of course, that was all exploded during the Arab Spring and his overthrow and particularly his massive corruption was exposed to widespread dismay.
Sisi apparently does not have the same political acumen.
He doesn't have the same political skills that Mubarak did, and he's much more reliant on brute force.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, I'll let you go, Rhys.
I know you're in a hurry now, but I really appreciate your time again on the show here.
Sure thing.
Glad to do it, man.
All right, you guys, that is Rhys Ehrlich.
Check out his new article at Antiwar.com, Turkey Plans Attack on Syrian Kurds.
And, of course, his latest book is The Iran Agenda Today.
Before that, Inside Syria.
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.
