100-year history of US meddling, coups and wars in the Middle East | Roy Casagranda | UNAPOLOGETIC

dude this is 76 years you need to be mad at truman Eisenhower JFK Nixon there was a European and an American sense that we can never let there be another Middle East superpower um the amount of Firepower they've used the amount of Firepower they're using in Lebanon we tend to go for the economic explanation too quickly and too often do you have time for one sure go for we have to I know I'm over but right I mean okay look the most important part is that Saudi Arabia promises it will never cut off the supply

of oil to the United States I'm also not a sociologist I'm a political scientist okay so historian and political scientist yeah sociologists are nice people political scientists are are gross so I don't want to people to misunderstand the nature what is it about some people they just they're obsessed with corruption and incompetence and they want to study it you know usually you want to study how to make the world a better place I mean I don't want to stop you from speaking because from what I've seen you you like to speak and and and the

reason why I'm contacting is because I like to see you speak so it's not like it's a problem okay we good I hope so okay let's uh begin in 3 2 1 hi good day and welcome to another episode of unapologetic today I'm joined by Roy casagranda who's a historian and political scientist you may have seen him on on the internet uh he's the founder of the Austin School lecture series which he's rebranding at the moment where he's hosted a series of lectures um dealing extensively with history but specifically the history of the Arab world

in the Middle East uh Professor Roy CA welcome to the show thank you for having me thank you so much for for giving us your time um today we're going to have quite a long discussion uh it's going to be based around I think what we're trying to do is try to understand why the Middle East how is how it is based on the history of the last 100 years but specifically uh because of UK and US interference but more specifically us interference just because it's the more recent interference in the last 70 years I

want to start off by by just asking you um there's a clip um and uh we'll actually play it for our audience uh but what you say in the clip is the following it's about the Eisenhower Doctrine which I think is something we going to discuss quite in depth today you say the Eisenhower Doctrine establishes that there's a priority before communism and that priority is to destroy the French and British Empires let that sink in for a moment we want to destroy the empires of the two states that were our allies our number two priority

is to prevent pan arabism from succeeding and from to prevent the Arabs from unifying and creating a single state then after that we're fighting communism unpack for us what the motivations of the Eisenhower Doctrine were exactly when you think about it World War II is this the Spanish americ war is the debutant ball um the United States goes in there beats up Grandpa puts grandpa on his place and says here we are we just defeated a European State um World War I the United States plays an important role uh they come in late right let

the let the war go three quarters of the way through and then come in the last quarter and be the hero of the day but it wasn't clear yet that we were going to be the superpower that we became World War II happens Europe is in ruins the whole place um Mass Carnage whole cities are destroyed and the United States realizes that even though we're going to play this game like the Russians are our Rivals that the reality is that it's a hegemonic world from this point on the United States is the single true superp

that the Soviet Union at some level is a is a paper tiger and and so what eisenh wants to do is he wants to reframe the world and sort of create a I'm going to use a term that's been used more recently but Cox um and so he he changes what Truman had been thinking Truman thought the goal is to sort of isolate the Soviet Union and lock the Soviet Union in what Eisenhower is thinking is no we want to replace the British and French Empires we want to become the new sole superpower and how

do we how do we make that happen I'm not exactly sure why Eisenhower thought fighting pan arabism was so important but I think there is a psychological thing in there by by the time we get to the Eisen our Administration it's clear that there's a lot of petroleum in the Middle East right there's no there's no question about that at all so part of it is obviously that and and it but here's the problem we we tend to go for the economic explanation too quickly and too often there there's almost always another explanation that isn't

economic um part of the problem is is that you know the Arab world is majority Muslim and there's there's this sort of historical background of anti-muslim feelings in Europe and then of course that gets sent to the United States so that that exists um and it it it's also built into the United States um in the 7 1960 census the American colonies Islam was the third largest religion and so it went uh bapt I think it went Baptist Methodist but if I'm wrong about that it's Methodist Baptist and then number three was Islam and so

you know part of the the American Colonial experience was how do we how do we dem muslime the slave population and christianize them so there's this sort of deep-seated anti-muslim feeling that's part of this as well but but I think there's another piece if you go back in time all the way to about 5,100 years ago with the exception of really the last 150 or so years the Middle East has always been host to one of the world's superpowers and I think after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire whether people said it out loud or

not that there was a European and an American sense that we can never let there be another Middle East superpower that this this has to end this this can't go on so one of the problems that Truman was facing was the fear that the United States had that there was going to be a World War II but that that World War II would be against Germany and Japan and that the United States might not win World War II against Germany and Japan so for for Truman the goal was how do we contain Germany and Japan

how do we make Germany and Japan into US vassal states that we can control Eisenhower I began to fear that if this pan Arab movement that was taking hold actually worked we would have another problem and it would be that there would be a new Middle East superpower on the Block and he just needed to make sure that didn't have most readings that we are exposed to in schools and universities and in the media about history is that is that the the US for the last 50 years of of the 21st century was mainly concerned

with Comm communism and they obviously were to to a very large extent Wikipedia says this about the Eisenhower Doctrine which is very different to what you've just said it says under the Eisenhower Doctrine a Middle Eastern country could request American economic Assistance or aid from the US military forces if it was being threatened by armed aggression Eisenhower singled out the Soviet threat in this doct in his Doctrine by authorizing the commitment of US forces to secure and protect the territorial integrity and political independence of such Nations requesting such Aid against overt armed aggression From Any

Nation controlled by International communism why is the world how it is that your interpretations and Wikipedia's interpretations are just so different okay because Wikipedia is doing the official line and I'm reading through the lines between the lines so I'll give you some examples F first of all if if you want to dive deeper into this uh the work written by Bob thealis uh does a better job probably than what I'm doing here talking to you about going into the little details about how Eisen Howard did this um and why Eisen how did this but I'll

give you some some examples so actually let me just give you really one two examples two examples so one is what happens in 1956 um president nser nationalizes the Suz canal and he does it for economic reasons he he wants to build the Aswan High Dam he doesn't have the money to do it the he Egypt purchased World War II material from Czechoslovakia Czechoslovakia was in a communist state Great Britain used that as an excuse to cut off funding for the Aswan High Dam so then nser there was funding coming from the United States and

Great Britain nser goes to the United States and says are you going to still fund your half United States says Eisenhower says no if the briti aren't funding their half we're not going to fund our so that that ends funding for the swan higham Egypt is too poor to build it on its all so he nationalizes su as Canal so that the revenue from the canal will then go fund the down when that happens the United Kingdom and France attack Egypt I'm sorry Israel attacks Egypt first Israel attacks Egypt including dropping paratroopers into the sin

and the Hope was that the Egyptian Military be lured across the sues Canal into the Sinai to defend the Sinai from Israel Naser doesn't fall for the bait the French goal was to then capture the sus canal and trap the Egyptian Army on the wrong side and because Naser doesn't fall for the bait the French and British when they do finally invade you know they they're not fighting any Egyptian military force they're just grabbing territory and Egypt isn't resisting it's allowing this to happen Eisenhower steps in on Egypt side so here's the United you know

a friend of the United States an ally of the United States two two NATO members and then Israel attacking a state that has had relations with a communist country in this case Czechoslovakia and isenhower is taking Egypt's side intervening on Egypt's behalf going to the United ations getting a United Nations Force to go to the Sinai and humiliating and shaming the British so in that particular instance if Eisenhower's real fear was the expansion of Soviet influence in the Middle East he he might not have taken Egypt's side he might have gone a different direction so

that's one example another example is what happens in 1958 so 1958 is the it just seems like there's there are these years where a lot of things happen all at once and then there's periods where you know a little bit's happening here and there and then all of a sudden there's another year where a lot of things happen at once so 1958 is one of those years Egypt and Syria unify the Sudan gets independence from Egypt so it's like going in two different directions at the same time Iraq is in the middle of a revolution

where they're overthrowing their monarchy and um Iraq is saying that it it it's planning on the other side of this to probably join the United Arab Republic and join Egypt and Syria um Iraq is also saying that it wants to Annex quit in 1958 so there's a lot going on all of a sudden nin State sends in the Marine Corps and they invade Lebanon so if the isenhower doctrine was we're going to defend you and we're going to defend you from Invasion who who got invaded what what was the invasion nobody invaded Syria nobody invaded

Iraq there was no reason to invade Lebanon his excuse was were trying to prevent a civil war but there there was no Civil War there there was a there was a political struggle happening in Lebanon but it there wasn't a civil war there was a movement in Lebanon to possibly also join Egypt and Syria as well just like in Iraq but what I think he was really doing was he was doing a show of Force if you do this bad things will happen we'll literally invade your country also he dropped the he dropped the threat

that he was willing to in uh B Iraq nuke Iraq actually in the event that Iraq did invade Kuwait and then as if to make things weirder there were in the Iraqi Revolution uh the Socialists were poised to take over and they do take over Parliament so what Eisenhower does is he instead of backing the monarchists instead of backing the Socialists he backs the Communists CIA is sending the Communist money and the reason is is because he believes and rightly so that the Communists if they're powerful enough they'll prevent Iraq from joining United Arab Republic

well if his priority is stopping communism why would he back the Communist in the end it works and Iraq doesn't join and then three years later the United Arab Republic implodes and Syria declares its independence and so in 1958 he sort of just shows his hands he shows what his priorities are his priorities are to prevent the United Arab Republic from forming he's willing to work with Communists to make that happen we want to kind of move forward but before we do that we move forward to where we start speaking about us interference specifically in

in the various countries in the Middle East but before we actually get there um I think it's important and and you'd probably agree to kind of just paint a picture of just what the Middle East is who Arab people peoples are and also just what happened between 1920 roughly and 1950 where these these states were birthed and how they were actually birthed Okay so um in the 7th Century the religion of Islam is born and an Arab Army leaves the Arabian Peninsula uh right after the death of the Prophet Muhammad and that Arab Army attacks

the Persian Empire defeats the Persian army and what is today Western Iraq that Arab Army then uh joins another Arab Army that had already invaded Palestine and that Arab Army will defeat the Romans and Palestine in Syria in the aftermath of this subsequent Wars or it's really the same War but subsequent leaders in the Arab world will eventually conquer all of the Persian Empire and they will um conquer a huge chunk of the Roman Empire they almost get the whole Roman Empire but they don't quite finish it off the result of this is that culturally

linguistically everything from Morocco to Iraq including parts of Iraq and uh going quite far south so that there's actually areas in Somalia and Eritrea and Chad morania that area speaks Arabic and as a result has an Arab identity marker so it might be worth defining the word Nation a nation is a group of people with a common identity that's the first and most important piece to National to to being a nation you have to say I am so if you say I I am Danish right you're you're claiming your national identity I am Arab you're

claiming your your national identity that's the first piece the second piece is you probably want to have a Common Language now it there's there's variation on this and it's these are human constructs the idea of a Nation so you'll find exceptions to this for example let's say you're uh you know a German American you might still identify is German because you are ethnically German and not speak any German whatsoever so it in other words it's it's a little fuzzy here but but language is really important because you kind of need to be able to speak

to the people from your nation the next two the next three pieces are you have common Traditions common history and a common DNA again you're going to find exceptions to this but as a general people from the same Nation tend to have similar skin color similar hair they tend to look similar cheekbone structure similar nose structure in other words what a nation usually is is it's a group of first second and third cousins who keep having sex with each other and making babies that look like each other in other words when Hitler got up and

said I want to make the German Nation pure what he was really saying is I want to have the German Nation as inbred as German Shepherds which is obviously an awful idea you don't want to do this but but that's that's kind of the core of what a nation is a nation tends to be a a relatively closed off gene pool um with a common history in the case of Arabs there's a little bit of a big exception here so Egyptians are not genetically the same as as people living in Arabia who aren't the same

as people living in Syria who aren't the same as people living in Morocco Arabs have really wide variety of skin colors facial features in other words it doesn't have the kind of hom hity that I think most people are used to when they think about a nation um culturally there's huge variant and even linguistically there's huge variance because you know if you speak Egyptian Arabic and you go to Morocco they might understand you because they watch Egyptian TV and Listen to Egyptian music but you might have a difficulty understanding them it's still the Arabic language

but the dialects are get really really profoundly different but but if you ask that Moroccan assuming they're not a Berber what are you they'll probably say I'm I'm an Arab and if you ask an Egyptian what are you they'll probably say I'm an Arab unless they're a Nubian and in other words the identity marker of Arab is still there and that's the the single most crucial part to the to whether or not you're a nation um so what happened was in 1919 there was an uprising in Egypt where a group of initially it was actually

Christian Egyptians but it obviously spread very quickly to the Muslim population as well these Christian Egyptians came up with the idea that we should create a single pan Arab state that stretches from morania to Iraq um it's secular socialist and promotes the the Arab national identity so that's where the pan arabism comes from the borders the borders are the result of a group of Europeans with a crayon and a napkin sitting around drawing random lines on the napkin and and just chopping the Middle East up in the little pieces the goal always was divide and

conquer how can we take a a population of people who are similar to each other cut them up put them in different states and then have different Empires rule them so that they are divided against each other and then if you can Clump them into uh CLP Clump them with another group right and and with the Arabs they had a problem because if if I cut if I carve uh Jordan off I don't really have another ethnic group inside Jordan that I can Clump them with it it didn't quite work the way I think they

they would have liked to but they obviously had a lot more success in a place like Africa but nonetheless that was the goal so the goal was to make these artificial States create the borders in such a way that it harmed as many people as possible I I think you're gonna ask a question that goes into the details more so I'll stop it there no no I mean look I'm I'm about to do that but I just want to take you back just just to one one just one step because I think what what you've

kind of said this in the start that it's not just about econ economics right which is often how colonialism is sometimes explained um or at least the aftermaths of post colonis explained in terms of what's in terms of your in your best in your financial interests or economic interests um so the thing is and I think a lot of this is also about and you mentioned this already about how how the Western World Views Arabs right um and I think a lot of that is possibly in either misrepresentation or in a misunderstanding of the Genesis

of what you spoke about this wide broad Arab Arab Nation um in one of your in one of your earlier lectures that I've heard cond which one but you actually say this you say the initial Arab Empire was and I quote shockingly non-muslim and shockingly un Arab entity can you just draw some light on that yeah so when when the Muslim Arabs conquered uh the landmass so by 7-Eleven they had conquered most of uh what is today Spain and all of Portugal um and they had actually conquered a little piece of s southern France um

so at that point this the Arab Empire went basically from Spain to roughly where the border between Pakistan and India are um not exactly but in that area so this and it went into Central Asia so this is a really big Empire it was the largest Empire to that date there had never been an Empire larger there have definitely been Empires larger since when the Arabs conquered that land they didn't force anybody to convert they didn't force anybody to change their language the the Arab in fact in fact they they they were kind of I

think shocked I I don't think the Arabs believe they could do what they did and when they did it I think they didn't know like okay now what do we do and so there was there was sort of this sense of okay the Romans and the Persians who are already here who are already running the show know what they're doing let's just leave them in place for the most part let them continue to to rule at the local level we'll make the big decisions at the top and that that's how they ran the Empire so

in the first by by 7-Eleven maybe the Arab Empire was 5% Muslim um there was a large chunk of land that did speak Arabic the Arabian Peninsula was mostly arabic speaking not entirely but mostly Iraq Syria and Palestine were mostly arabic speaking before the Arabs made their empire those places were already majority arabic speaking um they were also majority Christian so when the Arab Empire in its initial phases is Conquering Iraq Syria and Palestine it's actually conquering Christian Arab territory and the number one combat force that they were fighting were Christian Arabs who fought for

the Romans or Christian Arabs who fought for the Persians so a lot of the original battles were actually just Arab versus Arab um with you know with some Persian and Roman auxiliaries uh supporting the Christian Arabs in any case a country like Egypt didn't even start to speak Arabic in in large amounts until about 900 and they started doing it just because it was financially better for you right you nobody was forcing them to speak Arabic it was just I can I'm I'm in the Arab Empire I need to be able to trade with Syria

so in other words Arabic slowly became sort of the what English is today and that was true for the whole planet uh people in India and China for example were learning Arabic just for trading purposes and Arabic became the dominant language for trade uh Egypt probably didn't even become majority Muslim until about 1300 and so you know seven years 700 years after it was conquered it finally became majority Muslim and a large the largest reason for that was The Crusades in the aftermath of the Crusades being a Christian became shockingly unpopular um having said that

when the British did a census a little bit over a hundred years ago in Egypt They concluded that Egypt's po was still 25% Christian so the the the Arab world has always been multi-religious it's always been multiethnic it it was never something that was sort of forced on people the Arabic language wasn't forced on people and Islam wasn't force on people it became the dominant religion just through time not through violence let's first forward back into well not the present but 1925 1930 when where Sykes and Pico are are are drawing with their crayon on

a handkerchief so tell us tell us more specifics about about the the borders they decided to to create and why they why they did it in that way okay so there's there's a couple of things going on one of them is oil they know there's oil there and the the reason they know there's oil is because the English have been really fretting about this so the English did have an oil company it was shell now here's the really weird thing about Shell Shell actually started off as an antique dealership and somehow slowly morphed into an

oil company like just the idea of it is so strange the Dutch bought shell so the company became Royal Dutch Shell and when that happened the Dutch ended up with 51% of the company and the British ended up with 49% what year is this uh I I can't tell you a year I want to say it's like 1880s okay somewhere around there and the the British had already concluded that oil was the new col like that that was the future you needed to have your own oil resources because at some point oil was going to

replace coal and you got to remember that the British Empire is a naval Empire everything is based on ships so if you're going to have oil powered ships and you don't have access to oil your Empire is finished so they're freaking out when Royal Dutch buys shell there was really only one other major oil corporation on the planet at the time and it was Standard Oil and that was that of course belonged to the United States and so there basically there were these two big oil companies and the British didn't own either one of them

now having said that the British had a great relationship with the Netherlands and and the British had a great relationship with the United States so it wasn't like they were owned by two rival States it wasn't like it was France and Germany that owned the oil companies it's just that the British were concerned what if something down the road changes or shifts you know there's a bad election in the United States or the Dutch decide they're more German and they want to go that direction and so the British decide they have to have their own

oil resource so the way they the you know the way you look for oil back then was you walked staring at the ground and you were hoping to find like black Shale or black sandstone a porous rock that that you know acts like a sponge because if it's sitting on top of an oil field it'll literally suck the oil into it and turn black or because there was so much oil on the planet at time you could literally step in a puddle of oil and then that would be a big indication that there was oil

um when the United States found oil in in Pennsylvania they found it at a place called oil Creek in other words there was a really big hint there was probably oil there and and the reason the creek got named oil is the creek was cutting through the oil field and then oil floats so there was this Sheen of oil on top of the creek and they went ah I bet there's oil here let's dig so you right that was how you found oil you just mostly you kept your eyes open but the problem is the

planet is huge and so even though the British Empire own a giant chunk of the planet the idea of sending out armies of people to look at their feet and com whole planet to look for oil seemed daunting so the British decided to do something really extraordinary read history books and look for conversations about oil in the history books and they they found those conversations about oil in the Middle East um a thousand years ago the cities in the Middle East lit up their streets at night using oil using petroleum um the the the Roman

Empire had in the seventh century and then again in the e8th century were using flamethrowers using petroleum to fight the Arabs um at one point Arab armies carried around glass balls with a wick in it and inside it was oil and they would light them and throw them like little Napal hang grenades uh Na that was the the name of the soldiers so uh the British knew there was oil they just didn't know where and so so they moved in grabbed Kuwait by this point the British already had a presence in the Persian Gulf the

Arabian Gulf um and that was in the United Arab Emirates they created the trucial coast um they had already established a relationship with Oman so grabbing Kuwait was just taking a chunk of land away from the the Ottoman Empire and and and basically creating a base with the idea of looking for oil in southern Iraq or in Iran they made a deal with the Persian government and the deal was amazing they got 86% concession so normally when you make a deal like that you get a 5050 right you're the British company you're doing the work

but it's you know it's the Iranian oil so they should get they sure 5050 is pretty normal but the ggers the rulers of Iran were really how should we say into opium and uh maybe not exactly high in the IQ eager to get that British opium more than they were eager to advance their country and so the British got this really amazing concession from them and uh that began to shape the way they thought about oil I'm sorry thought about the Middle East having said that they found oil I'm pretty sure the Anglo Persian oil

company found oil in like 1908 we should double check my date um so that shortly after they get the concession they find it short after they find it in Iran the Ottoman Empire finds it in what is today Northern Iraq and the British are eager to get a deal with the Ottoman Empire for that oil but the Ottomans decide that Germany is their future and so the the Turks make a deal with the Germans and of course in that moment the British are thinking okay the Ottoman Empire is you know we have to destroy it

Germany can't have this oil Germany can't uh have this kind of access to oil and the reason is quite simply that they were worried that the German Navy was gonna eventually CLP eclipse the British Navy and the British and the Germans were in a an arms race every time the Germans built a a ship the British would build two ships and that would force the Germans to build another ship to try to cancel the two ships the British just built which would then force the British to build two new ships and they were bankrupting each

other at the at the rate that they were building ships it was inevitable that both economies were going to collapse and that's one of the reasons why World War I had to happen the they had to they had to just resolve the arms race one way or another somebody just simply had to to come out on top and of course the British come out on top the there is nothing wrong or evil about what the Germans did any more than what the British or the French did in World War I they're not the bad guys

they were all bad right it was just a bunch of evil States attack attacking each other it's not like World War II where it's easy to sort of lay blame on the Germans in any case Sykes and Pico get together because they want to talk about what the future is and that future will not include an Ottoman Empire the British and the French had decided that they were simply going to take out the Ottoman Empire it didn't hurt any that uh there's an Arab Uprising and the Arabs are actually in the act of defeating the

Ottomans because they're trying to break away and create their own independent state um and so the British and the French well the British really not the French assist the Arab Uprising but not because they cared about Arab aspirations but because an enemy of an enemy is a friend um and then the their their first goal of course was to undermine that Arab State and they did they successfully undermined it that Arab state did exist briefly its capital was Damascus um it had a flag shockingly similar to the Jordanian and Palestinian flag uh the stripes were

weren't the exact order right it wasn't uh black white uh green it was if I remember green black green white but almost the exact same flag um and there that's where the jordanians and the Palestinians got their flag it was inspired by that Arab that first attempt at creating a United Arab state from from Syria in any case syes and Pico be before that Arab State existed before World War I is resolved are sitting down and talking about how they're going to carve up the Middle East when they made the plan there was still a

Russian Empire so Greece the Italian Empire the Russian Empire the British Empire and the French Empire were going to be the participants in this giant carve up event so one one piece that needed to be carved up was the Ottoman Empire they were going to leave leave a piece behind that was going to become turkey but they were going to give a big piece to Italy in the South so antalia area that was going to go to Italy in the West ismir Was going to go to Greece so the Greeks were going to have the

western shore of what is today Turkey um and then the French we're going to end up with Syria Lebanon and what is today Iraq the English were only going to take what is today Palestine Israel and Jordan um and the reason why the British were okay with that is then the French would get the oil that was in Iraq because the British were planning to get the oil that was in Iran the Russian Empire was going to invade Iran take the northern half of Iran and the British Empire was going to invade and take the

southern half and that would get them access to oil that they could feel secure with the Russians though during World War I decide they're going to go communist have the Bolshevik Revolution and declare that they're no longer they no longer have imperialist aspirations and that they won't work with capitalist anymore and the British Empire realizes if there's no Russia to invade Iran from the north there's no way the British can manage Iran by themselves they they need to divide and conquer they can't do it just conquering so the British backstab the French and take Iraq

and they they're like you know we're sorry but we need to secure the our oil fields you guys just have to figure it out on your own why do the French just agree to that the the French were in such awful shape at the end of World War I um the British Empire was the hegemonic superpower France was in Number the number two slot I think that at that point the French were just grateful that the British were willing to even cut them in because the French had nothing to do with the destruction of the

Ottoman Empire it was the uh the the Arab Uprising the British did do the invasion at gipo but that also didn't right the the Turks won at galipoli it's okay though because the British were using Australians and nobody loves Australians so you know they're they're it's amazing that the British are like that but they are it's it's really amazing in any case uh the I think the French were just happy to have anything at that point they were grateful also they they will figure out eventually it's too late for them but that there is oil

in Northern Syria it was nothing like what was in Iraq so they they were probably hoping that they'd find something okay and what happens with Egypt and and Saudi Arabia okay so um Egypt had a different trajectory in 1798 Napoleon bonapart invades Egypt and after securing Egypt he actually invaded Palestine and his goal was to uh move the Jewish population out of France to Palestine he wanted to ethnically cleanse the Jewish population from Europe and you know people see it as oh he loved the Jewish people well if he loved them so much why didn't

he want them to stay in France he clearly didn't love them as much as I think some people think um in any case Napoleon is defeated the British sink his Navy uh the catch his Navy in a in a bay and sink it and it's a disaster and the French to escape Egypt and you know Napoleon was thinking he was going to basically march to China he was gonna he was going to start this new massive Empire with Egypt as his base of operations and the British ruin it for him so he decides you know

okay I'll just conquer Europe so he Retreats back to France what what that did though was it inspired somebody so there was an Albanian General who was part of the Ottoman Army his name was mahmmed Ali or Muhammad Ali depending on whether you're an Arab or a Turk he was an Albanian so I I guess we should ask the albanians what they say um he goes wow what Napoleon did was actually really cool I bet I could do something like that myself he takes his ottoman Army that he's in command of he invades creit takes

it over and then waits for the ottoman arm bar to respond it doesn't and then he's like well let's go and he invades Egypt conquers Egypt and then he takes his army into Palestine goes up through Syria and he actually invades what is today turkey before the Ottoman Empire goes whoa what are you doing please stop right he's just an ottoman General who goes Rogue he didn't speak any Arabic um he knew Turkish and Albanian his soldiers mostly speak Turkish and Albanian you know like this is this is such an odd thing to be doing

this is what he does he's he's a Visionary and he thinks in Grand terms he negotiates out a deal with the Ottoman Empire where he'll give back a bunch of Syria and turkey in exchange he'll become basically the governor of an autonomous Egypt and he starts a whole dynasty of kings of Egypt that are they didn't take the title initially but you know it's effectively what they became um who are going to be the governors of a semi-autonomous Egypt in to to mix the two histories the SS the sa the Saudi family had actually created

a state so if you look it up it's the first Saudi state in the 1700s that Saudi State lasted something like 80 years what happened was their Capital was Deo which is right next to Riad um in 1818 the Ottoman Empire was really upset with this first Saudi State because it it had become quite large it conquered what is today the UAE it had Bahrain uh it had essentially all of what is today Saudi Arabia and that was at the expense to some degree of the Ottoman Empire not all of that land was Ottoman territory

but a bunch of it was and so the Ottoman Empire asked mhmed Ali basically for uh a favor and they said you know uh technically you're part of the Empire can you go put down this this Saudi State and he does he takes an army into Saudi what this the first Saudi State he goes to daa he destroys daa and the first Saudi state is is terminated it doesn't stick I I think it was six years later 1824 that's the year in my head um a second Sai state is formed that second Saudi state will

eventually also fail and then a third Saudi state is formed out of nudged its idea is it wants to recreate the first Saudi State this big almost the entire Arabian Peninsula siiz State um but when we were talking earlier I was telling you about the fact that uh there was this attempt to create this Arab state in Syria when that Arab state was being created it was created by hais so West people who were living in Western Saudi Arabia it was a hashimite kingdom um the British go to the SS and they say we're going

to undermine and destroy this hashimite state but it would be helpful if you did as well now the the SS don't react to that they're they're not directly uh responsive to the British but eventually they do and they'll go and they'll conquer hez they'll put it together and they create the third Saudi State as a result the British and the Saudi royal family had a cordial relationship they the British saw the SS as somebody they could work with somebody that maybe that they had enough in common with that they didn't feel like they were a

threat in the case of Egypt the British did something really strange so the French built the sus Canal but when the French built the sus Canal they charged Egypt for it now you go okay well they built it well let me rephrase that a French company went to Egypt and then hired Egyptian laborers at way under labor value prices and then had them almost as slaves dig the suest canal with high mortality rates and then charge the Egyptian government for them and you know at some level you go really this is just another little imperialist

scheme well the to do this the Egyptian state had to borrow money from Banks so that's what they did well in 1882 the British government decided that they were going to use the the debt Egypt owed it as an excuse to invade they invaded and conquered Egypt um there was actually a whole Defense Force set up in Alexandria to try and stop what you a possible European Invasion the Defense Force fails and the British take over Egypt and they make it a protectorate inside the EMP Empire and they eventually Force the out of power but

then they replace him with a king and so Egypt becomes an independent Kingdom from the Ottoman Empire at that point let's move to 1950 right but for the sake of actually working through this um let's just deal with the region as a region now um and I just want you to talk through how some of the events that occurred were just really interventionist and how destructive they were let's start with uh with Syria 1949 yeah so Syria gets it independence from the French Empire right after World War II uh 1946 and uh the first president

of Syria is a guy named Al katle um you know it's a fledgling State it's a republic they're having free and fair elections they're trying to make things work and in the middle of this there is uh a a couet the cou d'a is launched by the CIA there's a guy named Miles cop who by the way was also a musician so it's possible people have heard of him he was a jazz musician um his son yeah his son I think became this the drummer for sting so uh there was like a little bit of

a family thing he he was in the CIA and uh he he goes to Syria and launches this cou d' and they topple the kle government and it's catastrophic Syria will then end up spending years trying to dig itself out nine years uh trying to dig itself out of this if I remember correctly Syria ended up with 11 governments over the course of that nine years like it was just coup after coup after coup at one point a guy who had been pulled out of government by a coup ends up doing a coup again and

getting back in like it's a mess it's a disaster finally in 1958 uh Al qule gets back into power he manages to get get back hold of the Syrian State he examines it he looks it over and he concludes Syria's collapsed that the this it's a failed State and that there's really nothing he can do to stop it from go from truly becoming failed and uh he went to gal Abdul Naser the president of Egypt and said you want to unify the Arabs let's start right now unify with Syria Naser said this is a disaster

I'm not ready Egypt's not ready we don't have the infrastructure we don't have the political system we haven't built the institutions necessary to do this and katle goes look this is going to end two ways a Egypt annexes Syria and we become the United Arab Republic or B Syria goes communist the Communists are on the brink of taking over the state and nser was a fierce anti-communist he was a socialist but he didn't have any use for communist and so Naser basically went fine I don't want Syria to go communist and he he annexes and

of course that's a disaster um nser literally became paranoid ABD Hakim Amar was a terrible guy to have being in charge of this he was a narcissist who only thought of himself um and it so the combination of naser's paranoia and Abdul Hakim Omar's uh incompetence the Syrian military does a coup and pull Syria out of the United Arab Republic after three years it doesn't help much Syria is still having couet after couet uh finally in 1970 haa alasa takes over and hav alas had what it took to to stabilize the Syrian State and he

will rule it until he dies and then his son has been ruling since Syria has not had the best post World War II experience taking me back just what were the motivations for the CIA C back in 1949 why did they do it so this is like I can I have a better chance to tell you motivations for Mad du's overthrow I at some level I think it was an experiment to see if they could do a coup and they were like can we just let's just pick a random country go in there and and

and take it down um and the reason I'm saying that is because Syria wasn't an oil Rich State Syria's economy wasn't big enough to be to care about it one way or another it wasn't like Syria was promoting some kind of ideology that the United States didn't like like there there's no no real good analysis I think that you could come up with a real motivation for doing it other than we just want our guy to be in in charge in another country but the problem is they didn't get that result they just got a

series of coups that followed so if that was their goal they they failed on a really Grand scale but you know katle was no threat to US foreign policy he was wasn't you know in a position to do anything serious against anybody or anything so it doesn't it doesn't feel like it has the kind of logic that what happens in Iran has okay so what what what happens in Iran um why does the CIA overthrow mused in 1953 so in 1950 madak becomes the prime minister of Iran and one of the things he wants to

do is get rid of this stupid concession the British God when they created the N the Anglo Persian Oil Company by this point it's called the Anglo Iranian Oil Company because Persia has renamed itself Iran um and so mosc decides he's going to nationalize the oil company and the British will have a 0% concession and so the oil company today is called the national Iranian oil company they just replaced Anglo with national madc knows from past experience that the British will do a couet and overthrow his government if he attempts to to do this Iran

would have just noticed what happened to Al quatle so it's not like it's a it's a far-fetched scenario it just happened the year before but Iran's me uh experience with this was way more intimate in 1905 Iran became uh it began to experiment with becoming an electoral Republic and it actually implemented the institution and began to have elections the British lost their mind they were horrified at the prospect that if Iran did become a Democratic Society that that the voters would vote for a government that would come back later and um vote to end the

the British concession the British oil concession so the British went to the Russians and said look let's get in there let's overthrow the government and basically restore the monarchy and so that's what they did and so the M that knows that the British will do this again to Iran's second attempt at at becoming a democracy in the sense that we misuse the word today right it's really a republic um so what the first thing he does before he he nationalizes the oil company is he throws the British Embassy out because the British Embassy is where

they'll launch the coup from and so he throws the British Embassy out basically cuts off relations with the English and then he nationalizes the oil company the British immediately go to hares Truman and say hey uh Mr President you know we can't we can't overthrow the Iranian government because our assets have been kicked out of the country but you could uh you want to use your cool little CIA and what you just did in Syria and do that in Iran and Truman said no he didn't want to do it and then of course in 1952

Eisenhower was running for president the British J even wait for him to win the election everybody knows he'll win so it's not a surprise but still they don't even wait for him to become president they go to him and they say once you become president will you overthrow the government Iran for us and Eisenhower says yeah of course now when they you know and without getting into the details of how Kermit Roosevelt pulls off the the overthrow of madc government um when they do this the British are thinking okay it'll be back to the way

it was and is how asked to actually explain to the British no we're replacing you um we you know you can still come back into Iran but Iran's now in our sphere and so that's that's the birth of the the the strong us Iranian relationship that ends in catastrophe with the Islamic revolution tell us about that relationship just tell us how intertwined Iran became with the USA under the Sha yeah so the Sha um was a big dreamer um first of all it's worth pointing out that in World War II the Sha's father was taken

out by the British and the and the British uh the British fear that the Sha's father was you know a little too sympathetic to the Nazis but that wasn't the real reason the real reason the British were doing this was they just wanted to secure they wanted to make sure nothing happened in Iran to upset their supply of oil um so what happened was uh they overthrow the father but have a conversation with the son before that happens just to make sure he's okay with it he's thrilled because he gets to become Shaw that much

quicker the father got sent to the SE shells where he'll spend the rest of his life and so the the Sha of Iran now is this Monarch whose power wasn't quite as strong as I think the British had hoped which is why in 1950 Iran becomes a republic and mosc as a prime minister is is running the show so when the United States does the coup against mosc they don't replace him with their prime minister they basically give the power back to the shaw they they destroy Iran's Republican institutions and make it an absolute monarchy

basically it's not completely but you know make it into a constitutional monarchy with way more power in the Shaw's hand than I you know I think the average person would assume the United States would want and the relationship became really strong in part because the Sha View the United States as the thing you wanted to become that was the goal he wanted to modernize Iran by the way his father did too and his father had implemented amazing modernization programs the sh wanted to modernize Iran but he did some things that were culturally a little off

um he kept promoting ancient Iranian culture and it wasn't quite sinking in with the Iranian public I bet if he did did it now it would but at the the time it wasn't it wasn't people weren't connecting with it um I know the reason I'm suggesting that it would now is I know that a lot of Iranians from the diaspora love to watch those videos they're they're wishing that they had the Sha a lot of them are wishing they had the shaw back and that he was promoting ancient Iranian civilization um he did manage to

do some modernization but what Iranians began to feel was he was doing an expense of Iranian culture and and who Iranians were they were losing their identity one of the nicknames that Iran got was uh the shopping mall of the Middle East and I think that that rubbed a lot of people wrong um Gago the famous singer she's amazing by the way I love her stuff uh she put out an album in the 1970s where she's holding two two pistols and she's wearing a cowboy hat and you know like Iran got into this culture of

everybody's dying their hair and uh getting nose jobs so that they can have white looking noses and I think when you do something like that you need to watch out for pendulum swing in other words Iran had gone too far in One Direction too quickly and that creates this reaction and the reaction of course is this catastrophic event called Islamic revolution um it's a reactionary event because it's not addressing the core problems it's just saying you know we're going to zero everything out and start over again and it it doesn't work I think the way

the average Iranian had hoped it would work okay we're gonna we're gonna come back to to the Iranian Revolution and and the US role in actually getting getting heni to to Iran um but before that while we still like sort of in the 50s timeline let's go let's go back to to Egypt and to Saudi Arabia where two things are happening where NASA is is trying to form the United Arab Republic and where the Saudis are now in a decade relationship with the with the with the US Post the rosfeld deal um can you tell

us about the roseld deal in 1945 and just how that started forting Saudi us relations we began to think there was probably some decent oil reserves in Saudi in the 1930s and a u a Texas California oil company called calex uh actually moved to Saudi and began looking for oil and they began finding oil so we knew there was there was something there and as they kept exploring they kept finding more and more um in World War II in a last ditch desperate attempt to try to turn the tide the Germans launched an event called

the Battle of the Bulge so it's December 1944 the Germans surrender in May so it's literally six months before they surrender this is It's it's way too late to turn the tide but uh that's the cool thing about fanatics fanatics don't care about it you know they don't look at the data they just they just act like maniacs so here's what the Germans did they took all what if you ask the average person on the planet today who won World War II Germany the United States or the Soviet Union I think You' get three different

answers from a large portion of population but the majority of people would say United States it was the so Union in Europe the United States was a sideshow the Germans had the very few soldiers fighting the United States in France and then on the on the Western Front they had the worst equipment their worst tanks their worst artillery pieces the Germans were fighting the Soviet Union they had all their best units all their best tanks fighting the Soviet Union so they did they did a little bit of math and they went what if we weren't

fighting the Soviet Union would we be able to defeat the United States and Great Britain so they grabbed all best units off the Eastern front left just a skeleton force on the Eastern front and rush it to the Western Front and they attacked through Belgium and their goal was to get to the English Channel cut off the British and US forces in in the Netherlands destroy them and then sue for peace with the United States and Great Britain and they thought that the United States and Great Britain would accept the German surrender where Germany would

then be allowed to continue to fight the war against the Soviet Union and maybe even that the United States and Great Britain would join Germany and help them fight the Soviet Union that's that's how crazy this plan was they attack and it's like a hot knife through butter American forces in Belgium are almost completely annihilated uh there's a Airborne unit in Baston that holds the its ground and gets surrounded because the Germans just go all the way around it everything else disintegrates the the German military is on its way to the English Channel there is

nothing we can do to stop it it is going to happen and then they ran out of gasoline the Germans had the best tanks in the war at that point they had Panthers and tiger Tomos nothing could stand up to it the United States had crappy M4 Shermans they were terrible tags and um they ran out of gas gas tanks I don't care how good your tank is if it doesn't have gasoline it's completely worthless it's useless we win the Battle of the Bulge and decide we never want to be that guy we don't ever

want to be in a situation where we're on the verge of possibly winning a battle and we lose it because we ran out of gasoline so Franklin Delano Roosevelt goes to Egypt he meets with the King of Saudi Arabia in the sus canal in January 1945 like literally the next month and and they make a deal and the deal is to create a ramco and the Saudis will agree to trade oil in US Dollars there will be a US Air Base in thean aranco will be a joint Arabian American Oil Company the most important part

is that Saudi Arabia promises it will never cut off the supply of oil to the United States um and and then in return the United States will protect the Saudi royal family for all eternity so that's that's the deal why do the Saudis trust the deal I mean over the last 60 70 years given America's um interventions in various countries which we'll still get to I mean I would never trust the United States um how many allies is the United States ultimately ended up backstabbing or betraying or turning against I I think the thought that

the Saudis have and they're not wrong for this is as long as the oil is flowing and as long as American businesses are making money there the United States has no incentive to disrupt the flow of oil by doing a war so I think there's there's sort of a calculation there another and then eventually the Saudis realized something else and that is they have so much Capital that they can heavily invest in the United States that the United States can can become can end up with a kind of a codependent relationship with Saudi Arabia so

and they they were right to think that um United States obviously has a more codependent relationship with China and Japan but the Saudis are you know in in the mix and so I think at some level the Saudis were gambling on will'll just make it economically not useful for the United States to mess with them um and they got lucky and and you know Saudi Arabia is an amazing place today because they got lucky uh they could have very easily have been on the wrong side of it and they just weren't so I we've discussed

n a bit but I think it's important to just kind of speak more about him and his vision and how his vision is more or less eventually cut down by the events of the 1967 war yeah so naser's goal was to create a United Arab Republic the goal the idea of it came out of the 1919 Uprising um in in M place that Egyptians love to do revolutions um this idea of pan Arab secular socialist state comes into being the the revolution started in there was a revolution in 1880 the English attack in 1882 at

the middle of the Revolution they used the revolution uh as a way to sort of uh use Egypt's instability to take it over 1919 Egypt does another Revolution and then in 1952 Egypt does a third Revolution Egyptians like Revolutions in case you hadn't figured it out 2011 does yet another Revolution it's like a it's like a hobby it's a side side gig um I I think only Iran has had more uprisings than Egypt in the last hundred years so um Iran and Egypt are clearly in a competition in any case in 1952 the Army steps

in and they overthrow the monarchy and they end the revolution when that happens uh Muhammad niib becomes the first President of Egypt um for the record he was half Sudanese so sometimes you'll hear Egyptians say we had the first black president of a white country uh if Egyptians got an an airplane and flew to the United States and got off the airplane no Americans would identify them as white it's maybe you could maybe make the argument he's the first black president of a brown country but it's fun this this idea of aspiring to whiteness that

people do in any case uh Muhammad niib ends up getting uh compromised by the CIA the CIA actually brought in bags of money to bribe them noser finds out about it and and basically does a a coup and takes over the country nser was already probably pulling strings in the background it wasn't like it was he came out of nowhere um he takes over the country and then he has a new Constitution created and they they actually have have a vote for it so naser's thinking was let's move towards this pan Arab State let's do

it slowly let's build the institutions that are necessary and he he takes some gambles so one of the gambles that he makes by the way uh King faroo had already committed to doing this was to educate the Egyptian population so in other words put a bunch of money into making it so that there was an elite educated Arab class of people who could build Bridges who could build roads build buildings they would be the lawyers to run the state they could build dams or at least maintain them right he wanted to create this technocrat and

skilled population bunch of MDS so that Egypt would be able to become a fully modern State we've already talked about what happens with Syria and obviously that does a lot to derail uh naser's goals because you know part he needed Syria to work and it doesn't work um what also happens right around the same time period is Yemen ends up in a civil war and uh the monarchy is being attacked by uh socialists the Socialists ask Egypt to come in the and Yemen becomes a republic and the monarchists become a rebel force that are trying

to stop the you know defeat the Republic and restore the monarchy and uh the Egyptians do go in in 1961 Yemen actually joins what was called the United Arab states because NASA's original goal was to create a Confederacy so there would be a United Arab states and then eventually that would morph into a single state which would be called the United Arab Republic so when Syria and Egypt joined they're derailing his timeline um but Yemen does join the United Arab states it's why Yemen has the flag that it has by the way Iraq had planned

to join United Arab Republic that's why it has the flag it has so in other words Palestine and Jordan have the the hashimite Damascus Kingdom of Syria state flag and then Iraq Syria Egypt uh Sudan and Yemen have variants of the United Arab Republic flag in any case the Egyptian Army is bogged in Yemen naser's reforms are tended to be idealistic they weren't necessarily always well thought through they definitely weren't always executed very well the Army started to get a little corrupt because people began to realize they could make money from within in other words

his dream is kind of falling apart while he's alive but he's also contending with a new force in the world which is uh describable as Islamic fundamentalism so so uh there's a point where he makes a speech and he talks about an event that he had with the head of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the the speech is really fascinating speech it's a cultural speech right he's I want to say he's making the speech around 1958 1960 I don't know the exact year but it's it's early in his presidency and he he said when

we first did the revolution we went we met with the Brotherhood because we wanted to come up with a compromised so that we didn't have to think about any kind of struggle going forward we'd have a unified Egypt and he said okay what is the one thing you want to see and the the the Brotherhood leader said I want women to cover their hair and noser goes that's the thing you wanted to see like that's the change that will make Egypt a better place is women are covering their hair and he says yeah and nozer

says to him no in your house you make the rules but but I think people should be free to do whatever they want to outside of the home right you want to cover your hair you don't and he and the guy's like no you're the president of Egypt you have to set the moral standard so Master tells him he says well I checked up your daughter she's in medical school and her hair isn't covered you want me you can't cover your daughter's hair you want me to go cover the hair of 10 million Egyptian women

there's a crowd mon is giving this speech to a live crowd they erupt with laughter because just 65 years ago the idea that Egyptian women were going to cover their hair was a laughable thing in other words there was there wasn't this kind of fundamentalist Muslim movement yet it was it was forming with the Brotherhood there were the idea of it was there it just it hadn't really gripped the Middle East yet and NASA is having to deal with that he's dealing with Yemen he's got a government that's slowly becoming more and more corrupt some

of his plans aren't totally well thought through Syria breaks away the Sudan breaks away and then comes 1967 the Israelis begin doing raids in Jordan so the uh King Hussein of Jordan is telling nser you have to do something to help us the Israelites keep attacking us and nser is in a position where he feels like if he doesn't do something that he'll look foolish so he closes the state Straits of Tran so if you look at a map there's a the Gulf of akaba is a very thin uh body of water between Saudi Arabia

and and the S Jordan and Israel touch the Gulf of akaba Israel has a tin tiny little uh City there called yat and it got something like maybe 2% maybe 5% of its trade through elot they were it was Red Sea trade when nser closes the straights of Jordan he's closing somewhere between two to 5% of Israel's trade but he doesn't actually close it he declares it closed and then doesn't enforce it so it's a completely symbolic gesture and reason doing it is he feels backed into a corner and feels he has to do something

so he doesn't enforce it so Israeli ships could just freely go through it um and then what ends up happening is Israel says you cut off the lifeblood of Israel we can't function like this and they begin to Rattle their saber like we're going to go to war Naser actually sends a communic to um president Lyndon Baines Johnson and says you know I want to resolve this peaceful is there the Israelis sound like they're going to probably attack Egypt at some point where are we on this and uh Johnson says don't worry about it I

promise you Israel will not attack and ner needs to know because so much of the military is in Yemen and the Israelis do attack they they completely surprise the Jordanian Syrian and Egyptian militaries and they defeat all three simultaneously in a blitz Creek style war reminiscence of German tactics in World War II they do it in six days so if if you if you really hate an Egyptian and you just want to hurt them just go 1967 it is simply one of the most humiliating events ever and it's catastrophic uh at that point Naser has

lost all sorts of legitimacy uh Egypt is basic loses the Sinai the Suez Canal which he had you know politically managed to to keep and hold is now shut down because the Israelis are on the other side of the Su Canal cutting off European and Asian trade they now have to go all the way around Africa um the Israelis seize the Gan Heights they seiz the Gaza Strip they seiz the West Bank and so now all of a sudden the Palestinian population which had been the West Bank was in Jordan the Gaza Strip was administered

by Egypt that that that Palestinian population is now under total Israeli control except for the you know the refugees in Syria or the refuges in in Jordan or Egypt and so it's it's a shocking gamechanging event Naser walks into Madan tah and he says I don't deserve to be your president I'm I'm ready to resign and the people start shouting his name and they lift him into the air and they say you're all president and he remains the president of Egypt for three years uh until he dies but those are you know three relatively unproductive

years in effect what happened was he went up against the United States and he didn't quite pull it off that there's a lot of lessons in what went wrong and you know he's worth examining and it's hard to be mad at him um but he does in the end ultimately fail you mentioned that he goes up against the United States do you think the United States was privy to Israel's attack what what's your reading of that so you know it's hard to say um the the United States had a ship off the coast of the

sin uh called USS Liberty and the israelies actually attacked the US ship and and destroyed it they sank it um when the US Sailors were getting off the ship into lifeboats the Israelis actually went in with an airplane and strafed it and was shooting the the sailors in the water uh at one point is Israeli boat came and grabbed one of the lifeboats and and Ed it in the air to knock the sailors into the water it and that event has always struck me as really bizarre it almost makes me feel like there was a

disagreement about whether Israel should attack or not and this was the way Israel was showing the United States no we're we're going to do whatever we want to we don't even care about you and your ships um but it but it's also possible that it was the other way that Johnson knew all along and he was happy to he was happy to let the Israelis do what they did and the you know you never know what to do with eyewitness accounts but there were eyewitness accounts in Egypt of US aircraft flying over Egypt during the

war attacking Egyptian sites air airfields attacking Egyptian airfields um I don't know that there's enough evidence of that to say that the United States did it the United States did have an aircraft carrier in the area so it's possible um but it but you know like whether or not the United States was behind it or backed it is is unclear it's a little shrouded in mystery if I was going to guess I would say the United States was was totally okay with it probably narrow and uh was happy with the outcome we haven't yet actually

discussed the origins of of Israel um and Palestine um so I think before we move because we we're about to jump back to Persia and Iran and the Sha and the Revolution and then the the Iran Iraq war and then Gulf War I but I think before that let's let let's go back let's let's deal with probably what we going what's the the main reason for our discussion today um let's let's let's discuss the Genesis of Israel yeah so in the aftermath of World War II uh the Zionist movement finally had a little bit of

uh of legitimacy so Zionism was born in the end of the 19th century as a result of the dfus affair so dfus was a Jewish German officer in the French army it's a little a little convoluted he gets busted by the French for being a spy for Germany the Jewish population in Europe interpreted that as an attack on a and a Jewish person it it's just as possible if not as likely that it was it was actually attack on an ethnic German living in France right yeah there was probably I'm not denying there was anti-Semitism

in France obviously was but but he was also German so there was probably also a component of anti-g germanness reality was is he was scapegoated he had nothing to do with what he was being charged with and so um zionists like Herzel are Bor the the Zionist movement is born Herzel kind of being the father of it in the Jewish population it had already existed as an idea we described earlier Napoleon wanting to send Jews to Palestine so the dominant anti-jewish ideology was originally called uden hos in Germany which meant Jew hatred the problem with

the name was it sounds like an emotional thing as opposed to a logical thing so they coined the phrase anti-Semitism so that they could say look it's I it's not that I have an emotion I just I disagree with the presence of Jews in Europe part a component of of the anti-semitic movement was we just wanted the Jews to leave the initial ideology didn't want to kill the Jewish population obviously it morphs into that and turns into the Holocaust but the original goal wasn't to kill them it was just to evict them um you know

in the same way that uh there's a there's a portion of the United States population that wants to evict undocumented immigrants or that the German population wanted to evict undocumented polish immigrants or that the British wanted to evict the Polish immigrants and that's why they voted for brexit right it's that it's that mentality and so here are these profoundly racist anti-semites they coin the phrase anti-Semitism the Zionist movement goes maybe they're right maybe we should leave Europe maybe we're not we can't make a good life for ourselves here um Herzel wasn't interested initially in palis

he want he was thinking some place like Uganda so in a really weird way what happened was the creation of a population of White Europeans who were who wanted to conduct a colonial Enterprise not unlike the colonial Enterprise that ended up with Argentina and the United States and Canada and Australia where there would be a population of white people going to another country and ethnically cleansing and genociding the local population to take it from them ultimately the zionists really just wanted to go to Palestine um the balfor Declaration sort of reinforces the idea of going

to Palestine um balfor was a British Lord who said that's where they should end up um and then World War II happens before World War II happens a lot of Jews decide to do this and they begin migrating to Palestine the Palestinian population welcomed them they they saw this as sort of a natural outcome um in part because historically Jews and Muslims and Christians in the Middle East got along you have to remember that even during the Crusades the native Christian population if it had been open to the Crusader states in the beginning totally rejected

the Crusader states by the end and were siding with the the the the their fellow Muslims against the Crusades the Crusaders and the Jewish population was always against the Crusaders there was this history of Muslims knew the Jews were their allies and so the idea of Jewish Europeans coming to Palestine the Palestinians welcome them in uh there's count a count after a count after account of Palestinian families letting like Jewish poles move into their homes and live with them and then they would do something foolish like go on vacation and come back and the Jewish

population in the home said no no this is our home now and you can't come back into it and and and so there was this strange effect of the Palestinians going yeah sure come the Jewish immigrants to Palestine sorry this was like 1910 20s like tens 20s 30s some of them began to do terrorism and so there terrorist organizations formed they began attacking British assets they attack hotels British military bases um so there's a violent element to this um there was a also an attempt to Simply legally purchase land and the the Zionist ended up

purchasing somewhere around 5 10% of Palestine legally and then in the process uh there was attempts to create land confiscation where they would just go onto a piece of land that nobody owned and begin colonizing it um the World War II happens there's the Holocaust which is a catastrophic event and the world becomes open to the idea that yeah there needs to be a Jewish State the irony is if you're going to create the Jewish State let's do it so I'm part Austrian just I want to out that because I'm I'm going to suggest the

Middle East peace solution let's make Austria New Israel Hitler was in Austria the the Germans Austria is German they speak German you can talk to austrians and go I'm not a I'm ger not I'm not German I'm Austrian whatever they're Germans the Germany did the Holocaust Germany annexed Austria and did the Holocaust so put Israel in Austria call it Israel make the danu be the the boundary between the Austrian area you know so instead of calling it The the West Bank call it the North bank right and put the austrians there Vienna will rename it

Jerusalem and then TR will call it the trr strip and we'll just shove a bunch of the Austrian population into the North Bank and the Tero strip but then let's colonize the the North Bank and and create little walled off sections and ghetto eyes the I mean I think that's the solution the natural solution instead the world thought let's do this to Palestine which is ironic because it's the Palestinians had nothing to do with the Holocaust in anyway shape or form uh during the war some Jews from Palestine actually joined a Jewish uh Brigade that

fought with the British the British wouldn't let Palestinians do that because they didn't want Palestinians to have had combat experience but but they did employ Palestinians as stevors so Palestinians did serve on the docks loading and unloading ships uh so that so that white people could fight the war because the British were nervous about about having brown and black people fight and they they did brown and black people definitely fought for the British they were just reluctant they didn't want anybody getting an idea and leading a rebellion when they went back home to Kenya or

South Africa or Palestine um ironically the British love to put giras and Maes into combat situations but that's a different story so in the aftermath of all of this the UN votes to divide Palestine and and create an Israel and a pal INE the division the vote for the division gave Israel about 55% of Palestine and gave the Palestinians 45% so the 55% that was going to go to Israel that land was to create a Jewish only state and then the 45% that was going to go to Palestine would be for Christians Jews and Muslims

but the problem was is that the the land didn't belong to the Jewish population right because they bought 5 to 10% of the land so basically gifting somewhere between 45 and 50% of the land to this Zionist movement what about the Palestinians already living there so the Arabs rejected this the Israelis invaded they declare they declare their independence what it is it's a colonial Enterprise they invade and Conquer Palestine there's a war the 1948 War and the you know the Egyptian army goes in with rifles that don't work they had tanks that were profoundly flawed

like tanks that could only turn in One Direction or the turret didn't turn or the machine gun didn't work um they were mostly I don't know if they were mostly but a lot of them were steuarts which were these little itty bitty tank cats uh the Israelis were better armed better equipped they had more combat experience there was a bunch of them there was a huge Invasion Force you know the jordanians made an attempt to stop this the syrians fought there were Iraqi units that showed up as volunteers nobody could stop the Israelis from creating

the state by the time they were done the Israelis ended up with 78% of Palestine so the UN division of uh Palestine created three Israeli wedges one in the middle one in the north east and then one in the South and then it created four Palestinian wedges one that was about twice the size of the Gaza Strip where the Gaza Strip is like the remnant of it one that was probably about one and a third times the size of the West Bank where the West Bank is and then one in the Northwest um so you

know like Bethlehem was supposed to be in the west bank and then uh hia was supposed to be Palestinian and by the time the Israelis were done they had Shrunk the West Bank they had dramatically Shrunk the Gaza Strip and they just took the remaining piece there were four pieces because yafa was going to become a little Enclave in Palestine that was completely thred by Israel in the sea and then uh Jerusalem was going to be a neutral zone and it was going to be administered by the United Nations that was the plan and uh

the Israelis of course broke the whole thing old Jerusalem or west or east Jerusalem ended up in Jordan West Jerusalem ended up in Israel and uh the Israelis during the conquest committed some acts of terrorism so there's a place called area scene where they do they conduct a massacre and the Hope was to cause panic in the Palestinian population to cause them to run away and they did a huge portion of the Palestinian population flees fearing that darasin was just the beginning of a series of massacres one of the catastrophic ironies of all of this

is yod vashem the Holocaust Memorial is across the Valley from daros so it's almost like there's there's the commemoration of a terrible cruel Injustice across the Valley from a terrible cruel Injustice instead of the world creating more Justice it heaped more suffering on a population of people that had nothing to do with the initial suffering okay so now I'm just gonna we are going to now start discussing uh Iran but I just want to sort of remind our viewers just where we are right so we're about to move to to the ranian Revolution and why

that occurred but uh by now in 1979 saddat is in charge well he's he's just he's just been assassinated but uh or about to be assassinated right timeline wise yeah he's about to be assass he about to be assassinated right and Mubarak is about to to be in charge there uh half half Al Assad is is in charge of Syria the Saudi family is in charge of Saudi Arabia and have a nice and cozy relationship with the US based on the US taking most of their oil for protection um Saddam uh is now in charge

of Iraq we haven't really dealt with Iraq yet um but I guess we can deal with that as we start speaking about the Iran Iraq War and the Sha uh is increasingly becoming more and more unpopular in in Iran why was he unpopular it's it's a large measure a backlash against the Americanization of Iran so if you if you talk to an Iranian I don't care who they are all Iranians are profoundly proud of being Iranian um Iranian nationalism is a real and powerful force and I think Iranians felt under the sh that he was

too authoritarian they wanted a republic they had tried twice before they had lost that opportunity they saw them as uh the United States is lacky they saw their own culture being eroded and I and then you got this pendulum swing event where instead of addressing those problems you get the reaction of the uh Iranian Revolution there were two factions in the revolution the Communists and the Muslim fundamentalists and the United States made a cold calculation and the cold calculation was simply this if the Communists win Iran is going to go to the Soviet sphere and

it'll help them in the Cold War and it'll give them direct access to the Arabian Gulf the Persian Gulf the the Arabian Sea the Indian Ocean and possibly oil and the United States felt that that would be a catastrophic outcome and so at that point then the United States went for backing the the islamist to prevent the Communist from taking over and so uh the Irani Revolution takes place the fundamentalists win they literally murder the Communists um a lot of the Communists end up fleeing and going in this direction and that direction so instead of

it creating a you know a republic that has the possibility of other parties competing it becomes a republic where only people who were okayed by the Islamic Republic get to run and for office and so it didn't become the Republic I think the average Irani was hoping it would become um for the record early on there was a protest where women took to the streets and they were basically protesting to defend women's rights and it the state kind of made it clear that this was not going to be tolerated and so there's this cold kind

of scary moment this kind of Gilead moment to invoke a handmaid's tale where the women are thinking we're going to be okay and they take to the streets and the state is like oh no don't worry about it you're not GNA be okay this is going to go in a very specific Direction and so uh instead of you know a moderating force that's creating a Republican to you know overthrow the monarchy and maybe bring Iran into the future it's this reactionary force that wants to bring Iran into the past an imaginary past because Iran never

had a state like it does now this there's no medieval or ancient state that looks like this this is completely 100% a modern state in every way shape and form but it's a modern state that pretends that there was some glorious path that you can you can get to which is by the way a core doctrine of all right-wing movements right that there was there was an imaginary moment somewhere in the past where people were living correctly they were doing the right thing they were you know maybe a little bit less sinful and maybe a

little bit more righteous and there was never such a time no time like that ever existed in The Human Experience and so whenever right wiers has come up with this imaginary past what they're doing is they're they're concocting their their vision for what they want the future to be but it's a fully modern idea for for the Nazis it was to recreate one 1,000 ad for for the fascists in Italy under musolini it was to bring back the Roman Empire um and so we've seen these kinds of right-wing movements time and time again they just

sort of manifest themselves in different ways right now we're seeing it with the hindutva movement in India and Modi we're seeing it Hungary with his Christian fanatic movement in orbon right the the polls were experimenting with this but at least for the time being the kinsky brothers are out of power and Donald Tusk is in power so this isn't unique to Iran in any way shape or form it's just it's a particularly rough form of it um but that's the outcome okay two things I just want to let's let's move into the Iran Iraq war

and and and just the history of how Saddam um is by now a US Ali in 1980 just before the war starts but also just a few comments from you on just on on in addition to the the Sha just sort of looking towards the west and trying to impose a fake identity on Iranians just just a discussion about his brutality yeah so in the grand scale scheme of things his his brutality pales compared to the current regime but he was definitely authoritarian if you stood up to him you you definitely had the Poss possibility

going to prison uh plenty of people were in Exile there was some torture there was some death in other words he he he wasn't a dreamy Scandinavian ruler this wasn't this you know Iran under the Sha was definitely not Sweden but compared to what Iran is now it was definitely probably a lot lighter form we you know I think people don't realize that at the end of the day there's always this kind of there's a scale um you know when people talk about ner they'll go yeah he he oppressed people he did there is something

like 1,700 cases of political repression under nser under sadan there was probably 30,000 cases of political repression 173,000 Sadat takes the prize right there's it's nobody is a saint if they're the ruler of a state states have to be brutal at some point in time the question is was there any excessive brutality in operating the state and you know in the case of the Sha I think you can make the argument that he definitely crossed some lines he definitely did not this was not a free Society by any means um but it's it's important to

always kind of remember that there's this this hierarchy of Cruelty and he's not at the top by any means okay so now the the origins of the of the Iran Iraq war and the impact it has so Saddam Hussein comes into Power because um Iraq like the uni like Syria ends up plunging into a a a few years of chaos so it has a revolution 58 gosam becomes the prime minister of Iraq gosam is the guy who's like I'm not sure I want Iraq to join the United Arab Republic but I but I would like

Iraq to join the Arab Republic he's he's running this really strange line and it's in part because his Soviet and CIA friends are telling him please don't join please don't join we'll support you if you don't in 1963 five years after coming into Power the CIA kills him so be careful who your friend is that's if you get no other lesson from this pick your friends carefully so Kum is murdered and Iraq plunges into chaos it's like Syria there's coup after coup after coup after coup finally by the mid1 1970s Iraq has a relatively stable

government Saddam Hussein is the number two guy the the the leader of Iraq is kind of scile and out of it and Saddam Hussein becomes the de facto ruler in 1978 the CIA hands him a list of Iraqis that the CIA doesn't like the number in my head is 800 but we should double check that number um and they they don't know what he's going to do with the list they didn't give him instruction what he did was he had the mass arrested tried Mass tried like the 30 people at a time in the same

trial they're found guilty and a bunch of them are hanged live on TV and the CIA goes W man that is our guy you know what I mean like we gave him a list we didn't tell him what to do with it he went full Crea he's like an artist and so at that point we've now established that he's going to work with us he's he's definitely our guy he be he becomes the ruler of Iraq and Reagan gets into Power So Reagan gets into power in the same way by the way that Nixon does

he gets outside interference from a foreign State um I wonder if there's anybody else who's ever done that let's say recently anyway it's something to think about so what happened with Nixon was he went to president 2 of South Vietnam as they're wrapping up the Paris Accords the Paris Accords were going to end the Vietnam War in November of 1968 so Saigon fell Falls in 1975 so this is seven years before the Vietnam war ends they were about to end the Vietnam War and Nixon basically goes to president 2 and says I will give you

money directly I will support you I will give you weapons if you pull out of the peace talks because Nixon knew that if he did if T stayed in the peace talks he couldn't win the election T takes the bribes pulls out of the peace talks Nixon wins the election Reagan rips a page out of that Playbook and he does the same thing so when the revolution happens in Iran a group of students stormed the US Embassy college students because they want the do doents that prove that the CIA overthrew the mosc government this is

an international incident it's a it's a disaster for the Islamic Republic they don't want to deal with this they begin negotiating with the students to release their hostages because they captured somewhere around 50 CIA operatives everybody else had left the embassy the CIA operatives were shreding the documents because they don't want the world to see all the stuff that they've been doing because ton was the headquarters for CIA operations in Asia so if the CIA did something ugly in China or the Philippines or in Indonesia they had it documented in tan so their their job

is to shred the documents they know they're going to get captured because the Iranian government called them up and said get out and they can't because they have to finish the students capture the embassy they take the documents that have been shredded stuff them in the garbage bags go to nearby schools dump them out and tell the kids you love puzzles right and the kids put the docum doents back together so now they have in the United States's writing documents that categorically prove not only that the United States overthrew their government in 53 but how

Kermit Roosevelt did it and whom Kermit Roosevelt talked to and where he was getting his money from and in the mind of those students the United States should now come clean and apologize and they won't and so the student said we we're not going to release the CIA operatives until you do R sanani who will later become uh prime minister of Iran um rafsan Jani was a top cleric in the revolution he starts negotiating with the students to get them to release the hostages right as it becomes clear he's got a deal the Reagan people

from the Reagan campaign show up in Iran and they just give him suitcases full of money and they tell them please don't let the students out because they're worried that if the students get out before the election Carter will win and so they don't naively Carter doesn't know that this has happened and he works up until noon on the day Reagan is inaugurated to get the release of the Stu of the hostages and of course that's that's what happens the hostages are released because that was the deal that Reagan and his campaign had made with

Ru Sun Johnny so now Reagan is President he basically looks at Saddam Hussein and says I we want to hurt Iran we want to hurt the Islamic Republic now if you stop and you rationally think this through what would be the purpose Iran could be a a useful trading partner for the United States it's strategically located so a you're you're mad because you hate muslim fundamentalists okay maybe B you're worried that Iran will end up a Soviet Al wait no then you would want to build relations with them if you're worried about that you don't

isolate them so that can't be it so you know what are you left with I mean one of the things that I think is clear is the United States felt like we were in a relationship we got jilted and we want Vengeance and we talk Iraq into attacking Iran the argument is that the southwest corner of Iran istan and actually the coast all the way to Babas is majority Arab and it's an Arab speaking region in Iran and so the argument is that should be in an Arab state so Iraq should capture it Annex it

to Iraq and Saddam Hussein goes along for the ride on faulty us intelligence the US tells Iraq that the Islamic Republic has killed so many of its generals and Colonels that that the the Iranian milit will disintegrate and it obviously doesn't and this turns into a catastrophic eight-year long war that kills at a minimum a million people uh three4 of a million Iranians and one quarter of a million Iraqis the high number I've seen is double double that number nothing is gained from the war other than just death Carnage and the destruction economic destruction of

both States how then do we end up uh with the Gulf War I and uh the brutal San which areed on Iraq afterwards so we got a naughty GCC State doing something they shouldn't have been doing so in the aftermath of the war the Iran Iraq war it's 1989 Iran and Iraq both go to the OPEC States and say look we're dying over here we need to get back on our feet is there any way you can help us out and the the answer was and Saudi Arabia was at the at the center of this

um what we'll do is every OPEC state will cut their production and then Iran and Iraq can increase their production by that amount so that the supply of oil in the marketplace stays the same so the price doesn't change but it gives Iran and Iraq a larger share of the oil Market that way they can use that extra Revenue to to repair and recover from the Iran and Iraq War so everybody's happy Kuwait began flooding the marketplace with oil which caused the price of oil to plunge which meant that any break that Iran and Iraq

had gotten from their increased sales was was evaporated um Saddam Hussein accused Kuwait of doing this he brought in a un team to examine this and the UN team discovered that what Kuwait was doing was literally stealing Iraqi oil by both there were oil fields on the border they were they were pumping oil at an excessive amount on those oil fields and they were slant drilling into Iraqi fields that were entirely on the Iraqi side of the border and then flooding the market with Iraq stolen oil causing the price to collapse Saddam Hussein brought in

April glasby the US ambassador Iraq and said I've tried everything the UN I brought the UN in the kuwaitis won't stop doing this I'm going to attack and and he basically told her look we have a historical claim to Ira to Kuwait Kuwait was carved out of the busra province of the Ottoman Empire and we want to attack it and Annex it and she said what happens between Arab states is of no concern to the United States and so he interpreted that as a green light he attacked George Bush Senior initially says I don't see

any issue with this at this moment but I'm going to consult my team he flies to Aspen Margaret ther flies to Aspen they come out of the Aspen meeting and George Bush Senior goes he's a Hitler he's a Hitler thousand points a light and the next thing you know uh we're doing Operation Desert Shield and then the next thing you know we're doing Operation Desert Storm so to be clear invading Kuwait is wrong that's not the answer I don't want to sound like I'm a apologist for Saddam Hussein but on the flip side of it

blow Iraq up and and smashing all its bridges blowing up its schools tearing up its government buildings and Wrecking the place probably also isn't the answer in the other direction so you know this this problem that we have in our world is a wrong is committed and then the response to fix the wrong is to do another wrong that doesn't make the world a better place Kuwait could have easily been liberated from Iraq without blowing Iraq up there was no need to to to do the kind of Destruction that was done we're talking about an

international Force the Egyptian Army there the the the syrians sent troops the Saudis are there the French are there the British are there the Americans are there like there's nothing in the world that could have prevent that Saddam Hussein could have done to prevent the the military capture of Kuwait the bombing campaign that the United States unleashes on Iraq for one month they we bombed the hell out of the country country has no reasonable explanation other than we just wanted to test weapon systems and kill as many people as we could and I think the

result was to kind of shock and horrify the world like what was that for this was so excessive in any case uh that's what we do the second or is even more irrational like at least in the case of the first war you can say well we were liberating Kuwait in the case of the second or there is no explanation for it so in the aftermath of the first war the United States announced George Bush Senior announced that as soon as Iraq got get got rid of its weapons of mass destruction it would be let

back into the the community of countries right the the Iraqis misund misunderstood what was being said they misinterpreted they took their their chemical weapons out into the desert in multiple sites and blew them up they did this in August of 1991 so the war had ended you know like six months earlier the Iraqis go out in the desert they blow up all these chemical warheads and they think they're done and then the UN weapons inspection regime shows up first of all chemical weapons aren't a weapon of mass destruction they're a terror weapon the number of

people killed by them is actually shockingly low it's just a horrific horrible death that's scary weapons of mass destruction are nukes and biological weapons um also you can use Conventional Weapons as a weapon of mass destruction you know we killed 20,000 people when we firebomb the city of Dresden in World War II I think burning 20,000 people alive it constitutes a weapon of mass destruction at that point right obviously we killed a lot more people when we nuked toosan Nagasaki but you can even turn a conventional weapon into weapon massu in any case we'll use

the terminology because that's the terminology everybody uses even though it's wrong and I just want to be clear that it's wrong the UN weapons Inspection Team shows up and they're like where are the warheads and Iraq goes we we don't have any and they whip out the receipts who delivered those VX sarin gas mustard gas Warheads ner gas Warheads to the Iraqis it was the United States during the Iran Iraq war so they had the serial numbers for every single rocket we just handed over the receipts so the UN weapons Inspection Team says okay we

have to find the serial numbers and the Iraqis go you're kidding we blew that stuff up and the weapons team goes show us where you blew it up we're going to sift the sand to find the little metal serial numbers so we can check them off by 1998 Scott Ritter a US Marine who was the guy by Leading the the inspection team at that point had confirmed that he found 98% of the serial numbers the life expectancy of those weapons were expired they were past their expiration date but Bill Clinton was in the middle of

the Monaco Lewinsky scandal he needed to distract the American public so he ordered the UN weapons Inspection Team out so he could bomb Iraq he does it and then Saddam wasin goes that's it I we were clean you knew we were clean you're playing dirty I'm not letting the weapons Inspection Team back in in 2002 George Bush Jr threatens to go to war Saddam Hussein lets the weapons Inspection Team back in because he doesn't want to get bombed he gets bombed anyway and we go to war a second round for weapons we knew they never

had because of Scott Ritter had identified 98% you got to figure when you're blowing up Warheads some of those serial numbers are melt or be shredded 98% shocks me I can't believe they found 98% you at that point I would have treated that as a clean bill of health but obviously Bill Clinton didn't care about that he was right Wag the Dog kind of situation created distraction for the public why George Bush Jr did the second war may be explained by a thing called the project for the ne American Century I what happened was a

group of conservatives in the United States had actually written a series of letters to Bill Clinton beginning in 1998 and then they ended up part of the George Bush Senior or George Bush Jor government and those letters said that what the United States ought to do is invade Iraq conquer it created as turn it into a base of operations and then either invade Syria or Iran next conquer those two because whichever only didn't do second you'll do third then United States is going to invade and conquer Saudi Arabia So the plan was to backstab Saudi

Arabia and then invade and Conquer Egypt and in the process encircle Israel secure Israel make it safe and then change the borders of the region to create even more divisions and and like I I've seen the map it's it's crazy they were going to split the hzz off of nudged and and make it so there were at least two states where Saudi Arabia was um they were going to carve Iraq up into three states they were going to carve Syria up and the goal was to just make it so that the United States would would

now have an imperial foothold in the Middle East the United States military named the Middle East centcom as in Central Command so the United States isn't Central Command the United States is North Comm it's north command the center of the United States is the Middle East and that that was the mentality that they brought into that war of course it turned into a disaster and the and the Iraqi people and you know Vietnam the United States and and the United States left humiliated and and in disgrace um the United States got Vietnam by by Afghanistan

as well so it was it ended up being completely catastrophic for the United States Empire in the end but the loss in life and the loss to the global economy is also catastrophic okay look we we are running out of time um so I would love to discuss a lot more with you we only are I mean we've discussed Iraq 2003 but we still really have to discuss the '90s and 2000s and 2010s in a bunch of other countries but um we are running out of time but we'll have this discussion again at some point

but I just want to ask you before you leave um specifically with regards the tactics used by the USA in in in I mean throughout the region but specifically in terms of bombing Iraq in both 91 and 2003 when you look at now when you look at how Israel is is really bombed Gaza completely and utterly um the amount of Fire power they've used the amount of firep power they're using in Lebanon um how much do you think Israel have taken a playbook out of the US and their actions in the region yeah that's a

good question and it's complicated because one of the things that's different about what uh Israel is doing is Israel has a colonial settler project whereas the United States didn't have a colonial settler project in Iraq I mean there were members in the Bush Administration who imag ined that they would send in missionaries and convert Iraqis to Christianity um but they pretty quickly realize that wasn't going to happen and the irony is is that the number of Christians in Iraq dramatically dropped because a lot of them ended up being refugees who left so uh more ethnic

cleansing is what they they ended up creating in the case of Israel the this settler Colonial project is that the Palestinian population needs to be not completely displaced right because you need them for a labor force but it needs to be largely displaced so that the land can be turned over to Israeli settlers so what's happening right now it's it's on a large scale and it's quite brutal um but it has a very different goal in mind than what the United States was trying to achieve so the Playbook is similar but not not exactly the

same in both cases is though the result is shockingly similar right in both cases it was genocide on a it's genocide on a grand scale in the case of Iraq the United States murdered somewhere between 1.3 to two million Iraqis um and you can't explain to me why right like why did we do this there's no answer um in the case of what the Israelis are doing last time I checked I have to be careful with how much I checked the news so that I can you know prevent myself from screaming and gouging my eyes

out as I run through the street um but last time I checked I think we were at 45 4 45,000 dead Palestinians in Gaza uh what that's a huge portion of the population and so from a proportional standpoint it it has to be classified as a war crime and a crime against humanity just like the US war against Iraq was um just the outcome the goal is obviously very different what gets me is that in Europe and the United States there just isn't that much upset so don't get me wrong some places have definitely come

out on the side of Palestine Norway Ireland Spain for example um there's definitely been demonstrations there have definitely been people who have spoken up um I one of the interesting things that I've noticed is is Jewish Americans especially from uh gen Z have been outraged about what Israel is doing and they've been standing up against it and speaking out but as a general rule Europe and the United States have been shockingly qu quiet about this and that was true during the Iraq War like here we are clearly committing genocide for no explan explainable reason and

the average person just seemed to be okay with it it was just par for the course to make things more complicated and put things in a larger scale there's 22 members of the league of Arab states last I might be wrong about that but that's the number in my head throw in Chad which is majority Arab and then throw in Eritrea uh so you have 24 Arab states eight of them are in Ruins they're a smoldering heap of Hell the Sudan Palestine Lebanon Syria Iraq Libya Yemen onethird of Arab states are burnt to the ground

name another place on the planet that has this there's nothing like this in South America there's nothing like this in subsaharan Africa there's nothing like this going on in Asia the only other place that's in turmoil is the Ukraine Russia War Arabs are 6% of the world's population they're 50% of the world's refugees we are in the middle of the worst Refugee crisis in human history so for me the the scale of this is not only insane in terms of the death toll it's insane in terms of the lack of response amongst people that we

would identify as white they just don't seem to care that Arabs when Arabs die it's nothing new right the the Palestine is Israel conflict is 76 years old like I I keep saying people angry at Kamala Harris for genocide it's like dude this is 76 years you need to be mad at truman Eisenhower JFK Nixon LBJ like why are you suly mad at this one random person there's this large picture here there was Iraq why aren't you mad at Bush why aren't we putting Bush on trial for crimes against humanity I think there's a fundament

flaw in the way people see the world that goes through the lens of two things nationalism which clouds people's brains and Trauma and people aren't developed enough to set aside some of that trauma to have a left compassion to go oh my God murdering children is just never okay it's never the answer blowing up whole cities is just never the answer I mean it what's strange about this too is the Israelis are saying we're defending ourselves how are you defending yourselves when you're attacking somebody like the the logic of it is beyond ludicrous you it's

it's uh we're we're being violent to prevent violence kind of logic when you're the settler Colonial project committing the violence to begin with because you're trying to take away somebody else's country here's the real tragedy of all of this for me the Abraham Accords there was a distinct attempt by so many Arab states to try to normalize relations with the hope that through dialogue some kind of solution could be achieved that at some point Israel could be normalized into the Middle East and that there would be a solution for the Palestinian population it might be

50 years from now but that that was the goal that was the hope now some people will hate this some people will love this I don't care there was a hint of a possibility of Israel having normalized relations I don't see how that happens now and so one of the weird things about all of this trauma and nationalism and crazy is that I think Israel has Point painted itself into a corner where negotiating its way out is going to be really difficult my fear is that instead of cool heads prevailing and that we find some

kind of solution for the Israelis and Palestinians that results in a peaceful let's trade let's have humus together kind of outcome that this is just going to keep festering and it's going to just keep constantly being this open wound that nobody is serious about healing that the United States or China or Russia uses to keep the Arab world in a state of chaos and Division and and so I I hate to end it on that note but that's that's what it looks like to me Professor Roy thank you so much um we did run out

of time and we had to abbreviate the last part of the conversation so we will have that conversation at some point um but thank you so much for your time and uh best of luck with everything you know what I I want to say one more thing just bring it home yeah so uh I'm a member of the Varna peace Institute and the I wasn't there when this happened but they invited Elon Pape to Berlin and if you get a chance I think what he his talk is amazing he talks about the Israeli project as

a settler a colonial settler project but he says something that that I think everybody needs to kind of hear and he goes there's no doubt Israel's on the wrong side of this and then he says but my children are Israelis in other words I think this is a really important thing that everybody needs to remember that even when people are doing something that's wrong there's still humans on the other side there's no just solution that doesn't include a just solution for the Israelis we need to figure out a way to get people to stop murdering

each other so we can have the conversations that lead to that and I don't know how to get there right now but I I hope people will keep that as their you know as as part of this yeah what's happening is wrong but there still needs to be a just Solution on the other side and I it's hard to imagine That's My Hope do you have time for one go for we have to I know I'm over but right I mean okay look I mean the thing is I spoke to a guest last week and

and and and I think this idea is is picking up precisely because of the extreme reaction um that we've seen to Israel in addition to the 76 years of occupation and and random brutalization um the Crusaders eventually were needed to be ejected from Europe they they weren't able to actually just become part of the Society I guess over the 200e period there were periods where they were where they did kind of you know where where certain Crusader tribes or people or or phases sort of befriended the population and there weren't alliances and normalization occurred between

various Arab Kings and the Crusaders but eventually their sheer brutality meant they were they were seen as this other entity and and eventually they left they were they were were they they were made to leave and chose to leave the region is Israel not creating a similar f accomp for themsel so that is exactly what I think is happening right the Abraham Accords were trying to figure out how do we normalize and just make it so you can be here peacefully the unfortunate thing is is the violence that's happening now has reached a point where

it feels like how does this end without just more Bloodshed what I'm hoping happens is that obviously it's probably not going to happen with Netanyahu but that whoever the next Israeli prime minister is that guy does what uh FW de clerk did in 1987 and that was he began negotiating with thec secretly to surrender and what my hope is is that the Israelis realize we're still powerful we're still in a position where we can negotiate and they begin the secret negotiation surrender and in that case I don't think you have there has to be an

ejection I don't think there has to be another another refugee crisis and I hope there isn't actually I hope the Israelis stay um what I hope happens is that there's a Truth and Reconciliation process like there was in South Africa and that in the end there look this two-state solution thing is done there's just no two ways about it I don't care everybody keeps talking about it it's stupid it makes no goddamn sense so Palestine isn't a state it's a skin rash the the only the only out outcome that's a just outcome is what South

Africa did a single state solution needs to be a single secular state with safeguards built in for the Jewish Christian Muslim Drews populations so that everybody can feel calm and safe and comfortable in that space any other outcome is still just a parti and so at the end of the day what I'm hoping happens is the Israelis calm down stop acting out of trauma and begin serious surrender negotiations to create a single secular state whether that happens or not and we end up with a crusader like outcome I mean that's unfortunately that's on the table

and stupid but that doesn't solve anything okay excellent thank you so much we I think now we have concluded I have to I have to go yeah yeah no wor so listen um we will we will have a conversation at some other point um thank you so much you're so welcome thank you for letting me have this opportunity to speak to you excellent [Music]