Speaker 1: I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekanana Show.
Speaker 1: Thomas is right back. Two episodes in a row with Thomas.
Speaker 1: We are blessed. How you doing, Thomas, I'm doing well,
Speaker 1: Thank you.
Speaker 2: I'm glad. I'm glad people aren't suffering. Thomas Ordals I guess,
Speaker 2: but yeah.
Speaker 1: I don't think that's possible. All right. So the last
Speaker 1: time we recorded, you had mentioned what we were talking
Speaker 1: about Russia. You had mentioned Russian Syrian relations and I'm
Speaker 1: just obsessed with Syria, have been for a while now.
Speaker 2: Been.
Speaker 1: I got kicked off of podcast ones for saying that
Speaker 1: Asad was probably one of the best leaders in the
Speaker 1: world right now. And when you look at the post
Speaker 1: the post Nuremberg order, these are two countries that you're
Speaker 1: supposed to hate. So I have great interest in them,
Speaker 1: and you have information on their relations since this sense
Speaker 1: disorder kicked off, and I want to hear about that,
Speaker 1: So start anywhere you want.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean there's two there's two variables that even
Speaker 2: people who are generally dissident adjacent don't fully grasp regarding
Speaker 2: the relationship between Russia and Syria. Syria's got outsized significance
Speaker 2: for a small country, for a lot of reasons. Okay,
Speaker 2: some of those are cultural, some of those are Jewish strategic,
Speaker 2: you know, some of them oh to the kind of
Speaker 2: peculiar circumstances that Syrian people, who are unique people. It's
Speaker 2: not just some kind of euschauvinistic mythology that the Syrians
Speaker 2: themselves you know promote, you know, they they view themselves.
Speaker 2: They're very much the air the kind of like the
Speaker 2: Hellenic tradition. You know. But when the case of the
Speaker 2: Soviet Union and then Russia, you know, a major component
Speaker 2: of the Cold War was the ability to index with
Speaker 2: both developing societies as well as as well as well
Speaker 2: established national cultures in a meaningful way. You were basically
Speaker 2: like selling your culture, okay, and the case of the Russians,
Speaker 2: stuff like this was deeply historical in a way. It
Speaker 2: wasn't for America. I mean, for reasons that I think
Speaker 2: are fairly obvious. You know, like what America had is
Speaker 2: kind of its selling point, to be kind of basic
Speaker 2: about it, you know, was a technology, a model for prosperity,
Speaker 2: you know, an opportunity to kind of align oneself with
Speaker 2: what appeared to be the sewer power that had kind
Speaker 2: of like the momentum of history and and kind of
Speaker 2: the glamour and prestige of of what is new behind it.
Speaker 2: The Russians really, I mean, maybe this is somewhat ironic
Speaker 2: considering the kind of dictates of Marxist Leninism. You know,
Speaker 2: the Russians really kind of sold the Soviet Union, and
Speaker 2: the Russians today kind of like sell their diplomacy in
Speaker 2: terms of you know, like them representing a deep and
Speaker 2: powerful heritage. Okay, And as I'm sure people have noticed,
Speaker 2: there's been something of an orthodox resurgence which is really
Speaker 2: interesting that very much owes kind of like United Russia
Speaker 2: and not just putin himself. I don't think it's particularly religious,
Speaker 2: but that it was very much to kind of the
Speaker 2: you know, Russian public diplomacy. And I mean there's historical
Speaker 2: and Zeitgeist variables obviously they facilitated, but you know, Syria
Speaker 2: is very much part of that. Okay, you know, after
Speaker 2: I'm jumping around a bit, but bear with me. I
Speaker 2: cite nineteen ninety nine is the year when not only
Speaker 2: did kind of the the neo conservative backs truly triumph
Speaker 2: and foreign policy corridors, but that's also when the Bush
Speaker 2: Baker concord that they established with Moscow, which is like
Speaker 2: shattered for all time. And what shattered it was like
Speaker 2: the unprovoked and like latantly irrational attack on Serbia, because
Speaker 2: I mean Serbia, Serbia is the Russian Federation and like
Speaker 2: the Russian nation, kind of what Croatias did Germany, but
Speaker 2: even more like deeply felt because obviously, you know, there's
Speaker 2: a there's a there's a sectarian homogeneity in among Russian
Speaker 2: people that there's not as part of it, but you
Speaker 2: know that when when NATO assaulted Serbia, it it was, uh,
Speaker 2: it was like it was kind of like viewed as
Speaker 2: like an assault and Byzantium itself. Okay. Now, Syria obviously
Speaker 2: is very diverse in sectarian terms. However, there's a tremendous
Speaker 2: amount of Orthodox artifacts of Orthodox lore in in Syria,
Speaker 2: you know. And I believe, although cultural anthropologists or relisous
Speaker 2: scholars will disagree on this somewhat, I believe that Alo
Speaker 2: whites are are occulted Christians. Okay, even if they're not,
Speaker 2: they're very much adjacent Oriental Christianity, which itself is a
Speaker 2: very or indexes very tightly with Orthodoxy. Okay, So there's
Speaker 2: something of a special relationship between Russia and Syria anyway,
Speaker 2: and not to be I mean crash isn't the word,
Speaker 2: like not to be like overly simplistic about it, or
Speaker 2: not to like fetishize, you know, racial matters. But I
Speaker 2: mean if you look at if you look at the
Speaker 2: Syrian uh kind of like ruling cadre Alo white or Moslim.
Speaker 2: I mean, these look like white people. Okay, that's not
Speaker 2: like some that's not just like they're it's not that's
Speaker 2: not Telemundo optics. That's not some accident. You know. Traditionally
Speaker 2: everybody kind of viewed like the Levantine Arabs and especially
Speaker 2: you know, like the Alo Whites and the Christians is
Speaker 2: like basically like not a Western people, but like a
Speaker 2: civilized people. So trying to cast the Syrians is like
Speaker 2: a bunch of like Beto Win like salavies or something
Speaker 2: is totally bizarre. Like that's that's like saying like the
Speaker 2: Japanese or a bunch of like primitive like cave dwellers
Speaker 2: or something like. It's really it's really really ignorant. But
Speaker 2: it's also just like totally at odds with kind of
Speaker 2: how how Near Eastern cultures sort of like index with
Speaker 2: the West and with Russia, which isn't the West, but
Speaker 2: which is you know, a powerful, a powerful cultural force
Speaker 2: to this day, although obviously not not I know, the
Speaker 2: same degree as as kind of anglophone societies and mores
Speaker 2: have have formative power. But there's a lot here. And
Speaker 2: if you want to, like, if you want to understand,
Speaker 2: like why the Syrian War also like Syrian Civil War
Speaker 2: like cut so deep in the minds of Zionis, Like
Speaker 2: Russia has been at war with Israel for decades, like intermittently, okay,
Speaker 2: And a lot of that derives from Israel's ongoing conflict
Speaker 2: with Syria. You know, as we get into like Russian
Speaker 2: forces literally went into action against the IDF. There was
Speaker 2: a huge dog fight over the Suez Canal between Soviet
Speaker 2: MiGs and like Israeli F four's and Mirage fighters. I'm
Speaker 2: talking like the largest like Ariel and like larger than
Speaker 2: anything happened over Vietnam. This was like a general war
Speaker 2: between the Soviet Union and Israel. Okay, this is why
Speaker 2: the nineteen seventy three crisis was so dangerous, you know,
Speaker 2: Like I'm always saying, that's what the Nixon quotes from
Speaker 2: the Nickson tapes where he says, like, you know, we
Speaker 2: can't blow up the damn world for these people, like
Speaker 2: these people meaning the Israelis, that's what he's talking about. Okay,
Speaker 2: it wasn't just an ordinary matter of coldor proxy battle
Speaker 2: that kind of got out of control. You know. I
Speaker 2: think we should get a little bit into like Jewish
Speaker 2: Russian relations it just to kind of recap. If that's
Speaker 2: not gonna derail the conversation too much. This might have
Speaker 2: to be like a two part thing. If that's agreeable,
Speaker 2: no problem at all, Okay. And I know that we've
Speaker 2: dealt somewhat with so Jewish relations before. But let me
Speaker 2: give like a brief, like a little background, Okay, and
Speaker 2: stop me if I'm I'm kind of becoming too tangential,
Speaker 2: like for context. By the turn of the twentieth century,
Speaker 2: like by nineteen hundred, the majority of European Jewry, like
Speaker 2: as we've think of it were, like lived in the
Speaker 2: Russian Empire. There was about eight eight point between eight
Speaker 2: point five and eight point seven million, like European Jews.
Speaker 2: Over five million of those people lived in the Russian Empire.
Speaker 2: They constant do about four percent of the total population
Speaker 2: of the Russian Empire, and about ninety percent of that
Speaker 2: population they lived in the pale of settlement, you know,
Speaker 2: to which they were. They were largely restricted there, you know,
Speaker 2: like going to owing to both law and custom. Okay,
Speaker 2: like we got the uh and all, but about like
Speaker 2: three to five percent. I've heard varying statistics. I rely
Speaker 2: on Hannah or Rent for a lot of this because
Speaker 2: I I don't think people can I mean, people try
Speaker 2: to impeach her credibility all the time, but like serious
Speaker 2: people don't, you know, really attempt to suggest that she's
Speaker 2: not a wasn't a credible scholar, but basic but close
Speaker 2: to close to ninety seven percent of these these Jewish
Speaker 2: people in the palest settlement or or it works as
Speaker 2: like middlemen of a sort, okay, in commodities, you know,
Speaker 2: like uh, it was like literally like the converse, like
Speaker 2: this funny converse of of uh, like the Russian Orthodox
Speaker 2: peasant population where like the lot majority of them were farmers,
Speaker 2: you know, like virtually virtually no, virtually none of the
Speaker 2: people in the Pale settlement were farmers or factory workers.
Speaker 2: The primary role of these Pale settlement Jews, you know,
Speaker 2: they bought, shipped, resold local produce. You know, they provided
Speaker 2: uh commodities on credit to provide a kind of a
Speaker 2: basic uh like security to to the standing crops, as
Speaker 2: well as you know, like more and more speculative endeavors
Speaker 2: they're involved in in in a state management, you know,
Speaker 2: and and and leasing. You know, they held the deed
Speaker 2: or the title to a lot of productive capital, you know, tanneries, distilleries,
Speaker 2: like sugar mills, like graneries, and like taverns and inns,
Speaker 2: which the latter were like heavily indexed with the government
Speaker 2: because there was the government had and a lot of
Speaker 2: these Eastern European kingdoms and states like a monopoly on
Speaker 2: liquor production and things. I mean, it's complicated, but you know, uh,
Speaker 2: they were disproportioning represented in the in professional services, namely
Speaker 2: as doctors and pharmacists, which obviously had you know, some
Speaker 2: prestige behind it. I mean it's like today it doesn't really,
Speaker 2: but in those days it really did, you know, And
Speaker 2: there was a this became an issue during the Second
Speaker 2: World War as like ethnic cleansing began in earnest I
Speaker 2: mean between various populations. But there's a lot of Jewish artisans,
Speaker 2: you know, like Taylor's shoemakers, guys who understood like medals,
Speaker 2: how to work medals, you know, specialized jewelers and watchmakers.
Speaker 2: These guys are overwhelmingly Jewish, and and especially in rural environments.
Speaker 2: You know, I think we got into before two. These people,
Speaker 2: the Russian Jews and the and the and the Russian peasantry.
Speaker 2: They lived in absolutely segregated quarters. Like the Jews spoke Yiddish.
Speaker 2: You know, they woren't distinctive clothes. They observed, you know,
Speaker 2: a dietary regiment totally different than the majority. They practiced
Speaker 2: a rigid kind of endogamy. You know, they only married
Speaker 2: within the tribe. You know, they basically like every aspect
Speaker 2: of kind of like their cultural learning was oriented towards like, uh,
Speaker 2: the preservation of a collective memory, which was contra that
Speaker 2: and the majority. Okay, you know they the centers of
Speaker 2: communal life obviously were you know, like the synagogue. You know,
Speaker 2: like in Russian culture, like there's like going to like
Speaker 2: the bathhouse or sona is a big thing. There was
Speaker 2: like Jewish saunas and like you know Russian ones. You know,
Speaker 2: these these people that were not like assimilated into like
Speaker 2: Russian society. And it wasn't just like because they desperately
Speaker 2: wanted to be but like Russians were racist or something
Speaker 2: like these like these people literally lived like parallel but
Speaker 2: not intersecting lives and like the Russians themselves, like they
Speaker 2: viewed Jews as like this kind of the did the
Speaker 2: culture is bizarre and opaque. They viewed it as as
Speaker 2: uh as hostile to the Christ. They viewed it as
Speaker 2: like unclean, like literally and like ritually like other you know,
Speaker 2: those were three people, you know, so basically these people
Speaker 2: on the cross paths in the course of business, which
Speaker 2: was sometimes basically amiable, sometimes pretty hostile, and occasionally you know,
Speaker 2: they they'd run across each other, and you know, because
Speaker 2: they they both had to deal with the same you know,
Speaker 2: state bureaucracies to which one of the other population was
Speaker 2: you know, like heavily represented, depending on mandate and locale
Speaker 2: and stuff, you know, and I mean like not non
Speaker 2: Jews didn't even most it was very other than scholars,
Speaker 2: you know, and and linguists, like almost no Russians even
Speaker 2: understoody Ish, you know. And this went beyond just Russia,
Speaker 2: like in in Ukraine and Lithuania, Lafia and Moldova and Belarus,
Speaker 2: like we're like, what's now Poland, Like these these these
Speaker 2: pale settlement people and the people outside the pale settlement, nonetheless,
Speaker 2: who were like you know, heavily indexed into that cultural milu,
Speaker 2: like they didn't a lot of them didn't even speak
Speaker 2: like the national language what we think of as the
Speaker 2: national language. You know. It's so there you're you're talking
Speaker 2: about you're talking about like an enforced alienation, okay, coming
Speaker 2: from you know, Russian jewelry itself. I don't mean that
Speaker 2: like the Tsarist system was like we must exclude these
Speaker 2: people at all costs. Like, don't get me wrong, there
Speaker 2: was definitely like reciprocal enmity, you know. But it's but
Speaker 2: people gotta understand. It's like you read you read these
Speaker 2: like dummy accounts where it's like, oh, there was you know,
Speaker 2: Russian and Polish Jews were just like everybody else. But
Speaker 2: then there was this prejudice that came out in the
Speaker 2: twentieth century that's totally completely acidine. It was nothing like that.
Speaker 2: You know, you could make the case in Berlin, which
Speaker 2: might as well have been a different planet, you know
Speaker 2: than the Russian Empire. Especially and it's kind of rural
Speaker 2: geographic corridors. You had Jewish Berliners who basically like looked
Speaker 2: askance at kind of like there the ostudent their their
Speaker 2: ostudent brethren. You know, they they spoke German. You know,
Speaker 2: they even if they didn't particularly want to mix or
Speaker 2: integrate with German people, you know, they they kept up appearances.
Speaker 2: You know, it was totally different. You can't extrapolate that
Speaker 2: experience or or the experience like Parisan Jews to that
Speaker 2: of to there the East. You know, like I'm not
Speaker 2: saying there weren't like enmities in in the case of
Speaker 2: the former that sort of dictated the terms of cultural interaction,
Speaker 2: but it was it was not remotely comparable. It's like
Speaker 2: I want to move, I want to jump ahead a bit,
Speaker 2: you know. So that's this kind of like laid so
Speaker 2: this is the context, understand you know, like the the
Speaker 2: the Russian national culture and the place of like Jews
Speaker 2: in it now obviously like the Bolshevik Revolution. You know,
Speaker 2: it's kind of mac Donald. He coded a lot of
Speaker 2: data and he wrote a lot about you know, the
Speaker 2: outsized role that the outsize role that Russian Jewish people
Speaker 2: played in in the NKVD and the terror apparatus and
Speaker 2: things like that. You know that that's all true, okay.
Speaker 2: And then of course, you know we've talked about you know,
Speaker 2: Yaqui's view of the Doctor's plot in what was then
Speaker 2: Czechoslovakia and the kind of purging of these elements from
Speaker 2: the nomenclatura. I don't want to rehash all of that
Speaker 2: because it's kind of too outside the scope. But the
Speaker 2: point is when people today talk about it like, oh, Russia,
Speaker 2: Russia is zog quote unquote zog or like Russia is
Speaker 2: this you know vis a the you know, the the
Speaker 2: Jewish diaspra or Israel. You're talking about like deep seated
Speaker 2: hatred and animosity, like real hatred. You know, the fact
Speaker 2: that like Theians don't like as that punch the air
Speaker 2: and like openly curse you Da every morning. But the
Speaker 2: fact that like Putin doesn't go on TV and like
Speaker 2: declare that like you know, I deny the Holocaust, and
Speaker 2: the fact that you know, Netanya who doesn't say inflammatory
Speaker 2: things about the Russians publicly, like that means absolutely nothing.
Speaker 2: Like first of all, I mean, if you don't understand politics,
Speaker 2: if you think it's about you know, wearing your actual
Speaker 2: feelings on your sleeve. You don't understand diplomacy, even at war,
Speaker 2: especially at war if you think that does as characteristic
Speaker 2: about enemies relate. But anybody would say that, you know,
Speaker 2: like Moscow is something like love for jewelry is an idiot? Okay,
Speaker 2: I mean that's not This is a very very very
Speaker 2: hostile and tragic history. You know, so jumping forward as
Speaker 2: people know, you know, Stalin, who is the constant machiavellian.
Speaker 2: Stalin played cards pretty close to his chest when like
Speaker 2: the uh when you know, during the when when Israel
Speaker 2: like you know, from nineteen forty seven to forty nine
Speaker 2: basically you know, like when when when Israel is a
Speaker 2: Jewish state it was being established. He did it for
Speaker 2: a couple of reasons. First of all, because elements like
Speaker 2: Ergun you know, and Hagan and whatever we're like get
Speaker 2: war with the British Empire would remained like the falling
Speaker 2: British Empire, and Stalin obviously like supported that. But Stalin
Speaker 2: also like he wasn't clear like what kind of trajectory
Speaker 2: Israeli politic from take like very quickly, you know, the
Speaker 2: Soviets like dropped and you know, all appearance of good
Speaker 2: offices with Israel whenever game clear that this was you know,
Speaker 2: the the that it was basically you know, a state
Speaker 2: that represented kind of like the express political will of
Speaker 2: like radicals and and and highly racializion is and it
Speaker 2: was it was just like it was totally off the
Speaker 2: table for like the Soviets to get behind Israel. And
Speaker 2: really by after the Suez Canal crisis, like like Israel,
Speaker 2: like Palestine became like literally kind of like other than
Speaker 2: other than Europe Central. It became kind of like the
Speaker 2: conflict diet of the Cold War, okay, and the Soviet
Speaker 2: Union literally went to war with Israel. And the key
Speaker 2: to this, you know, hostilities in absolute earnest really emerge
Speaker 2: in conventional terms, and the immediate aftermath of the Sixth
Speaker 2: Day War in ninety sixty seven, this kicked off what
Speaker 2: was called by the Kremlin as well as as well
Speaker 2: as by Nasaar's people the Continuity War. It translates Rolphick
Speaker 2: to the Continuity War. It so between nineteen sixty seven
Speaker 2: and seventy three, the story is not only it took
Speaker 2: a massive reireament and retraining program of the of Egyptian forces.
Speaker 2: They actually started trying to prop up Egypt when well
Speaker 2: the sixty were was still in progress. But regular Soviet troops,
Speaker 2: I'm not talking advisors, I'm talking the Red Army. They
Speaker 2: took up infantry positions opposite Israeli forces to hold the
Speaker 2: Suez Canal line at all costs. There was there was
Speaker 2: Soviets who were manning the anti aircraft defenses around Cairo.
Speaker 2: There was a there there were Soviet advisors who were
Speaker 2: like leading company level elements of Egyptians against the IDEF.
Speaker 2: You know, Like again, this isn't speculation or or or
Speaker 2: something or something that was like you know, filtered out
Speaker 2: of some like CIA memo that may or may not
Speaker 2: have been an accurate reading of the the battle space.
Speaker 2: This is this is this, This happened, This is documented,
Speaker 2: something that became a grave concern to Kissinger himself as
Speaker 2: well as uh people at Defense Intelligence as well as
Speaker 2: the Pentagon. There was uh this So there was a
Speaker 2: massive deployment of of integral Soviet combat units the Egypt
Speaker 2: in response to what Israel called depth bombing in the
Speaker 2: Egyptian hinterland. Like like basically this this this, this is
Speaker 2: this is a campaign of strategic bombing of basically like
Speaker 2: any like any target that uh it could remotely be
Speaker 2: construed like infrastructural okay, like they're basically trying to flatten
Speaker 2: Egypt and and you know, like and that and bombed
Speaker 2: back to the Stone Age as it were. Okay, Naser
Speaker 2: visited Moscow secretly on grounds of you know, legitimate urgency,
Speaker 2: and this accelerated, this rapidly accelerated implementation basically NASA for
Speaker 2: a head of state, especially in those days when I
Speaker 2: mean this is obviously like well into like the jet
Speaker 2: commercial travel era, but for the chief executive of a
Speaker 2: nation at war to travel to Moscow and say, like
Speaker 2: we're getting killed like a help, I mean, that's that's
Speaker 2: that's crazy. Okay. So from that point forward until the
Speaker 2: conclusion of the seventy three war, like basically the Soviets
Speaker 2: took over uh like operational authority, like on the Egyptian front,
Speaker 2: the Soviet expeditionary force that showed up in Egypt. It
Speaker 2: was the most advanced element. They had some of these
Speaker 2: uh like service their missile systems they were using. They
Speaker 2: weren't even sending these to North Vietnam. This is like
Speaker 2: still a spiritmental They were sending like their best man,
Speaker 2: their best material, their best hardware the Egypt to fight
Speaker 2: the idea, you know, and contra of what Israeli propaganda
Speaker 2: was at the time, I think not. I think this
Speaker 2: wasn't just capped kind of like both to the perception
Speaker 2: of IDFs aptitude, but it was also kind of like
Speaker 2: a suage American anxieties, which at that point were at
Speaker 2: a fever pitch. You know. These Raelis claimed that by
Speaker 2: the time the ceasefire in August nineteen seventy, there was
Speaker 2: like this tascit ceasefire with Egypt. They claimed that like, well,
Speaker 2: you know, there's this to like our victory over Soviet
Speaker 2: and Egyptian forces and such, and it's only like a
Speaker 2: you know, it's only like a skeleton crew or kind
Speaker 2: of like a token detachment of of of Warsaw Pact
Speaker 2: forces on the ground in Egypt. Like that that was complete,
Speaker 2: that that was completely at odds with reality the uh
Speaker 2: and and also too, I mean, if you're fighting if
Speaker 2: the Soviets, and I mean today with far lesser degree,
Speaker 2: but I think the point still stands in some capacities
Speaker 2: saying that like the Soviets saying that Russians can't stand
Speaker 2: the attrition you're implementing. I mean, that's that's ridiculous. I Mean,
Speaker 2: the one thing is Russian whatever their problems, and I
Speaker 2: don't have any illusions about the problems Russians had the
Speaker 2: Russian Federation and Russians historically have in in military operations. Uh, Like,
Speaker 2: suggesting they can't handle attrition is I mean, it's kind
Speaker 2: of like laughable. I mean, that's like the one thing
Speaker 2: they can absolutely handle. So there's so this uh kind
Speaker 2: of bizarre uh state of things like set in. We're
Speaker 2: on the one hand, on you know, there was a
Speaker 2: there was this, there was kind of like this the
Speaker 2: like the official party line in Washington was that this
Speaker 2: wasn't a meaningful deployment by the Soviet Union, although the
Speaker 2: theater remains critical. You know, you had the actual Soviet
Speaker 2: army on the ground like fighting IDF in nineteen seventy two.
Speaker 2: And part of this, I believe was NASA's alleged Maine
Speaker 2: and and and and and then and Naster's successors alledgered
Speaker 2: Maine because like periodically this was declared nineteen seventy two,
Speaker 2: there was a quote nquote rift between Cairo and Moscow
Speaker 2: whereby Soviet advisors were supposedly like expelled from Cairo. Meanwhile,
Speaker 2: like the Soviet army again is fully indexed at you know,
Speaker 2: in the command and commanding control capacity on you know what,
Speaker 2: on the on the Egyptian front contra I d F
Speaker 2: and they're like waging active war and you know this,
Speaker 2: So this was uh that, this was murky as anything
Speaker 2: was during the Cold War. But that's like the standard
Speaker 2: rebuttal people have is like, oh but what about what
Speaker 2: about the you know, the expulsion of Soviet advisors? But
Speaker 2: it's like, okay, it also bigs the questions like why
Speaker 2: this would be some public schism, you know, I mean
Speaker 2: it's not That's not the way the Communists did things.
Speaker 2: That's certainly not the way the Russians do things, and
Speaker 2: that's certainly not the way Nasaites Egypt did things. There
Speaker 2: were tensions between Moscow and Cairo leading up to the
Speaker 2: seventy three war, but I mean literally on the October
Speaker 2: sixth offensive and in concert with uh, with with with Syria,
Speaker 2: this was literally planned on the Arab's side by bye,
Speaker 2: by Soviet command elements, you know. So I mean like
Speaker 2: if if there was this like a rift whereby like
Speaker 2: Soviet advisors or something like banished from Cairo. It's like, well,
Speaker 2: I mean apparently they were. They remained, you know, like
Speaker 2: prop practical purposes, like the war planners in Cairo. But
Speaker 2: the U there's a guy named Victor Kayak and he
Speaker 2: was a he was a KGB type who in a
Speaker 2: ninety two back when a lot of these security apparatus
Speaker 2: types on the Formeries block. I mean they were both
Speaker 2: substantially younger then a lot more than we're alive. But
Speaker 2: also there was it was a rare brought nineteen ninety
Speaker 2: one to like nineteen ninety six, there was a rare
Speaker 2: kind of candor that these guys were prone to and
Speaker 2: in terms of discussing cooler operations. But and Kayak and said, uh,
Speaker 2: you know it was the KGB like US, US made
Speaker 2: the kgby quote, the KGB persuaded President Nashoul to wage
Speaker 2: the war of attrition to the bitter end. You know,
Speaker 2: Naster may not, Naser may not trusted the KGB entirely,
Speaker 2: but he did ask for help, and US, the KGB,
Speaker 2: the best friend of oppress nations, did help and military
Speaker 2: gear when it became clear there it's gonna do it
Speaker 2: on the own by sending in our own forces. That's
Speaker 2: a quote from Kayagin. Okay, now the actual more matrician
Speaker 2: I will bring it back to Syria, I promise. From
Speaker 2: seventy this involved fighting between not just the idea, the
Speaker 2: idea f on one side, and not just Egypt but
Speaker 2: also Jordan, the PLO Kuwait and really kind of the
Speaker 2: what I think of it is like the step punk
Speaker 2: the USSR, the Cubans as well as Syria, all right,
Speaker 2: from sixty seven to seventy is kind of the peak
Speaker 2: of this conflict cycle, you know, and then did it
Speaker 2: endure the varying intensities until seventy three, and then seventy
Speaker 2: three led to you know, the escalation to the point
Speaker 2: of of of Defcon three in America and that that
Speaker 2: changed everything. But that's that that's kind of ahead of ourselves.
Speaker 2: Following the sixty seven sixty war, there was no serious
Speaker 2: diplomatic efforts the for for a political solution to the
Speaker 2: Arab Israeli conflict like the Arab League in sixty seven.
Speaker 2: I mean, in the media aftermath there possibly became known
Speaker 2: as the three no's, you know, no no recognition, no
Speaker 2: negotiations with Israel, and like no peace until Palestine is liberated, okay.
Speaker 2: And the Soviets basically they're the ones who, like, uh,
Speaker 2: who made this possible. They made the confidence the side
Speaker 2: on for the the several you know, for the Arab
Speaker 2: League plus some of these non state actors to sign
Speaker 2: off on a long campaign all right, initially as it's
Speaker 2: kind of the the traditional Russian doctrine it like in
Speaker 2: in the opening cells, as it were, of this kind
Speaker 2: of period and hostilities engagement form like limited artillery doables
Speaker 2: like small scale incursions from sign into Sinai and vice versa.
Speaker 2: By sixty nine, the Egyptians, uh or at least or
Speaker 2: at least there's Soviet advisors and commanders judged the judge
Speaker 2: like company size and forces level, company sized forces and beyond,
Speaker 2: like they judged them like prepared for like a higher
Speaker 2: level of operational sophistication. Okay, because it's kind of when
Speaker 2: like the true like war of attrition kicked off. I
Speaker 2: think in like the public mind in terms of people
Speaker 2: who consumed like global news and things, as well as
Speaker 2: people kind of on the periphery of of military affairs,
Speaker 2: you know, extensive aerial warfare like large scale shelling, you know,
Speaker 2: like commando raids, like you know, combined arms assaults the frontiers.
Speaker 2: I mean the same as when the war began, but
Speaker 2: this you're talking about like real clashes of combined arms here, okay.
Speaker 2: The Israeli Air Force responded by directly targeting Soviet military personnel.
Speaker 2: From January to March in nineteen seventy forty eight Soviet
Speaker 2: troops and pilots were killed in bombing raids at Cairo.
Speaker 2: And then this there's a suburb of Cairo called that Sure,
Speaker 2: this was uh, this is where most like Soviet fighter
Speaker 2: pilots like lived. Okay. The Soviets responded, which was in
Speaker 2: flagrant violation international agreements. They deployed S one service their
Speaker 2: missile system to the Sewiz Canal zone like they were
Speaker 2: fortifying the Suiz Canal zone like a smaller scale like
Speaker 2: as deep as Hannoi was, okay, And this led to
Speaker 2: like heavy attrition. This this culminated in a massive dog
Speaker 2: flight over a This is the this the operation was
Speaker 2: coding ramone twenty by the Israeli Air Force. There was
Speaker 2: twelve to fourteen Soviet Mid twenty ones and twelve Israeli
Speaker 2: Mirage threes and F four phantom twos. They it was
Speaker 2: like I said, it was this massive dog flight in
Speaker 2: the Suez Canal operational area, like five Soviet aircraft went down.
Speaker 2: At least four of those pilots were killed. Israeli attrition
Speaker 2: it's hard to say. I mean, the Soviets claimed it
Speaker 2: was like far higher than it was. The Israelis claimed
Speaker 2: like minimal attrition, but it was probably uncomparable. But the
Speaker 2: entire purpose of this, by idea app was the lowreer
Speaker 2: Soviet fighter pilots into in the in the air at
Speaker 2: air combat so that they could be taken out because
Speaker 2: I mean, it's cast you will like kill fighter pilots,
Speaker 2: you know, I mean obviously you know. And but this
Speaker 2: is for that for the people who claim it's like
Speaker 2: euphemistic that you know, the Soviets right war with Israel.
Speaker 2: I mean this this is my rebuttal okay, I'm in
Speaker 2: a serious people don't don't claim that the uh in
Speaker 2: it's aftermath like varying sources like some people, I mean,
Speaker 2: and I'm talking objective people, not not just Zionis shields
Speaker 2: or something like some people claim that like well Israel
Speaker 2: was stood Soviet combined arms and you know they were
Speaker 2: able to fight off. Uh, you know, they they're able
Speaker 2: to fight in ways that here there too they hadn't
Speaker 2: been comfortable with, or that hitherto had been an alien
Speaker 2: type of warfare. I mean, I don't I don't know
Speaker 2: any think that's true. I mean, I think the Soviets
Speaker 2: brought brought they brought a quality of hardware and manpower
Speaker 2: and operational sophistication to the table. Obviously, but the idea
Speaker 2: was used to fighting Arab armies that had real problems
Speaker 2: but were basically following warsaw peg doctrine. You know. The
Speaker 2: American claim was that well, Israel successful and continuing to
Speaker 2: hold the main line of resistance, which was the Barrow
Speaker 2: called the bar Level line, and forcing the Egyptians ultimately
Speaker 2: to come to the table. But uh, you know eventually,
Speaker 2: I mean, but the but the consensus really on both
Speaker 2: sides of the Aisle was that this this really kind
Speaker 2: of sapped Israeli morale, you know, and this this really
Speaker 2: this culminated really in the seventy three warrants conclusion. I mean,
Speaker 2: is Israel had some big victories in seventy three, but
Speaker 2: they also took some big hits. You know, this wasn't
Speaker 2: people kind of trying to cast Israeli history as like
Speaker 2: the Sixth Day War into perpetuity, like oh, these really
Speaker 2: armies just top notch and they just over all their
Speaker 2: ops Like that's not true, you know. And admittedly, like
Speaker 2: if you're fighting the Soviet army and what was then
Speaker 2: you know they're cutting edge wartech, like it's not a
Speaker 2: minor thing, Like I'm not even saying that, like there's
Speaker 2: some like shame in it, you know, it's.
Speaker 3: I U.
Speaker 2: Interestingly, there's a couple. There's a guy and a lady
Speaker 2: there Israeli military type academics. The guy's name is Gideon
Speaker 2: ramez Lay. His name is Isabella Jenor or Ginnor. They've
Speaker 2: written a lot on Soviet Israeli hostilities. And obviously, like
Speaker 2: I said, these people are both like Israeli Jews, They're not.
Speaker 2: They're certainly not you know, people gonna be said to
Speaker 2: have a poor review of the zigon of state. They
Speaker 2: they both consider the war have been like a defeat
Speaker 2: for israel I mean Israel. Their argument is Israel is
Speaker 2: forced to accept the ceasefire and and basically a change
Speaker 2: like a change in uh kind of like the criteria
Speaker 2: for peace on the Israeli side and just like a
Speaker 2: holy and just and and they you know, just completely
Speaker 2: a complete sea change in the tenor of negotiations. But
Speaker 2: so Soviet air defenses were dropping it for fantoms out
Speaker 2: of the sky at an unsustainable rate. The Soviets and
Speaker 2: the Egyptians proved they they blatantly violate not just proceeding
Speaker 2: uh you know, ceasefire and treaty arrangements in the theater.
Speaker 2: But they they didn't care a whit about you know,
Speaker 2: deploying you know, banned weapons systems to the region. You know,
Speaker 2: they they were in it to win it. You know
Speaker 2: ramone twenty, this aerial operation that you know was purposed
Speaker 2: to zapp the Soviet Air Force tactically. Yeah, that that
Speaker 2: that was Ah, that that was a victory. But I
Speaker 2: think that as part of the whole paradigm, like that
Speaker 2: allowed the Israelis to kind of accept what there toofore
Speaker 2: would have been not acceptable to design as hardliners, but
Speaker 2: will also saving face. You know, hey, look like we
Speaker 2: we defeated the mighty Soviet Air Force. You know, we
Speaker 2: we can't we can't be said to have have lost.
Speaker 2: So I mean it's complicated, Okay, but like my point
Speaker 2: is that like Israel's fortunes were literally decided by the
Speaker 2: Soviet Union, you know, in the Continuity War then in
Speaker 2: seventy three, you know, so this, I I mean, there's
Speaker 2: two things here. So I mean this, this is demonstrative
Speaker 2: of how heavily the Soviet Union and Russia wasn't as
Speaker 2: like politically invested in Arab fortunes and specifically Syrian ones.
Speaker 2: But it's also like you think, you think the Israelis
Speaker 2: have like good feelings towards Russia. I mean really, I
Speaker 2: mean it's you know, it's propossible. Is closer to this
Speaker 2: The main subject at hand, what uh halfes As Sad
Speaker 2: was doing during this period. Hafesa Sad himself was a
Speaker 2: MiG driver, he was a fighter pilot. In nineteen seventy one,
Speaker 2: as a Syrian bath was kind of consolidating its hold,
Speaker 2: like serious Syrian politics. We were very byzantine and and
Speaker 2: and a lot of a lot of backstabbing, a lot
Speaker 2: of corruption, things like this. Not quite as bad as
Speaker 2: as the Iraqi situation has developed about a decade later,
Speaker 2: but it was very chaotic asades A Sad. Really, it's
Speaker 2: kind of like the father of modern serious political culture. Okay,
Speaker 2: but that's kind of a subject for another day. But
Speaker 2: in nineteen seventy one, Halfes as sad than the Soviet Union.
Speaker 2: He permitted the Soviet Union to open its naval and
Speaker 2: Tartis and then that the so the Russians community, you
Speaker 2: utilize this this base. To this day Tartis is the
Speaker 2: sole Mediterranean naval base for the Black Sea Fleet of
Speaker 2: the Russian Navy. Okay, this was this is a big deal,
Speaker 2: not just in not not just in like you know,
Speaker 2: strategic terms, but uh it it it demonstrates like a
Speaker 2: willingness of uh the Russians the sign on for the
Speaker 2: long term on on on what am also like a
Speaker 2: mutual defense treaty. So they've really got like absolute confidence
Speaker 2: and like the tenure the perennial tenure of of the
Speaker 2: regime currently situated in Damascus, or they're absolutely not gonna
Speaker 2: let that regime fall. Okay. Like the Tartars treaty for example,
Speaker 2: it runs, it ran it uh. It was set to
Speaker 2: run for twenty years with automatic five year extensions unless
Speaker 2: the unilateral unilaterally terminated I mean at uh and immediately
Speaker 2: immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union, officially like
Speaker 2: a fesisade recognized the Russian Federation as the legal successor
Speaker 2: to the USSR and you know, retaining all basing rights
Speaker 2: and everything else. Okay. During the seventy three war obviously,
Speaker 2: which was kind of like Syria's moment in the sun,
Speaker 2: because they proved themselves, you know, that they could think
Speaker 2: they could function at a high level of operational sophistication.
Speaker 2: Thousands of Soviet advisors, technicians, officers like combat officers assisted
Speaker 2: the Syrian Arab Army. At least twenty were killed in action.
Speaker 2: Almost three fifty funds of aid was airlifted to Syria.
Speaker 2: They seelifted at the at the conclusion no hostilities, the
Speaker 2: Sovietians sealifted over sixty thousand tons materials UH to Syria
Speaker 2: to replenished losses, you know, like infrastructural military, you know,
Speaker 2: like food stuffs like you name it. The one, uh,
Speaker 2: the one kind of blip in Soviet or Russian Syrian
Speaker 2: relations came in seventy six. The Soviets were just pleased
Speaker 2: when ASAD deployed the Syrian Air of Army to Lebanon
Speaker 2: and something of a diplomatic rift emerged. The Soviets were
Speaker 2: really worried about a confrontation between the PLO and the
Speaker 2: Syrian Era of Army, and for good reason, like they
Speaker 2: were very much at odds. You know, both of them were
Speaker 2: Moscow clients. This would have this could have been catastrophic
Speaker 2: in terms of broader interests held by Moscow in the
Speaker 2: Near East, and like taking sides in the sectarian war
Speaker 2: between Arab factions. I mean, that's that's always going to
Speaker 2: be a losing proposition. The UH. Brezhnev went as far
Speaker 2: as UH threatening the threatened to freeze UH military aid shipments.
Speaker 2: This ultimately was like smoothed over like a fence visited
Speaker 2: at Moscow in nineteen seventy seven, like much fan fear.
Speaker 2: He met with Brezhnev and Alexei Cossagen among others, or Cossagan,
Speaker 2: you know, the UH Assade openly endorsed and supported one
Speaker 2: hundred percent the the the the Soviet attack in Afghanistan,
Speaker 2: which distanced them from basically every other Arab leader. But
Speaker 2: I mean he didn't care like Assad's assad the message,
Speaker 2: like he stands with Russia. So I mean the final
Speaker 2: kind of if there was in fact, like a rift
Speaker 2: that still need a remedy by Christmas nineteen seventy nine.
Speaker 2: Like that. What sealed that, like Russian Syrian kind of
Speaker 2: like the affinity for all time was the fact that
Speaker 2: Asad said, like, you know, we stand, we stand with
Speaker 2: the Soviet Union like against its enemies in Afghanistan, you know,
Speaker 2: which was incredibly ballsy among other things, and it was
Speaker 2: the right play for Asad, but it was very ballsy.
Speaker 2: I covered nineteen eighty uh, Syria, the Soviet Union side,
Speaker 2: the Treaty of friendship really until until it all went
Speaker 2: down in eighty nine. You know, Uh, Syria, South Yemen
Speaker 2: was the only Marxist Leninist Arab state, but Syria was
Speaker 2: that even though Syria was not a Communist state at all,
Speaker 2: like they were the jewel in the Crown, a warsaw
Speaker 2: packed in terms of their in terms of era of
Speaker 2: affairs and in the Middle Eastern theater. This uh. Gorbachev
Speaker 2: scaled this back in April eighty seven, but once uh,
Speaker 2: but again like within after after. I mean your Russia
Speaker 2: was a mess like post Gorbachev, but the the any
Speaker 2: uh any unwillingness other other newly m a stale in
Speaker 2: Russian Federation, the back a sade like evaporated with you know,
Speaker 2: the end of Gorbachev's tenure that uh interestingly he met Videv.
Speaker 2: He was the first run He was the first Russian
Speaker 2: president to visit Syria, like uh Putin visited Syria. I
Speaker 2: believe he was on the ground for the there's two
Speaker 2: parades or on me a condor a legion honestly, like
Speaker 2: the the Russian UH military contingent, you know, marched in
Speaker 2: Damascus after UH after victory, and I think, uh, I
Speaker 2: can't remember if Pudin was made a state visit there
Speaker 2: or not, but point being, maybe it was the first
Speaker 2: leader of the Russian Federation to visit Syria. Jumping ahead
Speaker 2: closer to the present for context, you know that this
Speaker 2: is exactly why Syria was targeted for destruction in tart
Speaker 2: okayd joined Boshwiti was golf or coalition which was instrumental,
Speaker 2: you know, and the Syrians deployed to fight uh Saiddam.
Speaker 2: You know, like any anybody remotely reasonable would view assad
Speaker 2: As as like you know, somebody who the West wants
Speaker 2: on their side. But of course you know he was it. Uh.
Speaker 2: There's no like strategic logic to trying to destroy Syria
Speaker 2: and utilizing you know, terrorists and ISIS and and these
Speaker 2: tech theory lunatics, as is a deadnaz strategy. At the
Speaker 2: onset of the Russian intervention in Syria government forces, they
Speaker 2: controlled only about twenty six percent of the country. You know,
Speaker 2: they're truly beleaguered. The UH. You know, Russia was fighting
Speaker 2: the Islamic State, they were fighting the el news for affront,
Speaker 2: which is basically al Qaeda. These the guys, like John
Speaker 2: McCain said, are like are great guys and are like,
Speaker 2: you know, fighting for democracy. He was talking about al Qaeda,
Speaker 2: John McKay wine. He said, we need to support al
Speaker 2: Qaeda to murder the Asad family. And I guess everybody
Speaker 2: else who like al Qaeda doesn't like, you know, great
Speaker 2: guy Thatjohn McCain. The UH. Putin and I mean for context,
Speaker 2: I mean Putin is constantly cautious, as I think people know,
Speaker 2: which is ironic that he's painted as this like mad,
Speaker 2: reckless mad man, like he's you know, he really it
Speaker 2: really uh disturviced uh to the Russian State that he's
Speaker 2: he's he's pissed poor at at decision points. I think, Okay,
Speaker 2: so it's not that he's prone to ultimatums. It's not
Speaker 2: he's prone to absolute declaration of the matters of war
Speaker 2: in peace. But uh, Putin said that the you know,
Speaker 2: the Bath regime is absolutely not going to be allowed
Speaker 2: to fall, you know, And he said, we don't negotiate
Speaker 2: with terrorists. Neither does not neither does you know, President Asad?
Speaker 2: And I mean that was the core of the issue too,
Speaker 2: Like there was still it was on a tail end
Speaker 2: of such things. There was still an America supposedly fighting
Speaker 2: the global war on terror. I remember like a Bath
Speaker 2: Party spokeswoman who I can't remember her name, which she
Speaker 2: was got of this like severe Arab lady of whom
Speaker 2: there are many, but uh, she was addressing some British
Speaker 2: media contingent and she said, like, we don't negotiate with terrorists.
Speaker 2: We're not We're not gonna let We're not gonna let
Speaker 2: al Kaita. We're not gonna let Isis. We're not gonna
Speaker 2: let some constellation of of jahadas, you know, forced us
Speaker 2: to change the government by murdering people, you know. And
Speaker 2: I mean there was this they're just kind of like
Speaker 2: dummy silence by these media people. Then you know, when
Speaker 2: they're like the great chorus of talking about like how
Speaker 2: evil Lacade is. But I mean that's really this to
Speaker 2: me is really this is when America lost all credibility
Speaker 2: in foreign policy. You know, you're like you're literally saying
Speaker 2: that you're you're arming and equipping al Qaeda to destroy
Speaker 2: a secular regime led by a guy who's an eye
Speaker 2: doctor who was raised in London. You know, like it's
Speaker 2: I mean, that's it's not this isn't even like a
Speaker 2: you can't even raginalize. They hadn't under you know, some
Speaker 2: kind of appeal in Machiavellian necessity. It's just like it's
Speaker 2: just bizarre. It's it's just like it's just like a
Speaker 2: bizarre uh scorched earth position, you know, uh that only
Speaker 2: makes sense designs, you know. Yeah.
Speaker 1: A buddy of mine, a buddy of mine used to say,
Speaker 1: how do you make excuses for what? Trying to kill
Speaker 1: somebody who wakes up and shaves his chin every day?
Speaker 3: That's like it's interestingly back with CNN. I mean, CNN
Speaker 3: was always they always had some goofs on their staff,
Speaker 3: but they, you know, I'm talking like thirty years ago,
Speaker 3: they were like they were like a normal news network.
Speaker 3: You know, like they had they had goops like Peter Arnett,
Speaker 3: but like there was this they did this big interview
Speaker 3: with a Fez Astad who people viewed as a compelling guy,
Speaker 3: you know, and he kind of came to dominance, oh
Speaker 3: to the Gulf or coalition, you know, and uh, people
Speaker 3: seemed grateful for that, you know, and I'm sure like
Speaker 3: Baker State Department was. But it's like if you you
Speaker 3: know his like we paid back the Asad family by
Speaker 3: arming al Qaeda and like calling for you know, Bishah
Speaker 3: Asad his family to be murdered. I mean, like like
Speaker 3: who does that? You know, Like you can't there's no percentage.
Speaker 3: And uh, you know if you if you lay down
Speaker 3: with pigs, you're gonna get dirty, you know. And not
Speaker 3: not only gonna get dirty by dealing with America, but
Speaker 3: they'll they're gonna try and like arbitrarily murder you at
Speaker 3: some point, you know what I mean, Like this isn't
Speaker 3: that it's aside from like the naked irrationality of it.
Speaker 3: I mean, you you can't conduct politics that way.
Speaker 2: You know. I mean that's uh, that's like trying to
Speaker 2: that that's like trying to go into business with Jeffrey
Speaker 2: Dahmer or something you know, like uh, some some unhit
Speaker 2: like a Mary is literally like it's a second unhinde
Speaker 2: psychopath that might like randomly trying to murder you, like
Speaker 2: you know, but you're supposed to They're supposed to be
Speaker 2: something percentage and playing ball with with the with its ambitions.
Speaker 2: But we should probably wrap it up because I'm coming
Speaker 2: up on an hour and my our dear friend, uh
Speaker 2: Jay Burden, I gotta he's hosting me in a minute
Speaker 2: on his show. But I'm started to break this up
Speaker 2: into two segments if that's not what you had planned.
Speaker 2: But there's a lot here. Is that cool?
Speaker 1: Absolutely?
Speaker 2: All right? Yeah? Yeah, let me know when you want
Speaker 2: to complete part two and we'll get it done.
Speaker 1: Sure as per normal. Two plugs.
Speaker 2: Yeah, man, for those who don't know, I'm sure everybody
Speaker 2: probably does know already. Like I'm back on Twitter. It's
Speaker 2: like the same account. It's at Capital r e a
Speaker 2: L underscore number seven h on as seven seven seven.
Speaker 2: I'm on substack real Thomas seven seven seven at subsec
Speaker 2: dot com. I'm on Instagram, I I'm on I'm on Telegram,
Speaker 2: I'm I got a website. It's number seven hm S
Speaker 2: seven seven seven dot com like finding all those places,
Speaker 2: and I got like a merse line that people seem
Speaker 2: to like, and I'm very honored by that. Put they
Speaker 2: put that in the description line. If you would please.
Speaker 1: Always yeah, some good Eric Craig does some good, good works.
Speaker 2: The man I really owe him a lot, Like he's
Speaker 2: a great I mean, he's like he's just a good dude,
Speaker 2: but his designs are really a really tremendous man. Yeah, definitely.
Speaker 1: All right, Thomas, thank you very much. I want to
Speaker 1: welcome everyone back to the Peca Show. Thomas is back
Speaker 1: for more Syria and Russia talk. How are you doing, Thomas, I'm.
Speaker 2: Well, thank you. I'm not It's been a minute since
Speaker 2: we recorded. So if I'm repeating myself, please correct me,
Speaker 2: because I can't remember exactly where I left off. I
Speaker 2: think I think we left off approximately where I was
Speaker 2: talking about some of the more recent scholarship on the
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy three war.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's it. That's exactly where it was.
Speaker 2: Yeah, which has something of an outside significance. It's warranted.
Speaker 2: I don't I don't mean outsized in the sense that
Speaker 2: it's emphasized on duly that really changed the regional security
Speaker 2: paradigm in the near ease, exposed a lot of idea
Speaker 2: of weaknesses. I mean, don't get me wrong, ideaf on
Speaker 2: the Egyptian front, they performed exceedingly well. The Syrians, however,
Speaker 2: caught them lacking in some key capacities, you know, and
Speaker 2: one of the reasons why Israel is so fixated on Iran. Admittedly,
Speaker 2: then Yah was very clumsy in the way he articulates propaganda.
Speaker 2: I mean that that's just a fact that I don't
Speaker 2: think that can be denied. Ariel Sharon didn't have a
Speaker 2: lot of finesse, but Sharon was something of a military
Speaker 2: prodigy at these comparative terms. And obviously then Yah, who
Speaker 2: doesn't possess that skill set. However, the his blass Syria,
Speaker 2: the Syrian ara of army, you know, and in the
Speaker 2: art forms of the Russian Federation. You've kind of got
Speaker 2: to look at all those actors. It's kind of operationally integrated.
Speaker 2: You know, there's nothing conspiratorial there. I mean, these are
Speaker 2: these are israel primary ops, okay, And you know, like
Speaker 2: we've talked about before, and anybody who is it all
Speaker 2: knowledgeable about the conflict paradigm dynamics understands that Israel and
Speaker 2: NATO to varying degrees back you know, these Salafi elements. Okay,
Speaker 2: that's something of a detonation strategy, you know, because they
Speaker 2: identify their their primary ops is is Syria hissbil uh
Speaker 2: you know hasibial a slash Iran, I mean in all
Speaker 2: but name his as kind of the Iranian foreign legion,
Speaker 2: and the Russian Federation is part of that is like
Speaker 2: an essential part of the constellation. And this goes way back.
Speaker 2: And that's ket understanding the state of war and peace
Speaker 2: in and occupied Palestine, and and and and with respect
Speaker 2: to the Jewish state, they saidly so they I mean,
Speaker 2: Israel essentially has two problems. They've got this internal crisis,
Speaker 2: demographic crisis relating to the fact that Israel is a
Speaker 2: racial state, you know, and they've got this unmanageable majoritarian population.
Speaker 2: It's like super majoritarian population. You know, it's not their
Speaker 2: strategic situation is not unlike they're the Republic of South
Speaker 2: Africa around the time of Bota, you know, when the
Speaker 2: when the kind of permanent emergency set in. You know,
Speaker 2: I mean, I'm not I'm not comparing Israel to the
Speaker 2: Boer Republic at all, unlike cultural or ideological or ethical
Speaker 2: terms or anything like that. But in terms of the
Speaker 2: military situation, there's a parallel, you know. And so they've
Speaker 2: got this internal, this ongoing internal emergency. They've also got
Speaker 2: this geostrategic problem, you know, with respect to what they
Speaker 2: call the Shia Crescent, which I mean, she are obviously
Speaker 2: very much the minority in darl Islam, but there's there's
Speaker 2: a critical kind of like the Shia heartland, you know,
Speaker 2: is is I ran in Iraq obviously, and it cuts
Speaker 2: across the region in the Webanon, you know, So it
Speaker 2: there's a that's that's a very dawn thing. That's a
Speaker 2: very daunting arrangement, you know, in a general war. It's
Speaker 2: a discussion of another time. But it kind of begs
Speaker 2: the question like why exactly Israel maintains nuclear arms. You know,
Speaker 2: some people argued it was a prestige and cloud move
Speaker 2: during the Cold War. Being Prebaal, he basically suggests it's
Speaker 2: like a Samson options sort of thing, whereby people wouldn't
Speaker 2: let Tel Aviv fall because there'd be this uncertainty relating
Speaker 2: to what they would do with these weapons of mass destruction.
Speaker 2: I think that's a bit too imprecise, Like it's not
Speaker 2: really a military imperative. That doesn't mean it's impossible. And
Speaker 2: Israel is kind of strange in the way they approached
Speaker 2: things because they're a totally abnormal state, invokes novelty a
Speaker 2: lot and discussions of you know, dialectical processes and things,
Speaker 2: and but he was he was kind of reluctant during
Speaker 2: the Cold War to like diagnose, like then current strategic matters.
Speaker 2: But the exception was kind of the case of Israel,
Speaker 2: and he made the point that you know, Israel is
Speaker 2: not really Israel's not an anachronism in the way some
Speaker 2: people on the left would talk about it and still
Speaker 2: do to some degrees. It's not like it's not like
Speaker 2: it's a retrograde state like colonial power or something, despite
Speaker 2: you know, a lot of the a lot of the
Speaker 2: propaganda in the era of that effect that it derived
Speaker 2: from the same kind of like dialectical process and like
Speaker 2: causal nexus sociologically, historically, ideologically speaking, is the Third Reich
Speaker 2: in the Soviet Union, Like that's why it's so strange.
Speaker 2: I mean, obviously, Department of State, in the executive branch,
Speaker 2: they're constantly claiming it's a liberal democracy, because I mean
Speaker 2: that that's just a floating signifier that's suggests moral approval.
Speaker 2: But even even where that not the case, it would
Speaker 2: be difficult to describe what exactly Israel is, you know,
Speaker 2: it just would be because it's it's it's not just
Speaker 2: an outlier like North Korea is owing to its to
Speaker 2: a strategic situation. And it's not like one of these
Speaker 2: emirates or one of these small countries or constellation of
Speaker 2: a sovereignties that you know, like rolled by a monarch
Speaker 2: or something. It's it's something totally different than that, and
Speaker 2: it very much belongs to the twentieth century, the twentieth
Speaker 2: century dialectic. But anyway, kind of bring it back. The
Speaker 2: consensus these days is essentially that the seventy three war
Speaker 2: was a stalemate. Okay. David A. Korn he was a
Speaker 2: diplomat back when Department of State was still a trithin
Speaker 2: quality people. And he's he's written a lot, he's contributed
Speaker 2: to a lot of articles, especially to publications like Foreign Affairs,
Speaker 2: you know, things like that. He served he served for
Speaker 2: some time until eve as it's called the political officer
Speaker 2: and Hansho what's called the political section. That's kind of
Speaker 2: like a halfway. If you're in that role, you're kind
Speaker 2: of halfway between an intelligence officer and a diplomat, you know.
Speaker 2: I mean, everybody who's assigned to a diplomatic posting is
Speaker 2: in some ways an intelligence representative under light diplomatic cover,
Speaker 2: and everybody knows that. But guys like Coren they deal
Speaker 2: more in diagnostic analysis and things, and they're then they're
Speaker 2: not just going to cocktail parties and and kind of
Speaker 2: trying to dominate, you know, palace intrigues and things that
Speaker 2: determine what the true seat of power is. You know,
Speaker 2: they they've got a more they got more serious roles
Speaker 2: in that. And he made the point pretty consistently that
Speaker 2: one of the reasons why the paradigm is so volatile
Speaker 2: Israel contra the that Shia Crescent, the states that constitute
Speaker 2: that you a strategic concept. One of the reasons that's
Speaker 2: so volatile is because you know, there was the outcome
Speaker 2: was it's not now it was a no clear victor
Speaker 2: on the Syrian front. Is the outcome is poorly understood,
Speaker 2: you know, especially in Israel. It was retrospectively deemed a
Speaker 2: success because there was some big there, there's some there's
Speaker 2: some major kills scored by the idea AP in some
Speaker 2: cases where they were pretty seriously outnumbered, like combined arms.
Speaker 2: But the fact that they kind of convinced themselves of this,
Speaker 2: they led to a false sense of security, especially on
Speaker 2: the political side of things. The military IDEAF whatever it's problems,
Speaker 2: it's it's military is pretty serious because they have to
Speaker 2: be to sustain the status quo, you know, and as
Speaker 2: people on the left, they don't so much anymore because
Speaker 2: the intellectual left is kind of dead. But during the
Speaker 2: Cold War and even beyond the event into the nineties,
Speaker 2: they make the point that IDF is I mean, yeah,
Speaker 2: they've got a National service law in place. You know,
Speaker 2: it's like young people get drafted, but generally they get
Speaker 2: drafted into support roles like you're talking about like special operations,
Speaker 2: capable elements and like infantry elements. You basically have to
Speaker 2: sign up for that, and the guys who do, they're
Speaker 2: going to be pretty racialized in the first place. That's
Speaker 2: why they want to do that kind of work. And
Speaker 2: even if they weren't before, it's going to become that way.
Speaker 2: You know, Like they there's no pretension in an army,
Speaker 2: like the idef of like, hey, we're a political we
Speaker 2: don't you know, take any position. We're just we're just
Speaker 2: like loyal to the state. I mean, part of that
Speaker 2: is because the fact that this you know, that Israel's
Speaker 2: find itself in a ross and creed. But part of
Speaker 2: it also is that, you know, again, like Israel's not
Speaker 2: it didn't develop organically like a European country did or something,
Speaker 2: So there's not there's not this tradition of like an
Speaker 2: Israeli state that's you know, they like the post medieval
Speaker 2: heritage of the people who live there or something. You know,
Speaker 2: Israel is the Jewish state. The way it's configured isn't
Speaker 2: really important so long as it is capable of sustaining
Speaker 2: that demographic balance and being able to perpetuate its demographic
Speaker 2: supremacy despite being massively outnumbered. So you're not gonna have
Speaker 2: I mean, even if the just under those conditions like
Speaker 2: you can't mean, I guess I'm getting as you can't
Speaker 2: extricate those conditions from like ideological and parabise. Okay, So
Speaker 2: that's probably a force multiplier in some ways. Like when
Speaker 2: IDF actually goes into action, it can also lead to
Speaker 2: some bad outcomes because it's the institutions like that, particularly
Speaker 2: military institutions. We're having the wrong opinion can be interpreted
Speaker 2: as like a breaching doctrine or something. It becomes this
Speaker 2: kind of like ideological ghetto, you know. And Ehud Barak,
Speaker 2: he's really the Israeli guy I pay attention to. Okay,
Speaker 2: he's an interesting guy. He was a military man, you know,
Speaker 2: like career idef type, and he's not a particularly charming guy,
Speaker 2: but he's really kind of been the only champion oft
Speaker 2: jitsuk ra Being's memory, you know, we're being of course,
Speaker 2: is unceremoniously murdered in ninety five by this crazy young
Speaker 2: guy who's like rotting in prison now. But you know,
Speaker 2: I I'm not gonna say there was some conspiracy to
Speaker 2: whack Rabine, but a lot of people were happy that
Speaker 2: that that that that happened, and from that point forward,
Speaker 2: Israel became a one party state, you know, and Rabine
Speaker 2: was going to Rabine was was looking to commit to
Speaker 2: some way out of the racial war. Okay, I don't
Speaker 2: think that would have I don't think you ever would
Speaker 2: have seen any kind of like formal equality between the populations.
Speaker 2: Nor was Rabine just gonna throw his hands up and
Speaker 2: be forced into the position that the clerk was in
Speaker 2: South Africa and just say, okay, we're you know, any
Speaker 2: any any any man or woman of majority within Israel Palestine,
Speaker 2: or we're just gonna have you know where, We're gonna
Speaker 2: give them the ballot and and see where the ships follow.
Speaker 2: That wouldn't have happened, but some kind of extra case
Speaker 2: and from grant apartheide would have happened. Okay, But Barack, Ehud, Barack,
Speaker 2: he's the guy who made the point as well, that
Speaker 2: really was keeping that Nyahu alive politically. It's the fact
Speaker 2: that swapping out the civilian executive or kind of like
Speaker 2: rendering it headless, like if you Dona was removed by
Speaker 2: no confidence or if he was indicted, which you may
Speaker 2: very well be if and when this war results. But
Speaker 2: just perverse incentives that kind of pursue like bad strategy
Speaker 2: is what I'm getting at, okay, and and what Barack
Speaker 2: is getting it. You know, people turn around, I know
Speaker 2: what I hear from them, and they say, like, well,
Speaker 2: how does real performing so well? If what you say
Speaker 2: is true? Well, two things, like I said We're talking
Speaker 2: about basically two totally different conflicts that are related and
Speaker 2: increasingly is she and soon you are breaching the sectarian
Speaker 2: divide to tentatively cooperate against the common Zionist enemy. But
Speaker 2: the gods of situation and in the situation in the
Speaker 2: Levant and syria Is are two different things. I don't
Speaker 2: feel comfortable going as far as to say that they're
Speaker 2: just like two fronts of the same conflict. I mean,
Speaker 2: there's like a common nexus and causes, but it's more
Speaker 2: complicated than that. However, you know, idea got caught lacking
Speaker 2: when Hamas assaulted. I think I covered this on a pod,
Speaker 2: so if I'm repeating myself, forgive me. You know, on
Speaker 2: October seventh, Price it's almost been a year. But when
Speaker 2: Hamas breached the barrier fence, they assumed that the lead
Speaker 2: element was gonna get wiped out, you know, basically like
Speaker 2: a company sized element like storm to the mainline of resistance.
Speaker 2: But when they did that, there was nobody there, you know,
Speaker 2: like these Raelis were. It was like a skeleton crew
Speaker 2: that was not abiding any kind of alert deployment at all,
Speaker 2: Like some of them were literally sleeping, and Hamas just
Speaker 2: like waxed them, and then when they broke through, immediately
Speaker 2: Hamas like immediately started storming the breach with like as
Speaker 2: many men as they could get through as possible. You know.
Speaker 2: Then ID have like swarm drones on him and combine
Speaker 2: garb and sort of like hosing them with fire. But
Speaker 2: my point is that shouldn't have happened in the first place.
Speaker 2: You know that feel like if when that'd be like
Speaker 2: I point, it became clear the Russians were going to
Speaker 2: like assault you know, don Bass to like relieve they're
Speaker 2: people who were under pressure there from these guys who
Speaker 2: were like supposedly like irregulars like Azo, but were very
Speaker 2: obviously you know, very obviously like acting as official you know,
Speaker 2: and in the service of the Kya regime. That'd be
Speaker 2: like a point. It became clear like Russia was going
Speaker 2: to assault these like as of guys, and uh, the
Speaker 2: Ukrainian armed forces like preemptively like assaulted them then like
Speaker 2: broke through the Russian mainline resistance like ended up in Russia.
Speaker 2: Then like the Russians had to reconstitute like bring up
Speaker 2: their bring up bring their firepower to bear on them,
Speaker 2: like in the form of like armor, and you know,
Speaker 2: like hyperbard artillery and stuff like get the situation under control.
Speaker 2: Like if that had happened, like Putin would have been gone.
Speaker 2: You know that that's that's that's a catastrophic fuck up.
Speaker 2: So you know, I'm not I'm not saying like, oh,
Speaker 2: IDF is like a shit force, because they're not. But
Speaker 2: there's real problems there, okay, And this isn't just like
Speaker 2: some like intelligence failure or something.
Speaker 1: But moving on, there were, like immediately immediately after that,
Speaker 1: there were I was tracking people in the State Department
Speaker 1: who are retiring, and there was one specifically, I can't
Speaker 1: remember his name, but I did an episode with someone
Speaker 1: else talking about it. Was that he retired because he
Speaker 1: was in charge of getting the IDF and getting foreign
Speaker 1: militaries are weapons and he said that there were divisions
Speaker 1: in the IDF that he was not comfortable with arming.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I I'm sure that's true, and they've got real problems,
Speaker 2: you know. Like I I'm not some expert. I know
Speaker 2: something about Judaism, like the like the faith. I know
Speaker 2: something about their heritages of people. I mean I do.
Speaker 2: I am not some expert on the internal situation in Israel,
Speaker 2: but I do know that hard line Zionus of the
Speaker 2: kind who like sustain the military apparatus. Those people are
Speaker 2: aging and there's not a lot of young people to
Speaker 2: replace them, Like there is a hard line Jewish right,
Speaker 2: but more and more it's that's kind to be constituted
Speaker 2: by the people who are called correctly or incorrectly in
Speaker 2: clogial terms like the ultra Orthodox. And they have a
Speaker 2: strange they have a strange and somewhat contentious relationship with
Speaker 2: the military. I mean, Israel's got real problems, you know.
Speaker 2: I mean they that they can't be denied. So I
Speaker 2: don't doubt that guy's testimony for a minute, But I mean,
Speaker 2: like why would he lie about that. That doesn't if
Speaker 2: he was going to try and make if he was
Speaker 2: going to drop some kind of cap to try and
Speaker 2: make the situation seem less severe than it was, or
Speaker 2: to try and make Israel look like more cable with
Speaker 2: your role. Like you wouldn't say that, but you know
Speaker 2: the degree of which two you know, Israel had to
Speaker 2: kind of Israel kind of had to win in Syria, Okay,
Speaker 2: if they could have like knocked out a sod and
Speaker 2: like crushed the string era of army. And also like
Speaker 2: hit Hesiblah and like really really hard because the idea's
Speaker 2: been smarting from from their fight with HESBLA in two
Speaker 2: thousand and six for almost like twenty years now. You know,
Speaker 2: they really kind of needed to make a statement like that.
Speaker 2: And if if it's if Damasks had gone down in
Speaker 2: flames and Syria kind of became partitioned, they the would
Speaker 2: have been totally fine with like these lunatic killers, like
Speaker 2: isis controlling like some chunk of it. You know. Then
Speaker 2: they wanted to like basically like you know, create some
Speaker 2: like fake like Kurdistan like through like you know, a
Speaker 2: swath of Iraq and like assimilate part of Syria into that,
Speaker 2: and then probably like have some some zone that was
Speaker 2: like occupied by America but it was technically like you know,
Speaker 2: the a d m Z or something or some kind
Speaker 2: of like free zone. So it's like okay, then like
Speaker 2: basically like they've sown up, They've sown up their problem.
Speaker 2: And also too then like the Russians can't like access
Speaker 2: like their key port there, like the Russian Our Federation
Speaker 2: can't deploy there. That would have solved the like basically
Speaker 2: like that that would have solved like one half of
Speaker 2: the equation, you know, and then they could have brought
Speaker 2: like full firepower to bear and you know, one hundred
Speaker 2: percent of forces and being like to bear like on Gaza,
Speaker 2: and there's really nothing anybody could do about it. So
Speaker 2: the Russian the Russians really food barred their program. Like
Speaker 2: the degree of which they did, like can't be overstated.
Speaker 2: That's why like when I say to people, like when
Speaker 2: I point out to them the fact that you know,
Speaker 2: like the Ukrainian War is literally like a secondary front.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's not secondary to people there. It's a
Speaker 2: disaster and it's scale, it's it's it's just like a
Speaker 2: they're is suffering and death is staggering. But I'm saying,
Speaker 2: like to Israel, that's like a secondary front where they
Speaker 2: can bring pressure to bear on Russia. And the fact
Speaker 2: that when I raise that to people, they look at
Speaker 2: me like why would you say that, It's like you
Speaker 2: really don't understand that Russian Israel are like hate each other.
Speaker 2: You know, they're like literally like mortal enemies. You know.
Speaker 2: It's like the fact that Putin doesn't like call them
Speaker 2: the K word and like shake his fist in the
Speaker 2: ear and call for them to be destroyed, like you know,
Speaker 2: like you sound like Arab strong man or something. I
Speaker 2: guess people are so literally minded they can't like compute
Speaker 2: this or something. But the fact that like you know,
Speaker 2: likeever Offen going around like calling for some like pogram
Speaker 2: of like Ukrainian jewelry or something like. I don't know,
Speaker 2: I don't know how people can't discern this. But that's
Speaker 2: really what's so dangerous about this situation. And that's also
Speaker 2: why it's also like NATO's being so reckless. You know,
Speaker 2: if it was just a question of we want to
Speaker 2: murk the Russians and moving forward, you know, we want
Speaker 2: to ford deployment where we can. That's like farther east
Speaker 2: and central these are the you know, the central Asian
Speaker 2: land mass. You know, then then Germany is that America
Speaker 2: wouldn't be going about it. And it's kind of like
Speaker 2: just like catastrophically reckless way. It's because it's you know it,
Speaker 2: this is this is a this is like a key
Speaker 2: front of basically of of Israel's war to survive and
Speaker 2: perpetuate it as like the Jewish racial state. You know,
Speaker 2: that's also what it likes the Lenski's in there like
Speaker 2: outfront like that that's not good optics at all. And
Speaker 2: it's not just that the Ukraineism and Alibi like, oh no,
Speaker 2: we're not you know that this isn't some criminal psychotic regime.
Speaker 2: Look we've got we've got the Jewish guy out fronto.
Speaker 2: You know, it's involved in the entertainment business, and you
Speaker 2: know we're a normal country. Like that's not why they're
Speaker 2: doing it. It's because, uh, there's no way, uh, there's
Speaker 2: no way some like boyish front man would would be
Speaker 2: trusted there because I at any minute, like he could flip,
Speaker 2: even if he wasn't intending to that, he could find
Speaker 2: himself in a Melosovitch situation. We're suddenly like a bunch
Speaker 2: of band right, So like, look, we're like tired of this,
Speaker 2: you know, like we were not gonna like we're gonna
Speaker 2: keep killing the Ivans, but we're not. We're not taking
Speaker 2: orders from from his zid they call them. But that's
Speaker 2: you know, that's and Syria is an important country and
Speaker 2: it's got an outsized significance. There was I know that
Speaker 2: your friend he was asking forgive me for being a
Speaker 2: little scared, or he was asking about why there's panthers
Speaker 2: in Syria and Lebanon. One of the reasons why part
Speaker 2: of it is because of the peculiar dynamics of the
Speaker 2: Lebanese Civil War that went on for decades, and then
Speaker 2: the French were kind of backing all sides in that
Speaker 2: war depending on like who had the upper hand, that's
Speaker 2: what the French do, and the French like shove some
Speaker 2: panthers into the breach on on the Arab side. But
Speaker 2: there were a few dozen Vermacht officers who serving the
Speaker 2: Court of Nasa as well as in Syria both before
Speaker 2: and after, you know, the Syrian Bath conquered the political
Speaker 2: culture and the Czechs the Skoda Arms Works, which is
Speaker 2: kind of like the Czechs make great weapons. They're like
Speaker 2: the Transylvanian Saxons historically, and like the Skoda Arms Works,
Speaker 2: that's kind of like the Czech counterpart to Krupp that
Speaker 2: during a comunist Czechoslovakia there are so many panzers and
Speaker 2: like various like warsaw packed armies and adjacent armies. They
Speaker 2: started like manufacturing replacing parts for panders and also too
Speaker 2: obviously that's what that that's that's what these Vermachs guys
Speaker 2: were familiar with. You know, and that's then that's why
Speaker 2: that's the armor they knew how to fight in and
Speaker 2: habituating yourself to a new tank model that you can
Speaker 2: do it if you're a skilled tanker, but it's hard.
Speaker 2: Franco Spain in nineteen forty three, they got about twenty
Speaker 2: panzers like Mark four panzers that they'd ordered and Serrano Sooner,
Speaker 2: who's a great man. I'm like Franco, and he was
Speaker 2: like a diehard national socialist. He was constantly looking for
Speaker 2: a way to get Spain into the war against the
Speaker 2: UK in an official capacity. And after negotiations it broke
Speaker 2: down because like Franco was like a ludicrous demands that
Speaker 2: were you know, purposely that personally sabotaged any agreement between
Speaker 2: you know, the the Reich and Madrid. There was still
Speaker 2: hope and the Pandras that arrived like towards that end
Speaker 2: because people thought so highly a Sooner and I mean
Speaker 2: German counter legion had like spilled blood on Spain. I
Speaker 2: mean that was sacred. You know. These Mark four as
Speaker 2: they got were like the same ones that like the
Speaker 2: pans are arm used. They weren't these they were they
Speaker 2: weren't the like off brand like knockoffs, you know, they
Speaker 2: were real pantheras and like most of them had never
Speaker 2: like been deployed anywhere. So the Syrians got they the
Speaker 2: Syrians got like a bunch of like brand spanking new
Speaker 2: like mark for panders, and they also got some like yeah,
Speaker 2: they also got some yag coons are like tank killers
Speaker 2: like what was called assault guns in those days. So yeah,
Speaker 2: like in sixty seven and seventy three, like there was
Speaker 2: a there were panthers like assaulting idea, which is pretty
Speaker 2: pretty cool.
Speaker 1: And there's a certain level of irony there that's not exact,
Speaker 1: but still.
Speaker 2: I mean, I'm people like me, I you know, I'm
Speaker 2: very much like an anglophone person. I mean, I'm I
Speaker 2: uh I realized, uh, I realized proper Englishman. And Scott's
Speaker 2: like Peter Brimlow, who's like an awesome guy and he
Speaker 2: was like very cool to us at either. But I
Speaker 2: can tell you things. I can tell you things that
Speaker 2: I'm like, I can tell you things that I'm kind
Speaker 2: of like a little ulster bastard and like that's not wrong,
Speaker 2: but uh, I'm like a very Anglophone person. So I've
Speaker 2: got I think every I think every angle Saxon is
Speaker 2: something of like a an orientalist. So I find I
Speaker 2: find Eastern people is very interesting for various reasons, you know,
Speaker 2: as did guys like Johann Van and Lee and a
Speaker 2: lot of these National socialist guys who ended up in
Speaker 2: these Arab states. It was twofold. On the one hand,
Speaker 2: they're like, okay, well, we've got to accept Cold War realities,
Speaker 2: but there's room to there's proverbial room to breathe and
Speaker 2: ideological and cultural terms in some of these places in
Speaker 2: Latin America and the Near East, and there's people or
Speaker 2: remain receptive to our ideas and kind of want to
Speaker 2: be shaped by our ways. And uh they were also
Speaker 2: kind of like the shock troops contra Zionism, you know,
Speaker 2: So there wasn't ideological component to it. There's like incredibly
Speaker 2: silly propaganda and cap like put out by guys you
Speaker 2: know about oh, like you know, Islamism is is just uh,
Speaker 2: it's just this sort of anti Semitic, you know, Nazi conspiracy.
Speaker 2: I mean, there's like very stupid stuff that affects. But
Speaker 2: there was an is ideological affinity between people like the
Speaker 2: Syrian bath and and and national socialists. That's not the
Speaker 2: reason why. Like I mean, I like the Syrian people.
Speaker 2: I know a lot of Syrians, and I hold in
Speaker 2: a highest scheme. I think I think they're interesting in
Speaker 2: like a cultured people. But they also you know, if
Speaker 2: you if you there's some of these are are are
Speaker 2: with the Third Reich and what it stood for, you know,
Speaker 2: the obviously like a like like I think too too much.
Speaker 2: Croatia was the only it was the only true like
Speaker 2: national social estate that existed at the day to feed.
Speaker 2: But like an adjacent political culture is like is like
Speaker 2: bath is Syria? Like absolutely so yeah, I mean that's
Speaker 2: not to your point, Like it's not it's not totally
Speaker 2: all base or anything. But I'll i'll movie ahead. I
Speaker 2: realized I'm getting tangential. But the you know, in the
Speaker 2: the Russians cultivated. I can't remember how much we got
Speaker 2: into this. I should have reviewed our earlier episode before,
Speaker 2: like like yesterday this morning, So forgive me again if
Speaker 2: I'm repeating myself, please call me on it. But you know,
Speaker 2: the the Soviet leadership, they really they really cultivated and
Speaker 2: like vice versa. You know, like I the naval basic tartis,
Speaker 2: which is essential, it's the soul it's the sole Mediterranean
Speaker 2: base for the for the Russian Navy's Black Sea Fleet
Speaker 2: to this day, that was a big deal after if
Speaker 2: the Suy Union went down the assade and the Russian
Speaker 2: Federation worked out that this is like like the so
Speaker 2: is that like permanent rights, like the Tartist Naval base.
Speaker 2: You know, it's uh and it was it was. It
Speaker 2: was a sad. I mean, it takes nothing away obviously
Speaker 2: from the game. That's the Syrian Air of army and
Speaker 2: and and their toughness and there and they desire to
Speaker 2: win and things like that. But during the seventy three war,
Speaker 2: you know, which which males is called the Ramadan War,
Speaker 2: Alo Whites and Christians call it a couple of different things,
Speaker 2: or just the nineteen seventy three war. The Israelis call
Speaker 2: it the yan Kapoor War. But you know, like we
Speaker 2: like we talked about, there was thousands of advisors, technicians there,
Speaker 2: there were there were special operations type Soviet true, it's
Speaker 2: about twenty of whom died in action in seventy three,
Speaker 2: you know, and over close to four thousand tons of
Speaker 2: aid you know ammo uh like ration packs, you medical
Speaker 2: supplies like you name it by the by the conclusion
Speaker 2: by the end of October, you know, it's a station
Speaker 2: about still is immediately beyond the Soviet Navy. They'd see
Speaker 2: lifted over sixty thousand tons of gear like weapons again
Speaker 2: like weapons, AMMO, food stuffs, agricultural commodities to Syria or
Speaker 2: replace its losses. I mean, that's that that's a huge effort,
Speaker 2: you know. And as as we talked about, there was
Speaker 2: some tension from about seventy five to seventy seven, I
Speaker 2: guess the Syrians directly intervened in a webinon. There was
Speaker 2: this kind of tense minuet because you know, the PLO,
Speaker 2: the PLO, despite its, despite his like declared secularism, was
Speaker 2: always you know, like a like a Sunni outfit, and
Speaker 2: the Soviets were really concerned about, you know, active hostilities
Speaker 2: breaking out between the Syrian Ara of Army and and
Speaker 2: the plofes. Asad was able to smooth that over with
Speaker 2: skillful diplomacy. But what really what really kind of solidified
Speaker 2: their relationship even in the midst of some of these
Speaker 2: like interscene conflicts between Soviet Allied elements, was Asad Asad
Speaker 2: unconditionally backed like the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, and he
Speaker 2: made a lot of people really upset by doing that,
Speaker 2: you know, like within his own within Darla Islam, you know,
Speaker 2: but it was it was the right play considering the circumstances.
Speaker 2: And it was also essential, I mean building during the
Speaker 2: Cold War like that, that kind of consensus building across
Speaker 2: a national frontiers was essential, you know, And it was, uh,
Speaker 2: the kind of last hurrah of that sort of war
Speaker 2: in peace diplomacy was Bush forty one's like quorum that
Speaker 2: he gathered to wage the Gulf War, which was an
Speaker 2: incredible which was a master stroke, you know, but that
Speaker 2: was I think of that as kind of the book
Speaker 2: end of the Cold War and the entire prodige and
Speaker 2: of course the Physicsade you know, the syiener have already deployed,
Speaker 2: you know, to back to back US forces and of
Speaker 2: course America. How is America like pay that back by
Speaker 2: like trying to murder the Assade family. It's it's it's unconstable,
Speaker 2: like it's it's a vile I mean, aside in the
Speaker 2: fact it's it's totally irrational, but it's just it's just vile,
Speaker 2: Like you don't do that. April seventy seven as Asade,
Speaker 2: he made a state visit to Moscow and he got
Speaker 2: an audience in the president himself as well as Alexi
Speaker 2: proceedon Kaseigan, you know who were I mean basically got
Speaker 2: to meet the old Control Group of the Soviet Union.
Speaker 2: I mean for for a small, you know, underdeveloped country,
Speaker 2: that's that's pretty remarkable. And they signed h they put
Speaker 2: pen to paper on what was called the Treaty of
Speaker 2: Friendship in nineteen eighty, you know, less than a year
Speaker 2: after the Soviets assaulted Afghanistan. And that was that was
Speaker 2: not a that was not coincidental. That was very much
Speaker 2: Taylor to send a message to the world. And subsequently
Speaker 2: there became a permanent gar sin in Syria of Soviet troops.
Speaker 2: You know, not only were the balk Assyrian weapons you know,
Speaker 2: coming from Warsaw Pact, you know, the Soviet Union itself,
Speaker 2: the d d R, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, what have you, but
Speaker 2: also like North Korea, you know, like Syria, because there
Speaker 2: wasn't the only uh, the only Marxist Leninist Arab state
Speaker 2: was South Yemen, you know, so having having an ally
Speaker 2: in the Arab world, which again Syria had and has
Speaker 2: something about outside profile and conceptual terms, this is this
Speaker 2: is a big win for the for the communist world,
Speaker 2: even even though the Syrian Bath was not particularly empathetic
Speaker 2: to doctrinal Marcis Lentinism, but that, you know, that's the
Speaker 2: degree to which the Soviets became tolerant increasingly of what
Speaker 2: a lot of people would have viewed as kind of
Speaker 2: like a third position as tendency. That's very that's highly significant.
Speaker 2: And of course that's kind of stuff that guys like
Speaker 2: Otto Riemer and and George Switzer, Vierick and Ah Thompson
Speaker 2: and Francis Yaqui. I mean, that was their whole that
Speaker 2: that was their whole kind of diagnostic prediction, you know,
Speaker 2: and that's one of the reasons why they did this.
Speaker 2: Incredibly ignorant people who they like to bandy that there's
Speaker 2: some kind of third worldism. I don't even know what
Speaker 2: that means, but it, you know, within the X time,
Speaker 2: within the extent paradigm of the Cold War, this made
Speaker 2: absolute sense for you know, anybody who was on the
Speaker 2: you know, on the national socialist or fascist side of things.
Speaker 2: You know, it's it absolutely tracks. And Carrie Bolton, he's
Speaker 2: one of the only he's one of the only kind
Speaker 2: of contemporary I mean, he's an old guy now, but
Speaker 2: when I take an temporary, I mean like somebody is active.
Speaker 2: He's the only sort of like to like dissident, like
Speaker 2: like national socialists, like academic writers. I take really seriously
Speaker 2: like he's great, you know, and I he's kind of
Speaker 2: an eccentric guy. He's some of his interests are kind
Speaker 2: of eccentric, but I you know, he's his his viewpoint
Speaker 2: is closest to mine own out of anybody. He's kind
Speaker 2: of active in writing about you know, political theory and
Speaker 2: national socialism and stuff. In twenty ten, Medgetev became he
Speaker 2: became the first president of the Russian Federation to reciprocate
Speaker 2: and visit Syria. I think, like I said before, I
Speaker 2: can't I cannot remember if when the Russians after at
Speaker 2: the Syria of Army routed isis you know, there was
Speaker 2: a there was this parade for the Russian contingent there
Speaker 2: there reminded me of the Conor Legion parade. It was
Speaker 2: I thought it was really cool. I was. I watched
Speaker 2: it on there's a YouTube stream that came through live
Speaker 2: at like three am. And I can't remember if Putin
Speaker 2: was there or not, but regardless it was you know,
Speaker 2: the first state visit by a Russian Federation executive. It
Speaker 2: was mitigative and that was ah, that was a big
Speaker 2: deal too. And obviously in twenty ten, like less than
Speaker 2: a year later, you know, the civil war kicked off
Speaker 2: and that that wasn't that that wasn't uh, that wasn't accidental.
Speaker 2: You know, ever conducts I can't remember we got into
Speaker 2: this or not, but the did it to understand the
Speaker 2: situation in Syria with Isis al Qaeda on news refront
Speaker 2: the the Salafi terrorist elements who were assaulting the government.
Speaker 2: These guys were these guys were rapidly successful. You know,
Speaker 2: like obviously they had deep support you know, above border
Speaker 2: or not from from Washington and Tel Aviv. You know,
Speaker 2: they the Syrian government by the time of Russian intervention,
Speaker 2: they could be set in control only about twenty six
Speaker 2: percent of the country. I mean, they had Damascus and
Speaker 2: they had most of the built up areas that but
Speaker 2: that didn't matter. You know, when the integrating between Damascus
Speaker 2: and these kind of like outlying territories that were held
Speaker 2: by government forces and and UH and adjacent allies, it
Speaker 2: was they couldn't operationally integrate with the forces and being
Speaker 2: that they had. That's one of the things that the
Speaker 2: Russian Federation brought to the table, you know. Russia also
Speaker 2: they showed absolutely no mercy to these to these Salafi Islamis,
Speaker 2: you know, the they were practicing a scorched earth campaign
Speaker 2: against them. But that's what so the most horrifying modern
Speaker 2: more footage I've seen is when Isis they assaulted, they
Speaker 2: assaulted the suburb of Aleppo, and they beheaded all the males,
Speaker 2: you know, from like little kids to like military age,
Speaker 2: like teenage boys, to like old men. And it was
Speaker 2: like this forest of like heads like impaled on these steaks,
Speaker 2: and these Isis guys, Uh, they were doing their they
Speaker 2: were doing one of their afternoon prayers and you know,
Speaker 2: they were on their prayer mats. Like it's probably like
Speaker 2: a whole platoon of them, and there was just these heads,
Speaker 2: you know, like it's it's like something out of a
Speaker 2: horror movie, you know, I mean, that's those are the
Speaker 2: kinds of animals that American Israel returning it loose on
Speaker 2: on Syria as a dead nation strategy, you know, and
Speaker 2: to the Russians, I mean, God bless the Russians for
Speaker 2: like blasting those guys to help. But you know, the
Speaker 2: that that's probably the greatest victory, like battlefield victory. The
Speaker 2: anybody like who should be you should view as like
Speaker 2: an adjacent element if you're right wing. That that's really
Speaker 2: like what the what the Syrina of r and the
Speaker 2: Russian Federation and his block accomplished there other than operations
Speaker 2: storm like when the Cross routed the chet Nicks and
Speaker 2: like liberated the crying, that's like the only thing in
Speaker 2: my lifetime that was comparable. So when these like demento
Speaker 2: internet guys like don't go outside or something instead of
Speaker 2: talking about, say love Ukraine, it's I realize like how
Speaker 2: sick these fucking people are, and like I'm just like delusional,
Speaker 2: you know, like they don't they they're they're like they're
Speaker 2: either like ops or like masquerading as being like right wing,
Speaker 2: or they're or they're just like or they just like
Speaker 2: think that ship's like video games or something. I don't know,
Speaker 2: but you know, I make the point again and again
Speaker 2: if you don't if you don't understand that, like the
Speaker 2: Syrians are like your allies and and this this is
Speaker 2: an international struggle you can't isolate it and say, like
Speaker 2: I don't care what happens outside of America. Like that's
Speaker 2: this that the basic bitch like white and words stuff.
Speaker 2: But it's also like you're not in the game if
Speaker 2: you think these things occur in isolation. You know, whether
Speaker 2: you like like globalism or not, it doesn't matter. Like
Speaker 2: it's you can't ignore gravity, you know, it's it's the
Speaker 2: same thing. Globalism is like gravity. The power playable paradigm
Speaker 2: you live under is like the weather. You can't change it.
Speaker 2: I mean, I mean, you can change it, but if
Speaker 2: you got to like work within its parameters, you know,
Speaker 2: like saying you're a you're you're gonna like you're gonna
Speaker 2: take some like non position owing owing to some like
Speaker 2: ethical orientation that you know, you convince yourself like means
Speaker 2: you like rechecked like the prevailing the prevailing order that
Speaker 2: I mean, that's that's that's that's meaningless and in playable terms.
Speaker 2: But you know the UH plus too, that's when the
Speaker 2: Russian Federation like finally drew a line in the sand,
Speaker 2: you know, and I had they not, I I think
Speaker 2: Russia would be an even worse shape today than than
Speaker 2: than it is. Okay, I'm not saying bad things aret
Speaker 2: Russian people. I mean, the Russians are in a desperate situation.
Speaker 2: Putin said that like demand like like like I said,
Speaker 2: is not going down. He said, the bad regime is
Speaker 2: going to remain at all costs, and that and and
Speaker 2: he and he delivered on it. You know. That's that's
Speaker 2: that's what's kept Russia alive, is in in Warranty's terms,
Speaker 2: you know, like, had had the Russians just allowed Seria
Speaker 2: to go down like they they would have had a
Speaker 2: cascading effect of of of catastrophes. You know, you've he
Speaker 2: developed certain instincts for identifying what events are gonna have
Speaker 2: those sort of seismic kinetic effects. And you better believe
Speaker 2: if Damasius had fallen, that would have been one of
Speaker 2: those events. Uh. It's also it was executed pretty splendidly, man.
Speaker 2: You know, I'm We've talked a lot in various capacities,
Speaker 2: and I recommend you know, super off. He's most known
Speaker 2: for Icebreaker, but his book Inside the Red Army, you know,
Speaker 2: it's about the state of it's about the state of
Speaker 2: the Soviet Army, you know, basically in the in the
Speaker 2: in the later bresident of the era and something that
Speaker 2: remains this day and something that preceded the Bolshek Revolution.
Speaker 2: You know, the Russians big thing, the big military science
Speaker 2: imperative is to do everything possible to like overcome fog
Speaker 2: of war issues, you know, situational awareness issues within the
Speaker 2: battle space, you know, by eradicating and certainties. So they
Speaker 2: treat they treat battle doctor and almost like a Western
Speaker 2: army or like or like the US Army would treat regulation.
Speaker 2: It's highly inflexible, okay, but for what they rush. By
Speaker 2: the way the Russians fight, it does work. And the
Speaker 2: combined arms the Russians brought to bear against isis like
Speaker 2: cut them to pieces, you know. And it was absolutely
Speaker 2: you know, like a like like the Russians isn't just
Speaker 2: like rashally deployed. Like I remember, I can't remember his
Speaker 2: name he was. He said black guy on I don't
Speaker 2: even think he's on TV anymore. But he was kind
Speaker 2: of like he was kind of like mini me Lester
Speaker 2: Holt or something. He was. I mean, not that Lester
Speaker 2: Hal's any great shakes, but this guy was like he
Speaker 2: was kind of like the bush Ley Lester Halt, and
Speaker 2: he was he was talking to he saw its like
Speaker 2: uber Zionists, like like Nato Schill, like idiot who was
Speaker 2: like a light current, like a retired like light colonel
Speaker 2: or something. And this guy was dropping Cavaboll like, well
Speaker 2: we saw him, Chuch, beyond ninety four. The Russians can't fight.
Speaker 2: It's like, first of all, those you know twenty years ago,
Speaker 2: you fool. Secondly, it you know, if if that was
Speaker 2: a state of the arm front of the Russian Federation,
Speaker 2: frankly wouldn't be able to deploy a scale the Syria
Speaker 2: at all. You know. It's it's not like he would
Speaker 2: have been able to like arrive in the battlespace, you know,
Speaker 2: deploy in depth and then and then and then completely
Speaker 2: food bar the operation. I mean, they definitely could have
Speaker 2: lost it. But and I'm not going to suggest that
Speaker 2: the rush An Army deploying the Syria as like something
Speaker 2: on order of the British accomplishing that kind of logistic
Speaker 2: what mirrorable they did at the falk Whens maybe two
Speaker 2: or something, but it was was pretty damn impressive, okay.
Speaker 2: And once they were able to essentially like immediately drop
Speaker 2: like you know, five thousand boots on the ground and
Speaker 2: a whole gang a mid twenty nines and some kind
Speaker 2: of sex stuff like thermobar re artillery and things like that.
Speaker 2: It's like, okay, I mean, i it appears as if
Speaker 2: like the Russian army's back. I mean, the Roginary performed
Speaker 2: pretty well in Georgia in two thousand and eight, but
Speaker 2: there were still there were still problems. I mean, there's
Speaker 2: problems today. But the you know, I nobody who's not
Speaker 2: resorting the kind of callow propaganda, very deliberate sword is
Speaker 2: is going to say that, you know, the Russian operation
Speaker 2: in Syria wasn't impressive or something. You know, it's but uh,
Speaker 2: moving on, Yeah, it's uh. The Russian the chief of
Speaker 2: Staff of the Russian Air Force grass him of, he
Speaker 2: stated in twenty seventeen. In twenty seventeen, like in twenty sixteen,
Speaker 2: like twenty seventeen, there's kind of like this big like
Speaker 2: retrospective on the Syrian operation, and part of it was,
Speaker 2: you know, like a Russian flex like hey, this is
Speaker 2: what we did. Like you know, rah rah, we're back.
Speaker 2: We you know, we we're a serious you know, we're
Speaker 2: we're we're serious military power again. But they carried out.
Speaker 2: They carried out around twenty thousand sorties, like like yeah,
Speaker 2: between like eighteen and twenty thousand sorties and there was
Speaker 2: over seventy thousand strikes on what Grass them off called
Speaker 2: quote the infrastructure of terrorism, which what I take that
Speaker 2: to me is like a lot of ground assault type
Speaker 2: stuff like basically like it has blood on the Seria
Speaker 2: Army going into action, probably backed up by some Russian
Speaker 2: armor and artillery, and then like basically like the Russians
Speaker 2: that uh, they like pound the hell out of Isis
Speaker 2: positions from the air, you know, like in immediate advance
Speaker 2: of that combined ground and element you know, which would
Speaker 2: then like encircle these positions with kind of like textbook
Speaker 2: like Warsaw Pag deep battle just like smaller scale you know,
Speaker 2: and basically treat basically treat the operation as as like
Speaker 2: you know, the advance of fire wherever possible, you know,
Speaker 2: like lay as much fire as possible on the opposing
Speaker 2: force to kill it, you know, and even overkill it.
Speaker 2: You know. It's not exactly a lot of places to
Speaker 2: hide in the in the battle space and the uh
Speaker 2: there are some very serious fighting in Damascus, but I
Speaker 2: believe by the time there are friends of the Russian
Speaker 2: Federation arrived on the ground. I believe that it basically resolved,
Speaker 2: you know, the had the Russians had to route Isis
Speaker 2: from demand. I mean, I it might be an improper
Speaker 2: counterfactual because like if Isis was holding Damascus, it's like
Speaker 2: what I mean that would indicate the war was over.
Speaker 2: But it the point being, you know, they that would
Speaker 2: have changed things, if that would have changed things, if
Speaker 2: like his Blah was charged basically it was like liberating Damascus.
Speaker 2: I mean, like what do you that would have kind
Speaker 2: of neutralized Russian firepower too, unless they were playing on
Speaker 2: like leveling the city without regard to without regard to
Speaker 2: you know, friendly attrition and things. But yeah, it's uh yeah,
Speaker 2: I I guess we went on an hour. Yeah, I'm sorry,
Speaker 2: those two like heavy on the military side of things.
Speaker 2: I'd like to I realize we still get a grip
Speaker 2: of our Gladio series. There's if you want to do
Speaker 2: like an epilogue in this, I mean, it's totally up
Speaker 2: to you, obviously, it's just so literally there's something to
Speaker 2: be said for like the the Jackson Vanic amendments and
Speaker 2: what led to its passing and the whole kind of
Speaker 2: narrative of Soviet Jewurry being like under threat and you know,
Speaker 2: the g r U and the kg D quite literally
Speaker 2: uh establishing a directorate to monitor Zionism. I mean this,
Speaker 2: this is part of the equation. I mean there's a
Speaker 2: lot to the Russian Syrian relationship and and just kind
Speaker 2: of like the Russian you know, Russian enmity with with Israel.
Speaker 2: And we could definitely go like another hour on that
Speaker 2: if you want, but it's totally up to you. Just
Speaker 2: let me know what you want to do next.
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's finish since we're on this, let's finish this
Speaker 1: up and then we'll come back into a wrap up
Speaker 1: episode on Gladio and then figure out where you want
Speaker 1: to go from there. Yeah that's great, man, all right,
Speaker 1: So just tell everybody where they can find your stuff
Speaker 1: and uhpe.
Speaker 2: Yeah, man, you can find me on substick. This for
Speaker 2: my podcast content is it's real Thomas seven seven seven.
Speaker 2: That's substick dot com. I'm doing some by week we
Speaker 2: pods with Jay Burden. He's like my homeboy. He's great,
Speaker 2: like he really is. We're putting that up on gum
Speaker 2: Road and having Burden do it like I might be
Speaker 2: a total retard. I literally found gum Road like fucking unusable.
Speaker 2: I spent like four hours of that fucking platform.
Speaker 1: It's not easy.
Speaker 2: It's it's it's like always there's always like there's always
Speaker 2: like redundant buttons that don't do anything, and it's like
Speaker 2: it's like some fucking uh yeah, it's it's like some
Speaker 2: crazy person or like some like the bottomized page like
Speaker 2: programmed or something. So I after like four hours this garbage,
Speaker 2: I'm like, what the am I doing. I'm like, I'm
Speaker 2: not gonna I'm like, it's I'd rather have a root
Speaker 2: canal than like.
Speaker 1: Just like burden do it. He's young exactly.
Speaker 2: To do it. And the main thing is I love
Speaker 2: substack because it's literally simple as like point and click
Speaker 2: or like drag and populate, but they make it difficult.
Speaker 2: You can like add collaborators on substack, but it doesn't
Speaker 2: just like automatically like split revenue. Right, it's uh.
Speaker 1: Now we're getting inside baseball.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, check out check out Burn's action on gum Road.
Speaker 2: It's radio free Chicago. And I shouted out when we
Speaker 2: record new stuff, like on my substick, I like post
Speaker 2: a link and stuff.
Speaker 1: As well as I'll pick up a link to it
Speaker 1: and add it in.
Speaker 2: Yeah, thank you, and yeah, I mean obviously I'm on
Speaker 2: I'm on X formerly bird app. You know, I'm at
Speaker 2: Capital R E A L underscore number seven h on
Speaker 2: A S seven seven seven. Here Kreig has been. He's
Speaker 2: been busily making some new swag for like our merchandise,
Speaker 2: which I think is pretty cool. Man, Like I legit,
Speaker 2: like I stand by it because I think it's cool
Speaker 2: and people seem to like it. So yeah, if you
Speaker 2: could like drop a link to the merse stuff in
Speaker 2: the description, that would probably be cool. But that's otherwise. Man.
Speaker 2: I'm I'm I'm trying to get a jump on my
Speaker 2: I make progress on my my manuscript stuff, my long
Speaker 2: form written stuff, especially causin I'm gonna have to travel
Speaker 2: a bunch this winter, which I didn't, which is is fine.
Speaker 2: I am blessed people enjoy my company and want me
Speaker 2: to go places where they're hosting things, but I didn't.
Speaker 2: I didn't think i'd be like hitting the road again
Speaker 2: until like springtime. So I'm gonna try, and you know,
Speaker 2: like the next month, I'm I'm hoping I can have
Speaker 2: like a workable manuscript. It just takes time, especially when
Speaker 2: you got to properly like cite you know, your data
Speaker 2: on things. But that's what I've been up on.
Speaker 1: Awesome though. All Right, till the next time, we'll wrap
Speaker 1: this and wrap up Gladio and figure out where to
Speaker 1: go from there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, man, that's great.
Speaker 1: Take care, Thomas, thank you. I want to welcome everyone
Speaker 1: back to the Pecananas Show. Thomas, how have you been?
Speaker 1: I'm right, let's uh, let's finish this up talking about
Speaker 1: Russian series and I think, uh, I think I know
Speaker 1: where you're gonna go with this one, so just let loose.
Speaker 2: Yeah, sort of thing. You know. Obviously we're coming up
Speaker 2: to in the in the University of the Ramadan war
Speaker 2: you or they're the Yan Kapoor war is, which interestingly
Speaker 2: doesn't get it doesn't appear a lot in media these days.
Speaker 2: Some of the fellows that made the point in our
Speaker 2: discussions that you know, historical events don't really occur anymore.
Speaker 2: I mean that, like you know, like Zazec makes that
Speaker 2: point a lot, and and so does some of these
Speaker 2: other guys who are kind of trying to salvage what
Speaker 2: remains a condo philosophy. I mean there's something that's that's
Speaker 2: a deeply psychological mechanism, you know, and there's like sociological
Speaker 2: locations to it too, but in more kind of prosaic terms.
Speaker 2: That that's an important point because I'm always emphasizing to
Speaker 2: the fellas who don't remember because they weren't born yet,
Speaker 2: that media narratives like however corrupt they were corrupted they
Speaker 2: were by ideology and like conceptual biases, they did in
Speaker 2: fact build on a continuing foundation of historical time, you know.
Speaker 2: I make the point even really up until two thousand,
Speaker 2: kind of like the last instance of this in this
Speaker 2: in the spring or it was like summer or fall
Speaker 2: of two thousand. I remember this vivid lead because I
Speaker 2: made my dad really upset, and he went in this
Speaker 2: local radio show to talk about it, the show Beyond
Speaker 2: the Beltway that used to be like based here in Chicago,
Speaker 2: and me and like my then girlfriend, we went down
Speaker 2: to the studio to meet him, like in the loop.
Speaker 2: And the subject that my dad was on this panel
Speaker 2: with this like foreign navy seal guy and this kind
Speaker 2: of crusty older dude was a civilian, but he'd been
Speaker 2: on William Odom's staff in some capacity but Peter Arnett,
Speaker 2: and this is one of the things that kind of
Speaker 2: crushed his career. I mean, he was getting old up
Speaker 2: there in years anyway, but he broke this story where
Speaker 2: this guy claimed that. First of all, guy claimed that
Speaker 2: he was a deserter in the Vietnam War, and he
Speaker 2: claimed he ended up in Laos, Okay, and he said
Speaker 2: there was this village like full of like you know,
Speaker 2: like young white men who were like married to Indigenous women.
Speaker 2: And he's like, what's happening here? And they're like, oh,
Speaker 2: we're all deserters. This is like our commune where we're
Speaker 2: like escaping the war. And if anybody who knows the
Speaker 2: history of the conflict, that's preposterous on his own terms. Okay,
Speaker 2: there's no way that happened. But he was or that
Speaker 2: was taking what this guy said is fact. So our
Speaker 2: nets like, well, like what happened. There's no record of
Speaker 2: this place. So this guy's like, well, you know, he's
Speaker 2: like Army special forces arrived one day after they bombarded
Speaker 2: us with nerve gas and everybody died, but I was
Speaker 2: out in the fields that day or the rice patties,
Speaker 2: so I escaped. And he's like it was called Operation Tailwind,
Speaker 2: you know, and my Dad's like, this is outrageous. This
Speaker 2: is outrageous is being reported as news, And how dare
Speaker 2: this guy like defame uh these Special Forces operators? But
Speaker 2: did it takes that real? Seriously? You know, he was
Speaker 2: a civilian, but he got to know a lot of
Speaker 2: these guys very well, you know, and he takes he
Speaker 2: takes the honor of such people seriously, you know. And
Speaker 2: I mean for me, I mean, it was just I mean,
Speaker 2: aside from that, it was like, I mean, our NETT
Speaker 2: was just like lying, like it's if you're a serious journalist,
Speaker 2: this guy's story was preposterous. You know. Like I said,
Speaker 2: I was, I was like twenty four to twenty five
Speaker 2: years old, and I was just kind of like a
Speaker 2: student of the Vietnam War, and I'm like, there's no
Speaker 2: way that happened. And of course it broke that this
Speaker 2: guy with some crazy liars, that our net kind of disappeared.
Speaker 2: But it was a big deal, man, because you know,
Speaker 2: even twenty five years after Saigon went to put you know,
Speaker 2: Vietnam was still on people's mind man, you know, in
Speaker 2: conceptual terms, it was one of their main kind of
Speaker 2: like pull stars of historical events, so that it doesn't
Speaker 2: really that's it's just like not the case anymore. And
Speaker 2: part of it's deliberate. It's like a deliberate sort of
Speaker 2: like whitewashing of the collective memory. They're not so much
Speaker 2: just kind of like erasing the collective memory of historical time.
Speaker 2: But it's also these narratives increasingly are just kind of
Speaker 2: generated out of nothing, you know, They're they draw upon
Speaker 2: these kinds of like endure it this kind of like
Speaker 2: enduring phraseology that regime information or propaganda. Oh, let's disseminate,
Speaker 2: you know. So there's a certain structure to it, there's
Speaker 2: a certain conceptual structure, but it's very much like it
Speaker 2: kind of like every every aspect of it's just kind
Speaker 2: of like autonomously situated in a psychological terms. It's really weird.
Speaker 2: But in any event, even uh, even to the late nineties,
Speaker 2: they when when there was when when when any kind
Speaker 2: of crisis was an emergent between like Israel and it's
Speaker 2: and its enemies, they there there'd be contextual references to
Speaker 2: the Ramanan War, which they called the yan Kapor War,
Speaker 2: in the nineteen sixty seven Six Day War, which was
Speaker 2: Israel's greatest victory. That's not just cap that Israel had.
Speaker 2: They were unusually larded with military talent at operational level
Speaker 2: for various reasons. And I mean that was so that
Speaker 2: was a big deal. And that's kind of what the
Speaker 2: myth of Israeli military supremacy like was emergent, because in
Speaker 2: sixty seven it wasn't a myth. I mean, on the
Speaker 2: one hand, like modern combat resolves rapidly. That's why I
Speaker 2: was trying to beside the people. You know, they people
Speaker 2: get a corrupted view of this because pretty much like
Speaker 2: the only like the only wars in living memory involve uh,
Speaker 2: these kinds of nonsensical paradigms were like you know, some
Speaker 2: Pentagon guy or some State department spokesman or woman is suggesting, well,
Speaker 2: we're making incremental progress, you know, like the he's kind
Speaker 2: of like endless deployments that don't resolve anything. Like people
Speaker 2: think that that's normal, Like they don't understand that even
Speaker 2: on condition, even under conditions, they're relative parody, you know,
Speaker 2: like modern combined arms war. It's battles are usually massively
Speaker 2: one sided, it's usually your route, it usually resolves like
Speaker 2: within days, you know, but just the same uh, the
Speaker 2: idea's performance in sixty seven was unusually strong. But all
Speaker 2: of that, all that basically came to an end in
Speaker 2: the seventy three war. And it's significant to us. I
Speaker 2: mean even people who aren't particularly invested in Israel Palestine.
Speaker 2: I don't think that's a correct disposition because if you know,
Speaker 2: within the current paradigm, you you can't just kind of
Speaker 2: like select, we choose what you quote care about that
Speaker 2: wasn't of caring about it either, Like everything is impactful.
Speaker 2: You know anywhere that anywhere that the US forces are
Speaker 2: deployed under roscas a NATO or the ADF has deployed
Speaker 2: you know, with the full with the full faith and
Speaker 2: blessing and operational integration with an other the United States.
Speaker 2: You know that this has this has implications for everything
Speaker 2: that occurs in clinical nature. But you know, in seventy three,
Speaker 2: I I believe that that was a more dangerous crisis
Speaker 2: uh modality than the Cuban missile crisis, like the cubansical prizes,
Speaker 2: the way it was unfolding in real time and the
Speaker 2: way these Soviet naval vessels were approaching Cuba and there's
Speaker 2: a question like will they run the blockade or not,
Speaker 2: or like how will this resolve? Like and and as
Speaker 2: like the days and hours were away in Kennedy's war room.
Speaker 2: You know, people got the perception that this was especially critical,
Speaker 2: and it was don't get me wrong. However, there was
Speaker 2: nothing approaching strategic parody. Then in nineteen seventy three, there
Speaker 2: absolutely was, like the stories didn't officially accomplish like strategic
Speaker 2: parody in terms of forces and being you know that
Speaker 2: were in fact deployed until seventy six or seventy seven.
Speaker 2: By seventy three, that they they had the capability to
Speaker 2: absolutely devastate Western Europe and the connell the United States,
Speaker 2: you know, and uh owing to command and control duances
Speaker 2: and the shrinking of the window where human decision makers
Speaker 2: are capable of reacting, you know, that window of opportunity
Speaker 2: to render decision had had shrunk dramatic from a decade previous,
Speaker 2: you know, And so I maintaining that nineteen seventy three
Speaker 2: when America went to deaf Con three, and it's the
Speaker 2: only time that's ever happened, you know. And for context,
Speaker 2: it's not like during the early years the War on
Speaker 2: Terror with those like goofy, like color coded alerts, like
Speaker 2: today you look at terror thread as purple, so like
Speaker 2: chovid drubel up your rest or whatever, like you're supposed
Speaker 2: to do. It wasn't like that, Like, it was quite serious.
Speaker 2: And at deaf Con three, you know, basically that means
Speaker 2: America shifted to a war footing and missileers in their silos.
Speaker 2: They strapped into their siege to prepare for deep impact
Speaker 2: and awaited launch orders and like the little doors like
Speaker 2: atop the silo went like you know, which is kind
Speaker 2: of horrifying. But and Brezhnev he mobilized the Soviet Union operationally.
Speaker 2: In some ways they mirrored the NATI or order of battle,
Speaker 2: but in other ways they were totally different. But they
Speaker 2: had you know, America's kind of America's kind of rapid
Speaker 2: reaction force during the Cold War was uh, it was
Speaker 2: the eighty second Airborne Division. The Soviets mirrored that, like
Speaker 2: the Soviet airborne troops and at that point were like
Speaker 2: an air assault element. They they went on high alert
Speaker 2: and they were preparing to deploy to the Middle East
Speaker 2: to relieve the Egyptian Army. You know, so this was
Speaker 2: this was really really bad. But that it's interesting that
Speaker 2: that's been conspicuously absent. I mean it's to somebody in
Speaker 2: my age, the absence is conspicuous. I haven't read one
Speaker 2: reference to it. And since the IDF assaulted that Russian target,
Speaker 2: which don't get me wrong, happened many times before, okay,
Speaker 2: but it does constitute, if only in the court of
Speaker 2: public opinion, and public opinion in wartime takes on and
Speaker 2: outside significance, it does represent a kind of escalation that,
Speaker 2: you know, the idea of is flagrantly assaulting Russian targets.
Speaker 2: And it was one thing to do that during the
Speaker 2: Serian Civil Wars. Nothing to do that now, But I
Speaker 2: would think that any newsman or lady would, you know,
Speaker 2: kind of like invoke the seventy three war as the
Speaker 2: direct precedent to conteptualize what's happening, you know, and they're
Speaker 2: not doing that at all. So that's just something that
Speaker 2: sort of jumped out of me. But like moving on
Speaker 2: to you know, the topic of the day. You know,
Speaker 2: once again, I as I indicated, I don't want to
Speaker 2: sound like some crazy old person, but if I'm repeating myself,
Speaker 2: let me know, because I do forget sometimes where we
Speaker 2: left off, and I try to refresh my recollection from
Speaker 2: the last episode, but it always I don't always have
Speaker 2: time to like totally go through it. So I'm not
Speaker 2: gonna be offended if if you stop me and say,
Speaker 2: like we're already covered that. But I think where we ended,
Speaker 2: we were talking about, you know, the Russian Federation in Syria,
Speaker 2: and how one of the major, one of the major
Speaker 2: foreign policy moves, even even in the Yeltsin era, was
Speaker 2: to absolutely you know, guarantee that you know, the Soviet
Speaker 2: Mediterranean Fleet could still base in Syria, and the Syrians
Speaker 2: were still obviously very much amenable to that. But you know,
Speaker 2: despite even even Jelson's either you know, apathy or gross
Speaker 2: in confidence or combination of both on parapelitical matters. You know,
Speaker 2: it wasn't just him obviously either. It was you know,
Speaker 2: the the the equivalent of the General Staff and the
Speaker 2: enforced the Russian Federation and and in the Foreign Ministry
Speaker 2: and other things. But they even when they were not
Speaker 2: at all in a position to you know, be pursuing
Speaker 2: a true kind of world velt politique strategy, you know,
Speaker 2: they made sure they locked in a continuation of of
Speaker 2: good offices with Syria. You know, and this is the
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy one Naval Treaty that was signed with Halfes
Speaker 2: al Asad. It granted the Soviet Union. He basically understriged
Speaker 2: the access to the naval basic artists that it had
Speaker 2: built and they continue to this day, you know. And
Speaker 2: if the treaty runs for twenty years and there's automatic
Speaker 2: five year extensions and it's one of the parties oppsiturnity agreement,
Speaker 2: but it but it's it's a rubber stamp sort of thing,
Speaker 2: you know. And the the Syrian state, Hauf as Asad,
Speaker 2: who passed away in two thousand, he was one of
Speaker 2: the first uh heads of state to recognize the Russian Federation.
Speaker 2: You know, basically immediately as a Soviet Union became the
Speaker 2: Russian Federation, he recognized it and made clear that the
Speaker 2: Syrian government was going to abide any and any military agreements,
Speaker 2: and specifically the the naval treaty regarding tartists. But you know,
Speaker 2: and the UH I can remember got into this or not.
Speaker 2: We were talking about the Continuity War between sixty seven
Speaker 2: and seventy three and how the the Israeli air force,
Speaker 2: you know, they fought this pitch there was this pitched
Speaker 2: air battle you know, between the Israeli Air Force and
Speaker 2: and and Soviet megs. But during the during the the
Speaker 2: Ramedan War, Jogapor War itself, Uh, you know, there's thousands
Speaker 2: of Soviet advisors on the ground as well as you know,
Speaker 2: direct action military elements, you know, technicians, know, a veritable
Speaker 2: battalion and technicians to assist the Syrian Arab army and
Speaker 2: you know, to maintain their equipment and their armored platforms,
Speaker 2: their aircraft, all of that. And at least twenty of
Speaker 2: them died the Russians, So at least twenty kia and
Speaker 2: probably more. I mean, that's just what the Kremline acknowledged.
Speaker 2: But there was a during the war. There was over
Speaker 2: thirty seven hundred tons of aid airlifted to the battlespace
Speaker 2: by the end of October ninety seventy three. By sea,
Speaker 2: the Soviet Union that transported sixty three thousand tons to
Speaker 2: Steea or replaced it's military and infrastructural losses. That's a
Speaker 2: massive commitment in relative and absolute terms. I'm not sure
Speaker 2: people recognize that because you know, America throw his money
Speaker 2: around like water, and it's constantly just like dumping these
Speaker 2: like aid packages and secondary theaters that this was a
Speaker 2: big deal. Okay, I think I got into the fact
Speaker 2: that there was some tension in seventy six seventy seven
Speaker 2: between Damascus and Moscow. The Syrian Arab Army deployed to
Speaker 2: the Lebanese battle space, which put them directly opposite the PLO,
Speaker 2: and you know the PLO the Popular Front and the
Speaker 2: Popular Front Delivery of Palestine. They were very warshaw packed adjacent.
Speaker 2: There's a big concern in the Soviet camp that this
Speaker 2: would upset the kind of delicate balance that was in
Speaker 2: place in the Arab Cold War as it's called. This
Speaker 2: was remedied basically one hundred and ten percent when the
Speaker 2: when the sovietwents were in Afghanistan. Because I can't remember
Speaker 2: if I mentioned this or not, either, I guess aside
Speaker 2: immediately like declared like solidarity with the Soviet Union in
Speaker 2: in the war from in Afghanistan, and obviously I put
Speaker 2: him at odds with basically every other Arab government, you know,
Speaker 2: and that that and that's huge, it's and it's always
Speaker 2: it's significant too. I mean, because the there's obvious and
Speaker 2: inherent tensions between the Soviet between there were between the
Speaker 2: Soviet Union and I ran and there out a day
Speaker 2: between the Russian Federation and Iran. Some of these a
Speaker 2: sectarian and religious theological. Some of these are ethnic. You know,
Speaker 2: I that the persons in the Russians aren't aren't particularly cozy.
Speaker 2: But there's there's a very large Azeri minority in Iran,
Speaker 2: you know, Amadina Jods and ethnic Asiari. There's there, there's
Speaker 2: there's some bad blood there, you know, aside from the
Speaker 2: intrinsic value with Syria in absolute geo strategic terms to
Speaker 2: the Russian Federation, it's it's also very much like a
Speaker 2: con it represents kind of like it facilitates concord between
Speaker 2: the Russians and in Tehran in a real way. You
Speaker 2: know the UH I'm sorry one second, oh, and it's
Speaker 2: in UH in April of seventy seven, like it has
Speaker 2: this kind of Lebanon situation was developing as he had.
Speaker 2: He traveled the Moscow and there's some interesting sort of
Speaker 2: like cool footage that the Russians shot, and there's there's
Speaker 2: also some there's also some British UH media guy in
Speaker 2: the ground. The British were very well, very well indexed
Speaker 2: with the Soviet Union and in terms of media for
Speaker 2: whatever reason. So a lot of this, but there's this
Speaker 2: this footage of Hafesisa arriving in Moscow and receiving you know,
Speaker 2: like great honors. You know, it's really it's really interesting,
Speaker 2: and especially for a small country. You know, it's Syria
Speaker 2: has a very outsized relevance for this reason. But it's
Speaker 2: uh he he got a side gottage an audience with Bresnan,
Speaker 2: but uh with Alexei Pasigan, who uh was uh he.
Speaker 2: The way to think of him is he he was
Speaker 2: kind of in the role that Lavrov is today. You know,
Speaker 2: it's an imperfect analogy, but for foreign policy purposes and
Speaker 2: Warren peace terms, especially like if he's a via the
Speaker 2: Arab world, it tracks and you know it's not that's
Speaker 2: that's no small thing and it's not you know, that's
Speaker 2: why when people when people talk about the assad family
Speaker 2: like they're they're like you know, like like they're like
Speaker 2: Saddam and his clan, they're there not at all. You know,
Speaker 2: they're they're facade was anything but just some like tinpot dictator.
Speaker 2: You know, I mean I I I think they're I
Speaker 2: think the Syrians are a noble people generally and I
Speaker 2: find the ASSAD is particularly impressive, but that that's not
Speaker 2: that's not just that, that's not just cap I mean
Speaker 2: a conceptual bias or something. You know. Fesisade visited at
Speaker 2: Moscow again in early spring eighty seven April nineteen eighty seven,
Speaker 2: and he traveled there with the then serving Defense minister
Speaker 2: Mustafa class and he has to require the this advanced
Speaker 2: service to air missile system it UH and Gorbachev denied it,
Speaker 2: which is really interesting. And this was during a time
Speaker 2: when it's a critical period when when when avionics were
Speaker 2: becoming hyper advanced. You know, obviously the stealth but like
Speaker 2: the beef stealth bomber. It was a very different kind
Speaker 2: of plaid for him than those that the these missile
Speaker 2: systems that the Syrians wanted to acquire were tailored the
Speaker 2: as a counter measure for But that that entire sort
Speaker 2: of like skunk Works series of projects that was the
Speaker 2: emergent from this, that this kind of culture of high
Speaker 2: tech adeonics. Okay, so you know the Syrians were asking
Speaker 2: were requesting this for a reason, you know, they they
Speaker 2: need they desperately needed countermeasures because Israel, uh Israel and
Speaker 2: in Western Germanian the Cold War they were getting America's
Speaker 2: best equipment. I mean the Germans and their own right,
Speaker 2: I think the I think the Leopard tank is the best,
Speaker 2: like modern bail tank, like hands down, but the but
Speaker 2: they the West Germans and Israel I mean in the
Speaker 2: in the in the former case that you know what,
Speaker 2: obviously cold residencies, the latter was ideological and the ladder
Speaker 2: obviously still this is the case in terms of what
Speaker 2: they received. But they weren't getting like, they weren't getting
Speaker 2: like knockoff versions of of American aircraft. They were getting
Speaker 2: the real thing, you know. And this obviously decides to
Speaker 2: give the Syrians pause because even before even before UH,
Speaker 2: stealth technology became the norm, you know, long before it
Speaker 2: advanced avionics were making it increasingly difficult really to but
Speaker 2: he developed any counter, any counter versions at all, and
Speaker 2: the Soviets UH. One of the things the worstaw packed
Speaker 2: did very very well was aircraft countermagers. Okay, particularly service
Speaker 2: the air missiles, like you know, the old the old
Speaker 2: book and film Flag of the Intruder. It's it's a
Speaker 2: dumb movie, but it's a pretty good book. If you're
Speaker 2: in the air where.
Speaker 1: I read, I read the book and saw the movie. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the book is a lot better.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but it's and Stephen koons Is is kind of
Speaker 2: a he's kind of a strange guy, but he he
Speaker 2: flew ay sixes over Vietnam and the part where the
Speaker 2: the the kind of the kind of John Wayne type
Speaker 2: aviator Jake Rafton, you know, his new his new uh
Speaker 2: radar intercept of officer, his new ra O is is
Speaker 2: this kind of like wild guy. But even he, like
Speaker 2: fu sorties were downtown Hanoi is like a terrifying prospect
Speaker 2: for American aviators because other other than Moscow, like it
Speaker 2: was like the most hardened like target on this planet.
Speaker 2: Like that. That's not that wasn't creative license. That was
Speaker 2: including the book or something. And that owed the fact that,
Speaker 2: I mean the Soviets built it up to make it
Speaker 2: that way. You know, it wasn't it obviously there was
Speaker 2: you know, they the Vietnamese are and industrious people, but
Speaker 2: they they had nothing approaching that kind of technology. And
Speaker 2: you know, they the Soviets knew that. I mean that
Speaker 2: was before the sound of Soviets split. But you know,
Speaker 2: the like like the Chinese had nothing remotely honorable, you know,
Speaker 2: like the the chadac On equivalent was junk. But in
Speaker 2: any event, so this was, uh, that was kind of
Speaker 2: a turning point obviously in eighty seven when Garbasheff refused
Speaker 2: basically the kind of honor the good offices that had
Speaker 2: been sustained with serious really since day one, at least,
Speaker 2: you know, in as regards military necessities and exigencies. But
Speaker 2: you know, that was the what what garbage off was
Speaker 2: attempting to accomplish. I was writing something about this the
Speaker 2: other day, but that's kind of a subject for another episode.
Speaker 2: I know, if if we go off on that tangent
Speaker 2: like we'll be here all night. But it is uh
Speaker 2: that that that was definitely like a novelist though, you know,
Speaker 2: like I said, it even even even under Yel since tenure,
Speaker 2: the you know, the Moscow never made any indication that
Speaker 2: they did any intention of abandoning Syria. But moving forward,
Speaker 2: what's I mean obviously it was most relevant to the
Speaker 2: president is you know, the Serian Civil War, you know,
Speaker 2: and I it's it's hard to diminate really what's what
Speaker 2: people are thinking in Washington because you don't have a
Speaker 2: serious foreign policy establishment, and you haven't since you know,
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety two. But when Obama's people, when they were
Speaker 2: saying that Damascus is imminiately going to fall, that that
Speaker 2: that was that was in fact accurate at the outset
Speaker 2: of the intervention, the Russian intervention, and there's another case
Speaker 2: of pot putin waited far too long intervene. I mean
Speaker 2: it it's a credit to the Syrian people, you know,
Speaker 2: those loyal to Asad and the Hezebla and those Russian
Speaker 2: forces were deployed. That they won, but it was becoming critical.
Speaker 2: You know, the the Syrian government they officially only controlled
Speaker 2: about a quarter of the country. You know, the statistics
Speaker 2: separated is like twenty six percent of overall like territory.
Speaker 2: And how how much that territory you can deploy in
Speaker 2: depth or defend it. I mean they had they they
Speaker 2: had the built up areas buying large but you know
Speaker 2: they were they were essentially there was this there was
Speaker 2: this garrison. Demaskus was like becoming a frontline city, you know.
Speaker 2: And assad Uh Asad sends his wife away, and he
Speaker 2: sent his Asad away, and you know he I developed
Speaker 2: huge respect for Bashar the son because he said, I'm
Speaker 2: not leaving Damascus if I have to well die here
Speaker 2: and that's you know, I'm like, Okay, this guy's a
Speaker 2: real man, and he's a real president. You know, he's
Speaker 2: he's a real leader of he's a real worldlord now,
Speaker 2: you know, because that's the way it has to be.
Speaker 2: But you know, when the Russians did arrive, you know,
Speaker 2: they rapidly integrated with you know, a lot of the
Speaker 2: Syrian Arab Army defected. You know, I think a lot
Speaker 2: of that the degree to which that Sunny Bath elements
Speaker 2: and the Iraqi Bath and the Syrian Bath Party are
Speaker 2: very different animals, but there is like a common ideological
Speaker 2: core and there's and there's a common sociological rationale to
Speaker 2: like the men who were in our heavily index with
Speaker 2: the party, and you know, a bunch of Saddams officers
Speaker 2: who were you know, part of the Sunni minority in Iraq,
Speaker 2: like they clipped they clipped up with ices basically immediately,
Speaker 2: not all of them, but a lot of them did.
Speaker 2: And they were accepted by these guys, which is really interesting.
Speaker 2: And some of the same thing happened in Syria, you know.
Speaker 2: And the uh, the Syrian Bath Party even like at
Speaker 2: the top, is more ecumenical than they're credited but it
Speaker 2: still is. I mean, it's it's basically, you know, like
Speaker 2: an an Alley white like minority rule situation. But and
Speaker 2: it's it's interesting. And in May twenty ten, like before
Speaker 2: the formal on set of hostilities, Medvedev had visited Syria
Speaker 2: and that mid Medviedev's like brief ten, you're as the
Speaker 2: president is interesting, man, and it's interesting how we became.
Speaker 2: It was like out bad with Putin subsequently. But it's
Speaker 2: pretty obvious that NATO Israel and I'm sure their proxies
Speaker 2: in these isis types as well, because those guys weren't stupid.
Speaker 2: They realize, you know, look, the time to move, you know,
Speaker 2: the time to truly escalate is when the Russians are
Speaker 2: are having some kind of crisis of leadership, you know,
Speaker 2: or if not not, if not so much a crisis
Speaker 2: and a literal like you know, war in the Kremlin,
Speaker 2: like happened after a drop off died. You know, you
Speaker 2: when the civilian executive is kind of headless, that that
Speaker 2: causes problems. You know, it causes problems in terms of
Speaker 2: like grand schemes, peated decision making, it all the way
Speaker 2: down to the operational level. That's That's when I really
Speaker 2: when Yahoo was secure. Unfortunately, because even people who despise them,
Speaker 2: you know, they're playing musical chairs with with the civilian executive.
Speaker 2: Is not what you want to do at war. But
Speaker 2: because it may. When the Russians did deploy, they immediately integrated,
Speaker 2: you know, with Heslo and the Serenira of army and
Speaker 2: comand control capacities, you know, like like deeply and this
Speaker 2: how this you know, there were the Russians no like
Speaker 2: wartime diplomacy, man, I mean that during the Cold War,
Speaker 2: I'd say the key ways I mean NATO had them
Speaker 2: beat in all kinds of capacities like material, political and otherwise.
Speaker 2: But you know what the Russians head was. I mean
Speaker 2: they had firepower, obviously, they had a very tough and
Speaker 2: game population in the Russian people, but they were very
Speaker 2: they weren't aren't very adept at like war and peace
Speaker 2: politics and that uh that that that's how they were
Speaker 2: able to accomplish that, you know because like I I
Speaker 2: mean obviously especially considering the the tactical situation on the
Speaker 2: ground in Syria. I mean, Habla wasn't about to say,
Speaker 2: like we won't index with the Russian. The Russian federation.
Speaker 2: But there's always tensions in trying to integrate a command
Speaker 2: and control structure, you know. And this was accomplished seamlessly essentially.
Speaker 2: But the well, you know, the Russians, they the Russians
Speaker 2: brought in like real firepower to bear. You know. The
Speaker 2: Russians can't do high tech like America can. But the
Speaker 2: war tech as during the Cold War is now was
Speaker 2: good enough. And the Syrian intervention and the way they
Speaker 2: you know, they they pursued it truly scorched earth policy
Speaker 2: in the on the in the battle space, like against
Speaker 2: their against the up for and it paid off, you know,
Speaker 2: the and and Putin declared in knowing certain terms that
Speaker 2: you know, the the like the Asad government is not
Speaker 2: going to be allowed to fall. There is some momentum
Speaker 2: behind Syria two in the quart of world opinion. It's
Speaker 2: like we talked about, I'm not successful to propaganda, and
Speaker 2: I mean I I'm not some young naive person. I
Speaker 2: was legitimately horrified by those scenes from you know, like
Speaker 2: the subbers of a Lepo over these these Isis barbarians.
Speaker 2: You know, we're beheading people and putting heads on steaks.
Speaker 2: You know, like I said, I saw the video of them,
Speaker 2: you know, they were doing their afternoon prayers and their
Speaker 2: prayer mats and uh, there's like a forest of hits.
Speaker 2: You know, it's it's like a horror movie. But you
Speaker 2: know people were seeing that kind of thing. And I
Speaker 2: remember a Bath Party spokeswoman in knowing certain terms, telling
Speaker 2: some European media type like, look, we're not we do
Speaker 2: not negotiate with people who we will not negotiate with.
Speaker 2: We're not going to change our government because terrorists are
Speaker 2: are bombing us and killing people and beheading people. Like
Speaker 2: what that's you can't ever allow that, you know this
Speaker 2: is and you know this was also too when the
Speaker 2: War on Terror was still on. It's like, so you
Speaker 2: America is telling us and telling the world like, you know,
Speaker 2: we're waging the war on terror, yet you're you're trying
Speaker 2: to bring down a secularist eye doctor who it's got
Speaker 2: like a pretty wife who looks kind of like any
Speaker 2: white woman in the United States, and you're saying that
Speaker 2: like isis are the good guys? Like that's that's really
Speaker 2: when America lost all credibility, you know, like even more so,
Speaker 2: I think than the Iraq fiasco, because that was just
Speaker 2: like laid there. You know, it's like we will burn
Speaker 2: down civilization and hand it to barbarians. You know that
Speaker 2: basically a cow is what we want, and that's the
Speaker 2: opposite of civilization, you know, the same nothing of the
Speaker 2: fact that that's I mean nine eleven should never happen,
Speaker 2: but it did happen, and it's like okay, so okay,
Speaker 2: decades on, you know, a mere decade subsequent like now, now,
Speaker 2: now you're willing to like accept that as you know,
Speaker 2: just kind of like the verbial costs of going business.
Speaker 2: It's like, that's that's unconstable. It scoresesque, but you know,
Speaker 2: and then Putin clarified in twenty fifteen. It's really interesting
Speaker 2: too because when speaking of the Medvita situation for three
Speaker 2: four years, when when Putin, you know, he's kind of
Speaker 2: like second uh permanent tenure as President of Russian Federation,
Speaker 2: there's this kind of window where we're speaking very candle
Speaker 2: I think I think Putin quotes himself pretty well generally,
Speaker 2: but he plays up post of the chest and issues
Speaker 2: he's like non answers that policy questions. There's like this
Speaker 2: brief period of a few years where he was he
Speaker 2: was kind of trying to like humanize his image. I
Speaker 2: think I remember in October twenty fifteen. Yeah, it was
Speaker 2: like it was like October November twenty fifteen. He gives
Speaker 2: us an interview and he's like, look, he's like this,
Speaker 2: He's like, you know, our the Syrian intervention was prepared
Speaker 2: well in advance. Despite what made have appeared, we weren't
Speaker 2: just responding to an emergency situation on the ground. We
Speaker 2: knew that America and Israel wanted to bring down the
Speaker 2: bath regime. We consider this unacceptable. We still do. It
Speaker 2: was really interesting things like he'd never think. He just
Speaker 2: doesn't talk that way anymore, you know. And one of
Speaker 2: the things people criticize him for is is this kind
Speaker 2: of like ambiguous language about Ukraine. You know, oh no,
Speaker 2: this this is a special military operation, and you know,
Speaker 2: not not being clear about objectives and things. It's it's
Speaker 2: very different, but I think it's relevant, you know it,
Speaker 2: I know it is. But uh, the uh in Putin's
Speaker 2: terms and uh Russian speakers I'm sure will suggest and
Speaker 2: suggest correctly. This is an imprecise, imprecise translation, but it's
Speaker 2: the most coherent when I found, Like, in the same interview,
Speaker 2: he said quote that that the objective wasn't remains quote
Speaker 2: stabilizing the legitimate power in Syria and creating conditions for
Speaker 2: political compromise. And that's very much a Putinism. Putin's always
Speaker 2: resorting the you know, the rules based international order that
Speaker 2: purportedly exists, and like, I understand why he does that,
Speaker 2: but I think the time has passed for that those
Speaker 2: sorts of appeals, But it's just it's just interesting, the
Speaker 2: uh and if I can't remember, we dropped the brass tax,
Speaker 2: like the like the literal numbers of what this operation
Speaker 2: constituted in Syria. In some ways, especially considering a lot
Speaker 2: of the discussion about the deterioration of Russian capabilities, in
Speaker 2: some ways, this was as much a coup in world
Speaker 2: opinion terms as the UK's effort in the fault Ones,
Speaker 2: you know, because people were, I mean, Washington's always suggesting
Speaker 2: that Russians can't do anything right in military terms, but
Speaker 2: even relatively serious people were prone to talking that way.
Speaker 2: But the Russian Air Force, it carried out over nineteen
Speaker 2: thousand sorties, seventy one thousand direct strikes on what they
Speaker 2: called the quote infrastructure of terrorists. You know, I interpret
Speaker 2: that in like real human language, not military language, as
Speaker 2: a combination of you know, ground support, attack missions, you know,
Speaker 2: as well as uh you know, as well as bonding
Speaker 2: of any positions and things. But i uh, close air
Speaker 2: support and direct support of ground element forces is what
Speaker 2: really carried the day. And again, the Russians they've always
Speaker 2: viewed warfare as as kind of the advance of fire.
Speaker 2: You know, they're very clouds of woodsy and they're like
Speaker 2: literally clouds of wits end in their perspectives. You know.
Speaker 2: That's who train them to fight modern war. You know.
Speaker 2: It was uh clouds with himself and officers and there
Speaker 2: are for the Russian Federation on parade they still you know,
Speaker 2: perform the goose stuff. This you know, not a coincidence
Speaker 2: because they they think it looks really sharp, which it does,
Speaker 2: but it's because that's how they learned drill, you know.
Speaker 2: And this, this, this solidified Russia as a as a
Speaker 2: real military power on the world stage once again, you know.
Speaker 2: And that's why it's there's it's not as like a
Speaker 2: conceptual bias or like a categorical ignorance, when it's both
Speaker 2: those things too. What you know, like the honest of
Speaker 2: facilities in Ukraine. Like however mismanaged that war has been
Speaker 2: and it's kind of like grossing is managed on on
Speaker 2: the Russian side. Okay, But this idea that like Russia
Speaker 2: lacks the capability to deploy its scale, It's like, what
Speaker 2: are you talking about? I mean that that's that's at
Speaker 2: odds of reality, you know. And if you're gonna if
Speaker 2: you're gonna fight the uh, you're gonna fight the arm
Speaker 2: force of the Russian Federation like literally on their own frontier,
Speaker 2: you know, the the direct precedent that cons that bear
Speaker 2: as well what happened in Syria. You know, I not
Speaker 2: not make a mistake. I there is no like military
Speaker 2: objective on you know that that Ukraine is pursuing because
Speaker 2: there's no there's no path in victory in military terms.
Speaker 2: And it's but if you accept that, you know, US, NATO,
Speaker 2: Israel their only interest is you know, and it is
Speaker 2: in creating attrition. You know, it's uh, it makes perfect sense.
Speaker 2: But this idea that these these it's not as these
Speaker 2: fools like blinking either, like as you know, there's this people.
Speaker 2: I don't think there's any serious people in the foreign
Speaker 2: policies stay asman, but even people less kind of you know,
Speaker 2: out of it than he is. You know, they were
Speaker 2: talking like, well, yeah, you know, the the Russian mainline
Speaker 2: resistance is just going to collapse. You know, the moment
Speaker 2: basically we start popping off combined arms and you know
Speaker 2: from a borough communitions or whatever, and and then like
Speaker 2: the you know, the the United Russia is just going
Speaker 2: to collapse. It's like what are you smoking? Crack Like
Speaker 2: that's you know, the one thing, the one thing the
Speaker 2: Russians have going for them again is the fact that
Speaker 2: they can bring firepower to bear. They've got a very
Speaker 2: game population, and I as long as as long as
Speaker 2: Putin is alive and relatively healthy, like United Russia is
Speaker 2: like never been stronger, like they're Their problem is that
Speaker 2: apparently they can't achieve consensus on who on a man
Speaker 2: to take his place. But this idea that butth of
Speaker 2: Russians literally took twenty five million dead. You know, if
Speaker 2: you lose one in seven of your population to the
Speaker 2: Wehrmacht in four years, and not only do you not
Speaker 2: fall apart, you you can reconstitute into a superpower, albeit
Speaker 2: a crippled one, immediately subsequent There's nothing sort of incredible,
Speaker 2: and I think I think it's basically unprecedented, you know,
Speaker 2: like some some sort of comparable scenario or a state
Speaker 2: endoors that level of devastation and is able to you know,
Speaker 2: it's not profit from it to uh, you know, immediately
Speaker 2: reconstitute and project power in a way theretofore unthinkable even
Speaker 2: prior to the onset of hostilities. But you know, the uh,
Speaker 2: that's one of the reasons why I mean the the
Speaker 2: You've got to understand the Ukraine War as as literally
Speaker 2: like another a secondary front, a secondary theater of the
Speaker 2: same conflict as was underway in Syria. And one of
Speaker 2: the things facility Russian facilitated by Russian victory there was
Speaker 2: not just clout in the national stage, but uh, it
Speaker 2: basically guaranteed them access to the Eastern Mediterranean, you know,
Speaker 2: and uh uh from there you can stage you can
Speaker 2: stage comment operations like fear wide basically, you know, including
Speaker 2: in places like Libya that for reasons, some of which
Speaker 2: are within the bound rationality of ah, you know, NATO
Speaker 2: decision making, and for some reasons they have it Libya
Speaker 2: that makes sense. There's some that don't. But like point being,
Speaker 2: Russia absolutely can deploy their in depth if they're not
Speaker 2: tied down in their own frontier viause of Ukraine, and
Speaker 2: that's really the key to understanding what is underway there
Speaker 2: in in in in like hard material terms, I mean.
Speaker 2: But the Aside himself apparently on the h on the
Speaker 2: eve of Russian intervention, he I assume this came from
Speaker 2: his general staff, and I the Seriennery of Army. I know,
Speaker 2: people claim that they're shit, like the Egyptian Army or something.
Speaker 2: I don't accept that. I don't accept that because of
Speaker 2: the nineteen seventy three war. And like I said, the
Speaker 2: issue with the Syriennery of Army, it wasn't that like
Speaker 2: they were getting mauled in the field. It's that basically
Speaker 2: like this soon he said, like we're not gonna fight
Speaker 2: this war, you know. But Asad again I'm certain through
Speaker 2: like his general staff or its equivalent, they issued this
Speaker 2: series of reports to Moscow saying like this is the
Speaker 2: this is the tactical situation, this is what we absolutely need,
Speaker 2: this is what needs to be brought to bear. You know,
Speaker 2: they basically like identified and characterized up for and like
Speaker 2: how it was hurting them, and in a very concise
Speaker 2: and clearheaded way said like this is why we're going
Speaker 2: to lose this war unless you're able to deploy and
Speaker 2: guarantee A, B and C, you know, and that that
Speaker 2: events is like a remarkable level of trust because like
Speaker 2: among other things, if you invite a great power and
Speaker 2: in very reduced terms, Russia still is a great power
Speaker 2: in relative terms, although like nothing you know, like a superpower.
Speaker 2: You know, you invite the Russians to deploy in depth
Speaker 2: and in hand your command control mechanism over to them,
Speaker 2: they may will just decide that like now serious part
Speaker 2: of Russia for all practical purposes like that that's not
Speaker 2: just cap like when people like you know who's going
Speaker 2: to attack one, Like it's it's no small measure inviting
Speaker 2: like five or eight thousand like armed Russians and their
Speaker 2: common aircraft and guys in their general staff like into
Speaker 2: your country and saying like okay, fellas, like you know,
Speaker 2: do do you do best? Then implement like death at
Speaker 2: scale among like those people, but then like kind of
Speaker 2: politely bow out when it's done. I mean, it's it's
Speaker 2: a rare case, like real kind of like respect and
Speaker 2: reciprocity at like cultural level as well as practical levels
Speaker 2: but yeah, and that's why, uh you know, like I said,
Speaker 2: if I could, if I can meet the when I
Speaker 2: go I head to state, like I found a little
Speaker 2: interesting as Bashar al Assade, like you know, he's uh,
Speaker 2: he's a fascinating dude, and I find it highly relatable.
Speaker 2: But yeah, the I think that's uh, yeah, I was
Speaker 2: gonna get at some point. And we covered some of
Speaker 2: this in earlier, I mean in like a different series.
Speaker 2: I mean we were talking about, you know, the the
Speaker 2: Jackson Vanic Amendment and what prompted it, which wasn't a
Speaker 2: large measure, you know, the the public bro and the
Speaker 2: Supreme Soviet moving moving to literally like outlaws of Zionism,
Speaker 2: like it became it became a political crime against the
Speaker 2: state to you know, like advocate for Zionism, you know,
Speaker 2: and there's a party official in in April eighty three,
Speaker 2: they're like this full page this full page ad titled
Speaker 2: quote from the Soviet leadership laying out the case against
Speaker 2: Zionism as as as viewed from Moscow, which is fascinating,
Speaker 2: you know, and this and then subsequently, you know, that's
Speaker 2: when you started hearing in media this narrative like like
Speaker 2: a Soviet Jews the right risk of annihilation. You know,
Speaker 2: the Soviet Union is this you know, anti Semitic country.
Speaker 2: I mean they've been at war for decades already, but
Speaker 2: it's it. Uh, it took on like an over the
Speaker 2: you know, an above board like character, you know, and this, uh,
Speaker 2: the the you know, the purported plate of Soviet jewelry.
Speaker 2: It it was something that was endlessly bandied about by
Speaker 2: not just NGOs and sympathetic media people, by the Reagan
Speaker 2: administration like it's really it's really wild. And you know,
Speaker 2: speaking of cold war movies or cold war theme movies,
Speaker 2: then we Firefox is a really good movie. This if
Speaker 2: you can, I mean you've got to look like the propaganda.
Speaker 2: But I when I was like a little kid, my
Speaker 2: mom and dad, I want to see it with them,
Speaker 2: and it like blew my mind. But uh, you know,
Speaker 2: one of the subtexts of it is that you know
Speaker 2: that Clint Eastwood is like the Russo American like non
Speaker 2: era combat pilot. You know, he uh he goes hit
Speaker 2: his mission is like steal uh what the then fictional
Speaker 2: mid thirty one, Like there is an actual mid thirty one.
Speaker 2: It's it's call signs his Fox bat But it didn't
Speaker 2: exist when Firebox came out, but the the med thirty one,
Speaker 2: Firefox is like the super plane and it directly interfaces
Speaker 2: with the pilot's brain waves, so like if you so
Speaker 2: you think commands to the central processing unit and then
Speaker 2: it responds. And because Eastwood in the film, his character
Speaker 2: is this Russian guy Russian to he he speaks Russian,
Speaker 2: you know, so it's so he can think in Russian
Speaker 2: to manipulate the avionics. But any event, like a subplot
Speaker 2: is there's this Jewish avi ONYX engineer and the Soviets
Speaker 2: are basically they're like threatening to like waste his family
Speaker 2: if he doesn't build the Firefox, and like uh, at
Speaker 2: one point, like Queneatwood's character makes conted with him and
Speaker 2: he's like, yeah, you know, like the the Soviets are,
Speaker 2: you know, they're they're as bad as like the German Reich.
Speaker 2: And that's kind of like obvious propaganda insinuated, you know,
Speaker 2: But that he like he even that wasn't just like
Speaker 2: Hollywood stuff like that's that was the narrative being presented,
Speaker 2: but that that's kind of a tangential when it's a
Speaker 2: long topic. But yeah, I think, uh, I think we're
Speaker 2: coming up in the hour. Yeah, no, that's uh, that's
Speaker 2: about all I got for this series. I don't I
Speaker 2: don't want to break off another like subtopic. Man, And
Speaker 2: forgive me if I repeated myself, but uh, yeah, I
Speaker 2: think uh unless uh and unless I'm I got a
Speaker 2: real gap and uh my recollection, I think we I
Speaker 2: think we covered quite a bit of the of uh
Speaker 2: what's relevant you know over these past few sessions.
Speaker 1: Can I hit you with one question from yeah, what
Speaker 1: was your what was your take on the the Iranian
Speaker 1: uh missile offensive?
Speaker 2: The Iranians had to do something, I mean, yes, like
Speaker 2: his blase is for all practical purposes, you know, like
Speaker 2: the foreign the Iranian foreign legion. But there's a plausible
Speaker 2: deniability that the Iranians like very sort of jealously guard there,
Speaker 2: but also just in in in terms of in terms
Speaker 2: of poopolitical terms as well as for domestic consumption as
Speaker 2: well as in the court of world opinion, like I
Speaker 2: Ran had to respond somehow. And this this is basically identical.
Speaker 2: It is basically a reducs of when when SOLMANI was
Speaker 2: you know, it was the same thing. It was just
Speaker 2: like it was just like very very controlled response. You know,
Speaker 2: the target the areas targeted were like exclusively counter value.
Speaker 2: You know, it was announced that this was going to happen,
Speaker 2: So that's the way I read it. And it's more
Speaker 2: for the benefit of like they were in regime despite
Speaker 2: the time about media says this, it's not like the
Speaker 2: Taliban or something, and it's it's also like it's already
Speaker 2: they actually hold election as and I ran all the time,
Speaker 2: and like the regime does have like certain credibility problems,
Speaker 2: but like I'm a Dana Jod. You know, he was
Speaker 2: not only in a Zeri, but the reason he's were
Speaker 2: that like members only jacket. I remember, like media people
Speaker 2: that make fun of him, but it's like the dude
Speaker 2: work he was like an he was he was he
Speaker 2: was like an oil rig worker or like a pipeline
Speaker 2: like a like a foreman, and like that's why he
Speaker 2: was trying to look the part of like you know,
Speaker 2: mister like a Zeri working man. He was like this
Speaker 2: big like socialist kind of like labor leader like Rabel Rouser,
Speaker 2: and like the religious authorities didn't like him at all,
Speaker 2: Like they basically allowed him they into the top job
Speaker 2: because they had to, you know, and so talking about
Speaker 2: something is alamist. It's like this most like you like
Speaker 2: looking crack if you think that. But point being Iran's
Speaker 2: it just gets it's a complicated situation domestically and the
Speaker 2: regime there. They do have to cater to public opinion
Speaker 2: more than people acknowledge in the West, and especially if
Speaker 2: it looks like I mean, even if even if these
Speaker 2: like retaliatory strikes like don't mean anything, it doesn't matter.
Speaker 2: It's for domestic consumption anyway, you know, like Iran's Iran's
Speaker 2: ground element in real terms is hepla. That's my interversation.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it seems like with some of the incursions
Speaker 1: that I've been monitoring over the past twenty four to
Speaker 1: thirty six hours, was doing a pretty damn good job
Speaker 1: on the ground there. Yeah, it seems like it seems
Speaker 1: like Israel they're only they can only do anything from
Speaker 1: the air right now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they don't want Well it's also too what are
Speaker 2: they gonna do? Are they gonna assault Evanon? Like it's
Speaker 2: some the eighties early nineties. You were in two thousand
Speaker 2: and six and they tried that you're not You're not
Speaker 2: gonna they don't have the forces they don't have the
Speaker 2: force structure or the political will to assault Beirut and
Speaker 2: try and like route Hesibla from the Shia urban heartland.
Speaker 2: You're gonna fight house to house against HESBLAF the next
Speaker 2: five years and you know and take like twenty thousand
Speaker 2: dead in a few months. Like, no, you're not gonna
Speaker 2: do that. No, his was They're they're no joke, man,
Speaker 2: They're they're definitely the most capable ground element other than
Speaker 2: IDF in the region.
Speaker 1: Cool, well, do your plugs. We'll get out of here,
Speaker 1: and I guess the next uh, next time we get
Speaker 1: together will finish up the gladiol and then move on
Speaker 1: to something after that.
Speaker 2: That's great. Yeah, yeah, yeah man. You can find me
Speaker 2: on Subspect. It's real Thomas seven seven seven of subspect
Speaker 2: dot com. That's where the pod is at, and as
Speaker 2: well as like longer form stuff and just like various things.
Speaker 2: I uh, I'm on social media at Capital R E
Speaker 2: A L Underscore number seven h O M A S
Speaker 2: seven seven seven. I'm on Instagram, I'm on t Gram.
Speaker 2: I got my own website. It's Thomas seven seven seven
Speaker 2: dot com number seven h O M A S seven
Speaker 2: seven seven dot com And I got uh, I got
Speaker 2: like merse that I sell because owing to popular demand.
Speaker 2: I'm not trying to be corny like that's literally why
Speaker 2: like I started doing it with my friend and partner
Speaker 2: in crime, Hair Cree. But if you would include a
Speaker 2: link to that in the description, that would be a
Speaker 2: great help so people can find it.
Speaker 1: Yep, dah, last time it'll be it'll be there this time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 1: I appreciate it. Thomas, It's all the next time. Thank you.
Speaker 2: Boys,