Breaking: Assad Regime Falls

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Welcome back to Pod Save the World.

I'm Tommy Vitor.

I'm Ben Rhodes.

We are recording a bonus episode today because of the truly historic events happening as we speak in Syria.

Ben,

is this the best news bonus we've ever done?

I've been waiting to record this bonus episode for over a decade, Tommy.

So I think so.

Yeah, it's really good to see a guy like Assad go down.

So, Russian state media is now reporting that Bashar al-Assad has escaped from Syria and is in Moscow with his family.

Rebel factions have captured basically all the territory that was held by the Assad regime just a few weeks ago.

The Free Syrian Army is flying over Damascus as we speak.

It essentially took less than two weeks, around eight days, I think, from the start of this offensive by members of this opposition group, HTS and the Free Syrian Army, to sweep down from northwest Syria and eventually take the capital.

Incredibly, they seem to have done so without really encountering much, if any, resistance.

I think these Syrian soldiers, underpaid, demoralized, exhausted by 13 years of civil war, mostly just chose not to fight.

There's these pictures all over social media of army uniforms just littering the streets because these guys stripped them off and ran away.

On top of that, Syria's benefactors, the Russians, Iranians, Hezbollah, were too damaged and distracted by other wars to come to their aid.

And as HTS and the Free Syrian Army swept down from the north towards Damascus, other opposition groups saw their moment here.

Some in southern Syria started taking territory.

The Kurds took some territory in northeast Syria.

And the net effect is that these groups just ended 50 years of brutal Assad family rule in Syria.

And they closed at least this chapter of Syria's 13-year civil war, where Bashar al-Assad killed hundreds of thousands of his own people.

You'll see estimates ranging from 300,000 to 600,000.

He imprisoned and tortured countless more.

There's amazing footage, Ben, on social media today of those prisons being liberated.

One that really stuck with me is there was a footage of a women's prison being liberated, and a woman came out of a cell and there was clearly just a small child, like a little boy, who had been living there with her.

Unbelievable, just horrifying.

The prime minister, Assad's prime minister, I guess drew the short straw here, or maybe he just didn't make the plane manifest.

He said he's going to stay in Syria to manage the transition to whatever,

whoever takes power next.

So a lot to cover here, but Ben, I just want to start with like initial reactions to this unbelievable two weeks of events.

I think it's almost hard to put into words how many lives this conflict has touched, particularly obviously Syrian lives.

You think of all those people who died.

You think of all the refugees, the millions of people.

I mean, Tommy, one of the more powerful images I saw is is basically like a traffic jam, you know, of people coming back to Syria from Turkey, which obviously runs completely counter to what we're accustomed to, images of people leaving.

I think of all the people I know who have been touched by this, you know, war, Syrians I've met over the years, aid workers, people who worked with refugees, people living on the Turkish border, people living in Jordan.

I mean,

at a time when there's so much darkness and despair in the world, too,

to all of a sudden have this cathartic collapse of this regime.

And we can get into kind of why that happened.

It just reminds you that things can turn on a dime and that you never know.

When we were in office, you know, we were constantly looking at intelligence assessments and regime morale and defections and territorial holdings and trying to figure out the day when Assad might go.

It's so amazing that after such a grinding civil war for so long, that it just happened so fast.

And the last thing I'd just say

to start here, what's also so remarkable and heartening is that this was clearly done by Syrians.

For all the debates about whether the U.S.

should have intervened more or what countries in the region,

what proxies they were backing,

whether it was Turkey or Qatar or other Gulf states or whomever, at the end of the day,

this was Syrians who organized themselves and seized this moment to bring an end to a really corrupt, awful, tyrannical rule.

And I think we just have to kind of inhabit that as a hopeful moment.

It doesn't diminish the amount of challenges that exist for Syria, for the Middle East, for U.S.

foreign policy, which we'll get into.

But today is a hopeful day at a time when you don't get a lot of those.

Yeah, I mean, God knows what will come next.

I don't think any of us are, you and I live through the Arab Spring.

We are not sanguine about, you know, how these things go.

I mean, this civil war could continue.

There could be more chapters.

It could get bloodier.

You could see the rise of

a pretty unsavory set of leaders in Syria.

But I do think it's worth taking a moment and just celebrating that Bashar al-Assad, one of the most evil men in modern history, an absolute butcher who just massacred his own people without any concern for it over the course of a decade, is gone.

And friend of the pod, Max Seddon, Ben tweeted a link to an article from 2014 where Assad said, tell Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin that I'm not Yanukovich.

I won't go anywhere.

This was him peacocking and bragging about how he would never leave his country the way Ben, the leader of Ukraine, did.

So, you know, life comes at you fast.

But yeah, I mean, just to put a fine point on the dictatorship of it all,

you do get a sense of the difference between total dictatorship and the alternative.

When you just see people almost shocked being able to do normal things, like walk walk out of their houses,

like travel back to their homes that they've been exiled from, in some cases more than a decade, to kind of just, you know,

there's a reason it's a cliche to kind of breathe free air after that physical space was closed to them.

I will say to Max's point, now that Russia's in the business of accepting Syrian refugees with their first refugee family, the Assads,

A bit of extra justice too, that it's Moscow winter.

So he's going from the Levant, one of the most beautiful places in the world to uh you know grim grim circumstances in moscow right now i imagine in in december i uh i hope it's awful i hope his apartment is shitty and uh that he lives a very short life so uh let's talk about how we got here ben so you know as we mentioned at the top asad's allies have historically been the russians the iranians and then a bunch of shia-led militia groups and proxy groups especially hezbollah assad is an alawite which is a branch of shia islam which is why he aligns with iran and some of these other groups after the syrian regime the Assad regime, faced this existential threat to its existence after the start of the Arab Spring, the Iranians helped Assad with direct military support.

They brought in various militia groups to fight on his behalf, including Hezbollah, including, I mean, they literally were recruiting Afghan refugees and paying them to go live and fight in Syria on behalf of Assad.

And then, you know, reportedly Qasim Soleimani, the former head of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, IRGC, he apparently went to Russia himself to personally convince Putin to directly intervene on Assad's behalf in 2015, which led to the Russians beginning two years basically of grueling, brutal airstrikes on the Syrian opposition with total disregard for civilian casualties.

But

this time, The Russians, as we've discussed, their military has been chewed up in Ukraine.

They're down a lot of men and a lot of kit and a lot of money.

Hezbollah had its leadership decapitated by the Israelis.

Iran started pulling the rip cord on Assad last week and started pulling out military and diplomatic staff.

The New York Times reported that I think they were talking to some IRGC sources who said, Look, we saw that Assad's forces were not going to fight for themselves.

So, how do we advise them?

How do we even help them when these guys are stripping off their uniforms and running away?

And then I think it also really has to be

emphasized that the Syrian regime was not legitimate.

It was a corrupt, hollowed-out kleptocracy.

These fighters were exhausted and underpaid and unwilling to die for Assad, especially the Sunni ones.

It wasn't all Alawites in the army.

There was a lot of sort of like Sunni

grunts.

And then diplomatically,

you'll read all these reports that Assad has just managed to piss off all of his friends recently.

Like the UAE, the Emirates had undertaken this effort to rehabilitate him.

They tried to bring him back to the Arab League.

They did bring him back to the Arab League.

They wanted to get the world to recognize Assad again, but I guess Assad just has been unwilling to give an inch inch in diplomatic negotiations, especially with Prime Minister Erdogan of Turkey, who I think Erdogan primarily wants to form a buffer zone between Turkey and Syria to keep out the Kurdish forces that he views as a threat.

And Assad wouldn't give him what he wanted.

And pissing Erdogan off seems to have been a huge mistake as it made Erdogan more and more committed to providing support to HTS, this rebel group that just stormed down Damascus.

So, Ben, what are your thoughts on kind of like the biggest factors that led to this moment?

Because I think two, three, four weeks ago, like 95% of analysts would have said this moment would probably never have happened.

Yeah, I mean, I always,

I thought someday this would happen just because Assad is a corrupt kleptocrat without support from the people.

But I

did not see it coming anywhere near this soon, nor could I forecasted when.

There are two factors I'd point to.

First, we talked about the distraction.

You know, Russia is focused on Ukraine.

The Iranians are focused on their own internal stability.

Hezbollah has been decimated

through the war with Israel.

There's a practical piece to that, just that they're less personnel.

I mean, the Wagner Group, which we've talked about a lot and has been a subject of some

bonus pods in the past, they were foot soldiers too.

And so a lot of the Wagner group guys that were there, they were moved up to Ukraine.

So yes, there was less manpower from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and some of the Iranian-backed militias and Hezbollah and Russians.

But the other thing is it's not just a numbers game.

You know, it's a psychological point because there are a significant number of people technically in the Syrian military, but it wasn't just, you know, they probably could have put up some kind of fight and could have made this drag on and could have kind of plunged things back into civil war.

But I think psychologically, they knew that the cavalry wasn't coming and they knew that the public didn't support them.

And so it just collapsed fast.

And again, this is not an apples to apples comparison because obviously, you know, the Assad regime is a horrific entity that these people were serving.

And the Afghan security forces were by and large trying to serve a better government than the Taliban in that case.

But in the same way that when the U.S.

pulled out its support for the Afghan security forces, they collapsed because they knew that they didn't have the manpower and the logistics and all the things that they needed to fight off the Taliban.

And so these things can happen rapidly when that psychological piece shifts.

Now, the second part of this is the affirmative part of what the opposition accomplished.

And you talked about this in a very good interview with Natasha last week.

But essentially, you know, HTS clearly made the best use of this time that they had in Ibla province and northwest Syria the last few years, not only kind of trying to de-extremize, if that's a word, but to kind of of distance themselves from their kind of al-Qaeda affiliation in the past, but to start to build some diplomatic bridges to other aspects of the opposition.

When I look back to when

Obama was in office and we had

so many problems and probably did all kinds of things wrong, one of the challenges is that the opposition was totally fractured in Syria at times and they were fighting with each other.

And the opposite happened this time.

And I think that's because work has been done

that none of us saw.

You know, it was hard to see.

I mean, maybe some very close analysts saw it to try to kind of build lines of communication and to kind of get past some of the differences between some of these opposition groups.

But I think also importantly, when people saw that the window was open, you know, they just put that aside.

Nobody was,

they didn't stop the advance to kind of argue with each other about who was going to be in charge or what have you.

Everybody, you know, those people in the south that you mentioned in places like Dara, which is south of Damascus, those are very different people than the people coming down from the northwest in terms of their political factions.

But you know what?

They didn't let that get in the way.

And so what you saw is a very unified and cohesive Syrian people and opposition groups up against a regime that felt like it was on its last legs.

And that's, I think that accounts, that combination of the affirmative work done by the opposition and the decision to choose unity over any kind of, you know, let's argue about what happens when we get to Damascus before we get there, that combined with that psychological tipping point for the regime is how you get this in eight days.

Yeah, there was some really interesting reporting in New Lines magazine where they talked to some rebel sources who told them that they somehow penetrated this high-level security meeting in Aleppo and killed an Iranian brigadier general and some Syrian officers, which just led the entire security apparatus in Aleppo to freak out and fear for their own safety, which allowed them to slip in.

I guess they also had some sleeper cells inside Aleppo.

And so ultimately, I think the regime was like, whoa, we can't do this.

They tried to pull back to other cities and retrench, but then the opposition just moved so quickly that they essentially steamrolled them.

I mean, it was this unbelievable, fast-moving success.

But, Ben, I think you got into the more important point here, which is trying to understand HTS, which is this umbrella organization for

what was previously a collection of opposition groups led by a guy named Abu Muhammad Al-Jalani.

So let's talk about Jalani for a second.

I mean, he's a 42-year-old.

According to the various biographies of him, i've been trying to inhale over the last couple weeks he had grandparents who lived in the golan heights they were driven out by israel i think he was ultimately born in saudi arabia but moved back to syria in the late 80s um jalani said he was radicalized by the second intifada in about 2000 that was the major palestinian uprising after the failure of the camp david uh talks uh and then right before the u.s invasion of iraq Assad made this big effort to recruit Syrian men to travel to Iraq to fight the Americans.

I'm not sure if you've seen this, man.

It's on YouTube.

There's this amazing frontline documentary where they interviewed Jalani, I think in 2021, and they get into his whole history.

But it talks about how Assad was literally filling buses full of Syrian men in front of the U.S.

embassy in Damascus instead of sending them to Iraq.

And so Jalani is one of those guys.

He got to Iraq before the U.S.

invasion actually started.

He fought in the insurgency for several years before being captured by the Americans, held at Camp Buka prison, which ended up being like the,

you know, it was like Harvard for insurgents, right?

It was like all the best and the brightest of the insurgency and terrorism going forward.

We're at Camp Buka.

There, he, I guess, put together like this long plan for how to battle against Assad and Syria.

I'll fast forward a bit, but you know, Jalani gets out in, I think, 2011 or so out of Camp Buka.

He gets to Syria with the blessing of al-Baghdadi, who's then the leader of ISIS.

He forms al-Nusra, but then al-Nusra broke with ISIS in 2014 after Baghdadi declared the ISIS caliphate now included Syria as well.

So Jalani was like, you know, screw you, I don't want you to control my turf.

He pledges allegiance to al-Qaeda.

Jalani then publicly breaks with al-Qaeda in 2017.

There's a lot of questions, I think, that are fair to ask here about, you know, when he talks about not liking ISIS or al-Qaeda's tactics or whether, you know, that's sincere or whether it was a power play.

But then, as you mentioned, Jalani rules Idlib province in northwest Syria for several years.

They administered services, they trained, they built up their capacity to do this, and they clearly gained a close relationship with Erdogan and the Turks that have helped sort of arm and equip them and enable this.

But Jalani sat down with CNN a couple days ago

where he was asked about his ties to extremism and worldview.

Here's a clip from that interview.

People who fear Islamic governance either have seen incorrect implementations of it or do not understand it properly.

We are talking about something that aligns with the traditions and nature of the region.

The most important thing is to build institutions.

We are not talking about rule by individuals or personal whims.

It's about institutional governance.

No one has the right to erase another group.

These sects have coexisted in this region for hundreds of years, and no one has the right to eliminate them.

There must be a legal framework that protects and ensures the rights of all, not a system that serves only one sect, as Assad's regime has done.

Hayat Tahrir Rasham is one of the factions in the region, just like all the others.

Now we're talking about a larger project.

We're talking about building Syria.

Hayat Tahir Sham is merely one detail of this dialogue, and it may dissolve at any time.

It's not an end in itself, but a means to perform a task confronting this regime.

Once that task is complete, it will transition to a state of governance, institutions, and so on.

So, Ben, I mean, this is a big question, right?

I mean, is he sincerely moderated?

Is he saying the right things?

He's like wearing, you know, business suits to interviews.

Is this all for show?

I mean, I think the answers may be unknowable, but I wonder what you make of this guy.

Well, to start at the end, I mean, he's saying exactly what...

everybody wants to hear, and not just people like us, but I mean, people in Syria, all these minority factions.

We've talked about the religious factions where you've got Alawites and Shia and Christians and a Sunni Arab majority, but

Kurdish factions and different political factions within the Sunni Arab community.

What he is saying is exactly what I think most Syrians want to hear, which is let's have like a government that negotiates among these different factions, protects everybody's rights, and ultimately has institutions that don't favor one over the other.

And that is the essential thing to build trust with people going forward is can you have a system in which Syrians can just kind of work this out amongst themselves peacefully instead of resorting to violence.

And sometimes that violence has been kind of pushed or instigated by external forces as well.

And I know that's been a source of a lot of frustration to Syrians.

To roll back the tape, Tommy, the couple things that are interesting to me.

First, this is a reminder, just Jelani's history, of how much, if you want to pick a time to start

a certain window of history in the Middle East, the Iraq War unleashed so many things.

I mean, because this guy's story does not begin in 2011 with the Arab Spring when we saw protests and people writing, you know, Saad must go on walls.

His story begins with the invasion of Iraq.

And then as a young man, getting bussed

to Iraq, where he kind of becomes part of the Sunni insurgency because a Sunni leader and a Baath party leader in Saddam Hussein has been overthrown.

And now there's a Shia majority population kind of governing the country.

He gets, you know, those skill sets that you talked about in prison.

He, you know, and this is the point about, and this is the next thing I was going to say about al-Nusra, the Nisra front, they were, you know, probably, I don't know, one of, if not the most prominent opposition force when we were in government.

I always thought it was strange, and we can talk about policies maybe later in this podcast or another time.

You may remember, Tommy, the rollout when the U.S.

was simultaneously

arming the opposition, but we're going to designate the Nisra front as terrorists.

It was kind of one of these classic dumb U.S.

government logic things, which is that, well, we're getting some criticism for beginning to arm an opposition that includes some extremist elements.

So we're also going to designate these people as terrorists as if you can sit in Washington and design through things like designations and

who the opposition is.

Again,

one of many ways in which the United States has gotten this wrong over the years.

But I think because the challenge there is, yes, there are extremists.

And Baghdadi and what became ISIS is a clear signal of the kind of extremism that is possible.

But some of these people have just been fighting on the same side of different insurgencies for a long time.

You know, so in the insurgency in Iraq, you had people that were al-Qaeda, then you had people that, you know, may not have believed the full al-Qaeda ideology or agenda, but they were fighting the same enemy.

So they were fighting together.

And we just don't understand this.

You know, we have to have some humility that we can sit and know which individual is, you know,

is where on the spectrum between, say, you know, ISIS and al-Qaeda to kind of peaceful Islamists, because there certainly can be Islamists who want to set up institutions peacefully.

If you ruled out that possibility, the one thing Jalani is right about is you can't tell people, you know, if you rule out the possibility for there to be any Islamist character to some of these political movements, well, you're ensuring some kind of, you know, hyper-minority rule

against the broader population.

So all that to say, his evolution is really interesting.

I think it speaks to how much both U.S.

policy through the Iraq war and through the Syrian Civil War kind of helped foster some of these dynamics for bad and maybe good at times.

But how ultimately he's kind of arrived at his own formula.

And what we don't know is whether that formula is a true transition, as he says, to kind of a negotiation between different factions and the establishment of a new government, or whether, you know, as we've seen in other countries, HGS will say it's doing that and then never really let go.

We don't know.

But what we do know is this is now in the hands of Syrians principally.

And I think that alone is a lot of progress from either it being in Assad's hand or it being something that people who don't fully understand Syria are kind of negotiating in Geneva or the Gulf.

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So Assad was an Alawite.

I think like 12 to 14% of the country is Alawites.

Sort of a classic,

you know, a colonial put a minority sect in charge set up so they oppress everybody else.

But their message was always to all minority groups that if, you know, essentially a Sunni Islamic caliphate is established across Syria, all of you will be massacred.

Christians, Druze, Shia, everyone.

That was the Assad narrative, and it was very powerful.

And clearly, Jolani has identified that and is trying to cut against it.

And I think, you know, talking to Natasha last week, she said she personally knew Alawites living in Idlib province who felt safe.

Josh Rogan at the Washington Post tweeted today that he interviewed the bishop of Aleppo.

He told me his community members are safe and give Syrians credit for being able to live together.

He said, don't fall for propaganda that Assad was the protector of Christians.

You know, Robert Ford, who was the U.S.

ambassador to Syria when we were in government then, has sort of a rule of thumb, which is like, okay, look where the refugees are fleeing to and where they're fleeing from.

And clearly, you saw millions of people move from Assad-controlled territory to HTS-controlled territory.

You know, none of this is like whitewashing their behavior.

There's lots of reports of HTS,

you know, torturing people, arresting journalists or people that criticize them on social media.

Clearly, they believe in a pretty strict Islamic fundamentalist view of the world.

But, you know, a Jalani either through a really brilliant PR or through evolution and

growth has evolved into this kind of new narrative.

But it was interesting, Ben.

In 2021, he does this frontline interview.

I didn't realize this.

This U.S.

State Department put out the following tweet in Arabic.

Oh, hello, Jelani, you handsome one.

What a cute suit.

You can change what you wear, but you are still a terrorist.

Don't forget the $10 million reward on your head.

So that was the response.

Yeah, I wonder who wrote that.

Jeez.

No.

Again, Nusra Front, you know, certainly committed atrocities in the Syrian Civil War, and we don't know exactly where this is going.

I will just reiterate, we have to allow some room.

Not just some.

I mean, the Syrians get to figure this out.

It's their country.

If there's one thing, and I'm going to repeat this because it's important, that I've learned in 13 years, is that a bunch of people sitting

in Washington or Geneva or Abu Dhabi or

Istanbul,

they're not going to know Syria as well as Syrians, and they're not going to be able to kind of orchestrate the Syrian politics from abroad, even though they're never going to have some influence.

And what you have to allow for is a possibility that a guy like Jalani may have learned a lot over the course of the last decade and may have sincerely decided that it's a better approach to try to negotiate differences with factions, that ultimately he doesn't want to keep fighting in an endless civil war.

So better to treat Christians and Shia and other minority populations well rather than kind of being in a permanent conflict state.

We have to allow for that possibility.

And I say this because, you know, early in the

Arab Spring, you know, I think there was just an immediate skepticism of anybody that had a Muslim Brotherhood background coming to politics.

And you saw this obviously most acutely in Egypt,

where, you know, the rest of the region, its leaders at least,

did not want to allow for the possibility that a Muhammad Morsi in Egypt could be anything other than an existential threat to them.

Now, to be fair, Muslim Brotherhood also overreached in Egypt during its period of governance and was starting to kind of crack down on its opponents.

So

a lot of open space here, but the problem with that tweet and that mindset in that tweet is it just insists that somebody is the worst version of who the United States government believes them to be, or that somebody and their movement is incapable of changing.

And at a minimum, it's a a good thing that Assad is gone.

And now we don't know what's going to happen.

And I'm not making predictions about what's going to happen, but we also kind of owe it to the Syrian people to give this a chance and to

see if there can be, you know, a negotiated process.

And clearly, the fact they were clearly negotiating with this prime minister to have a transition and to come into Damascus peacefully.

I mean, the fact that they had no resistance,

there was clearly some back channeling going on and some dialogue.

And now what you want to see is whether whether that kind of continues to be the predominant strain in Syrian politics or whether you start to see reprisals and violence between factions again.

So we'll know what happens here, but I think we need to allow for the possibility that maybe we were wrong here.

Well, or at least like just not.

decide that it's binary.

You are a terrorist and you're stamped as such by our designations or you are not.

I mean, certainly it is the case that Jalani and al-Nusra were part of ISIS, pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda and then left.

Certainly it's true that they have a fundamentalist, Islamist view of the world.

There is a sense that they want to put in place a government led by Sharia law.

It's also true that they have used violence, including the killing of civilians, to advance political aims.

So by every definition,

that is terrorism.

But the question becomes, is it transnational terrorism like al-Qaeda and ISIS, where they want to kill all non-believers everywhere?

Or was this really like nationalism in service of a political project within Syria that was about ousting a dictator?

And what you ultimately end up with is something more moderate.

I mean, he says he will allow for some sort of minority rights or acceptance or existence in Syria.

Now, you raise the bigger question then, which is like, does Jalani survive?

Is his faction the one that comes out of this two-week process in charge?

Another big set of questions is like, what does the international community do to help this revolution succeed?

Is there sanctions relief?

Is there economic support on behalf of some kind of political entity that gets set up?

Like, now is the part of the podcast where we're just going to start asking questions about things that are coming that we just absolutely don't know the answer to.

Well, yeah, I mean, what is the role of the international community?

Because I think in terms of domestic Syrian politics, you would just hope that there's a structured process for negotiation about what this transition is, who it's to, you know, does it lead to institution building?

Does it lead to elections at some point?

They've got a lot of questions to figure out.

The international community's objective right now, I think, should be to provide as much support as possible.

Number one, is there some kind of capacity from the UN or anywhere else to kind of help with the structure and process of that negotiation?

Number two, there are huge humanitarian needs in Syria, decimated by 13 years of war.

Mass majority of the population is living underneath the poverty level.

There's going to be some disruptions probably in services as this thing transitions.

And so, providing support, yes.

I mean, no reason for those sanctions.

They were on Assad.

And also just providing direct assistance.

And here, by the way, the Gulf Arabs have a lot of resources.

And so, can there be some kind of coordinated effort to kind of help begin to rebuild Syria?

That's a role for the international community.

I think there's, you know, also a role to prevent bad actors from trying to fill vacuums.

Today, you saw the U.S.

take, I think, something like 50 airstrikes against ISIS.

I'm sure part of the thinking there, which is understandable, is like, let's just kind of, we know where all the worst actors are.

Let's try to keep them on the back foot here so this thing doesn't get disrailed by, you know, ISIS suddenly emerging back on the scene and making a dash at some city.

And then the other piece that'll be really interesting to watch, Tommy, is.

I believe that a lot of Syrian refugees want to go home, you know, counter to the narrative, you know, that they wanted to just kind of come into Europe.

And no,

the vast majority of refugees I've met in my life would like nothing more than to return to the place that they're from.

That is a massive enterprise.

You're talking millions and millions and millions.

I mean, I've lost track of how many millions of Syrians, at least five million, I believe, are living outside the country and Europe and other places.

And, you know, so that's something that's got to be coordinated.

Now, that's a new dynamic.

And

it points to how hopeful this could be, that, you know, counter to the kind of refugee crisis that has persisted since 9-11

because of all these conflicts.

We had the possibility of people going home.

So that's a lot of reason for the international community to remain invested here to try to make this work.

Well, yeah, and I think you're right, this is an opportunity because you can imagine a good version of this conversation where a bunch of European leaders say to their people, we need to step up and provide direct support to Syria right now to create the opportunity for refugees to go home and live where they want to live.

You could see a bad version of this conversation where some of these right-wing parties in Europe say, now is the moment we need to expel these Syrian refugees and get them the fuck out of here because the war, you know what I mean?

Right.

That's exactly right.

That's what this has happened fast.

But, Ben, let's talk about U.S.

interests for a minute, too.

I imagine the U.S., and there's reporting on this, is very, very worried about Assad's chemical weapons stockpiles, who has control of those, what is going to happen.

This is another area where Jelani is saying the right things and saying he'll allow in international inspectors, but I would imagine you would want more than that.

There's the U.S.

alliance with these Kurdish factions in northeast Syria that have been bravely fighting ISIS for a long time.

There are not only ISIS prisoners, but there are tens of thousands of people who are just swept up in these counter-ISIS operations, including women and children living in these horrific camps.

Everyone needs to figure out what to do with them, including whether some of these individuals are repatriated to the countries where they're from.

And then President Biden went out today to talk about these events.

Here's a clip of that.

Over the past four years, my administration pursued a clear principle policy towards Syria.

First,

we made clear from the start

sanction on

Assad would remain in place unless he engaged seriously in a political process to end the civil war.

Second, we maintained our military presence in Syria.

Our counter-ISIS to counter the support of local partners as well on the ground, their partners, never ceding an inch of territory.

Third, we've supported Israel's freedom of action against Iranian networks in Syria and against actors aligned with Iran who transported lethal aid to Lebanon.

And when necessary, ordered the use of military force against Iranian networks to protect U.S.

forces.

Our approach has shifted the balance of power in the Middle East.

Through this combination of support for our partners, sanctions, and diplomacy, and targeted military force when necessary.

We now see new opportunities opening up for the people of Syria and for the entire region.

So, that's President Biden today.

Look, I think it would have been a little more credible to say, hey, we fed a ton of arms to the Ukrainians who used it to fight and bleed out the Russians who were distracted.

And then we gave a ton of arms to the Israelis who used them in Gaza and then used them against our will to start another front and another war in Lebanon where they smoked a bunch of Hezbollah guys.

So those were huge drivers of these events rather than be like, see, policy mailed it.

Yeah, I, I, I, there were, there was never any indication whatsoever from the Biden administration that they were focused on Assad going.

Um, uh, you know, I think, obviously, scarred by the experience of the Obama administration, they, they, you know, lowered their ambitions to pretty focused missions.

So, so this has not happened because of U.S.

policy.

Um, this has happened, again, because of Syrians.

Um, you're right, Tommy, though.

If he did want to kind of draw some correlations, it actually wouldn't be that we had sanctions.

I mean, keeping sanctions on Assad and insisting he negotiated a certain way had nothing to do with this outcome.

You're right, though, that the support for Ukraine, which obviously has kept Russia diverted up there, was a part of it.

And also,

in addition to the support to the Israeli military, you know, the U.S.

has taken some shots at some of these proxy militias in Syria since October 7th.

It's very bank bang shoddy, you know.

And again, I think the main factors had to do with like what the Syrian opposition was able to do themselves.

But the U.S.

was a part of that picture that obviously distracted or degraded

Assad's main backers.

And you're right, going forward, I think

the hardcore

security interests are making sure that chemical weapon stockpile, whatever remains of it, is secure and hopefully, you know, destroyed.

And, you know, making sure that ISIS doesn't re-emerge

in any fashion.

And then, you know,

you don't want to see kind of a

the political process fail to the extent that there's some disintegration, again, of the Syrian state.

And,

you know, that kind of...

becomes a force for instability.

So you'd like to see a process that, again, maybe messy.

I mean, none of us should expect, you know,

the ideal democracy in Syria in six months.

I mean, we're still working on it here in the United States, you know, 250 years later.

So allow for

Nelson Mandela.

And, you know, this builds on what we were saying about Jelani.

Allow for some bumpiness here, but if it holds together, that's hugely preferable to either disintegration or to Assad.

The only other thing I'd raise here, Tommy, is that what is also in the U.S.

interest, but I think what people in the region maybe aren't saying out loud, is

where does this go next?

right because as you and i experienced in the contagion of the arab spring people in egypt where there is a loathed dictator are watching this and thinking well wait maybe sisi could collapse like a house of cards king abdullah is very vulnerable in jordan because of the war in gaza and anger uh from his population that's the other thing that the us i think is going to be watching is is does this become contagious in some way

Yeah, and also, I think we will probably be eager to leap on the opportunity that comes from the Russians getting ICE out of Syria, losing access not only to a big naval base in the Med, but also an airfield.

And as you mentioned earlier, you know, I think a lot of the Russian operations in Africa have been run through Syria over time.

So this could cut off that access point as well.

So that's a pretty big win.

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Just on the American political front, Ben, two other things.

I mean, Trump has been truthing about this.

I think the one that really matters was yesterday.

He had a long statement where he kind of like narrated events, slapped Obama around for the red line, and then ended it with, in all caps, saying, the United States should have nothing to do with it.

This is not our fight.

Let it play out.

Do not get involved.

So Trump's

pretty clear position there.

You and I debated this last week.

It seems that this hasn't changed.

But there is also still the very awkward confirmation hearing that's going to come up for Tulsi Gabbard to run our intelligence community because she is a woman who still doubts that Assad was the one who used chemical weapons on his own people.

She has said he is not our enemy.

As these opposition groups sweep through Syria, I imagine they're going to collect ungodly amounts of evidence of war crimes and other horrors by the Assad regime.

So this could, it's going to make for a bumpy hearing for her.

Yeah, I think the record keeping among the Syrian secret police was at like stasi level.

So,

you know, finding the, you know, going to G and pulling out Gabbard and seeing what's in that file would be quite interesting, you know, because I'm sure they recorded, you know, what she talked to Assad about and whatever other contacts she had with the Syrian government.

So that bears watching.

It is a genuine.

strategic blow to the Russians to just build on the thing you said before,

you know, to lose this conduit in the Mediterranean and down to Africa.

And so watching how that plays out is going to be something something that

will

be interesting.

But to the Trump point of like stay out, that's probably net, net the best thing he could possibly say for the Syrians themselves.

You know,

I would like to see, as we just discussed, a U.S.

government that would credibly provide a lot of assistance and try to work with the Gulf countries to mobilize more resources.

So, there are good things that the U.S.

could be doing, but I would rather Trump just say leave it alone than he started meddling around in there.

So, maybe, maybe that statement's for the best, you know?

Yeah, maybe let more competent people take over, though.

I know, hopefully, none of these sort of arsonists in the Gulf decide to pick a side and help foment another civil war.

I mean, that's the worst case scenario for the Syrian people.

One other big U.S.

interest, Ben, is a journalist named Austin Tice.

He went missing 12 years ago in Syria.

His family and the Biden administration say they believe he is still alive.

I guess U.S.

officials, according to CNN, have been in touch with opposition forces about trying to locate Austin Tice.

I think everyone just praised this guy as okay, but he has been in Syria for a long time, and it would be incredible to see him released as

among these political prisoners who have just been rotting in these Syrian prisons/slash torture chambers slash execution sites forever.

The other people that are watching this very closely, though, Ben are the Israelis.

Netanyahu shares a border with Syria.

They just, you know, the Israelis have been hitting targets both in Damascus and they just took a bunch of territory in the Golan Heights to try to improve their buffer zone between Israel and Syria.

Netanyahu gave some speech about this today.

He did it in English, so we have a clip of it.

Let's listen to that.

This collapse is a direct result of our forceful action against Hezbollah and Iran, Assad's main supporters.

It set off a chain reaction of all those who want to free themselves from this tyranny and its suppression.

But it also means we have to take action against possible threats.

One of them is the collapse of the Separation of Forces Agreement from 1974 between Israel and Syria.

This agreement held for 50 years.

Last night it collapsed.

The Syrian army abandoned its positions.

We gave the Israeli Army the order to take over those positions to ensure that no hostile force embeds itself right next to the border of Israel.

This is a temporary defensive position until a suitable arrangement is found.

Equally, we send a hand of peace to all those beyond our border in Syria, to the Druze, to the Kurds, to the Christians, and to the Muslims who want to live in peace with Israel.

We're going to follow events very carefully.

If we can establish neighborly relations and peaceful relations with the new forces emerging in Syria, that's our desire.

But if we do not, we'll do whatever it takes to defend the state of Israel and the border of Israel.

Every Netanyahu statement boils down to like, if I feel like killing you, I will do it.

And that is that.

You could imagine a scenario where the Israelis are happy that there's no longer an Assad government that is friendly enough with Iran to allow them to transit arms through Syria constantly to give to Hezbollah to use to attack Israel.

That said, I think the Israelis had those.

those shipping routes pretty well wired and would just blow them up on the regular.

And at the end of the day, they're probably a lot more worried about a potential Islamist government

on their flank.

But I don't know.

I imagine it's just mostly anxiety, Ben.

Yeah, I mean, as usual, too, it was an entirely securitized statement,

you know, with notably this focus on the border.

I think for Israel, this so-called axis of resistance

that Iran, Hezbollah, the Assad regime,

all these militias in Iraq, and

in some ways the Houthis, this is a huge blow.

It's kind of the end of a version of that because you no longer have Assad.

You've got Hezbollah really on its back foot.

You know, Soleimani's dead.

You know, Nesrall is dead.

Assad's living in Moscow.

That's something, you know, that the Israelis, I'm sure, welcome and obviously had something to do with.

On the other hand, to your point, I mean, I remember

when we were in the Obama administration, there was never really a push from, for all the people that were kind of pushing for the U.S.

to militarily kind of do regime change in Syria.

That never came from Israel.

I think there was always some ambivalence about what might replace Assad.

And so it was kind of how can we crush this network we don't like, this axis of resistance, but maybe, you know, we're not quite sure if that necessarily means, you know, going into the unknown of a new government.

I think, you know, we don't know.

I'm sure there's differences of view in Israel about that.

So I think, you know, they'll be watching very closely, you know, what emerges here.

Given what they're doing in Gaza right now, I can't imagine that, you know, public opinion in Syria is going to look favorably to kind of having a warm relationship with Israel.

And so it sounds like he's going to keep it very transactional, kind of focused on the border.

I mean, you hope that that's it, that there's not, you know, they don't try to fill some vacuum in ways that they have in Lebanon at times and have, you know, some territorial buffer zone that kind of creates tensions.

We should name the fact that Israel's already annexed the Golan Heights, which is not something they did through any international agreement.

So there's a place for tension here, but I think they'll probably watch this warily

like they do everything in their neighborhood.

Yeah.

So we had also, we'd asked for our awesome Pod Save the World Discord users to send us some questions.

We actually kind of covered two of the three I plucked out, Ben.

So the Sharkulin asked about the refugee crisis in Europe, which we talked about.

Poto pre-97 asked about Tulsi Gabbard and her weird affinity for Assad.

And I think we got it covered how that might make her confirmation hearing pretty weird.

One we should definitely just talk about because it looms so large in both of our brains and consciences is a question from Curry Roo, which is, why didn't Obama intervene back in 2013?

I don't like counterfactuals, but I'd imagine we'd be celebrating this moment a decade ago, San's hundreds of thousands of deaths, if he did.

Good question.

It's impossible to know if that would have been the case then, you know, if this would have ended the same.

I think all the pieces of context we talked about at the top, Ben,

are what got us to this moment.

And the idea that a U.S.

military intervention in 2013 would have led to a clean outcome or, you know.

The outcome that we all wanted is it's hard to say.

I mean, I guess what I'm trying to say, and I'm stumbling on it, is U.S.

military interventions have not gone very well everywhere.

And what we're talking about in 2013 was a very limited response to the use of Syrian chemical weapons.

And Trump eventually did basically exactly that.

He hit a bunch of runways and absolutely nothing changed.

What I think a lot of people really wanted from the Obama administration was a full-scale regime change operation in Syria.

And I think that just wasn't on the table for...

a variety of reasons.

But first and foremost, the fact that U.S.

regime change operations tend to end in disaster, which doesn't mean I think the last 12 years was good in any way, shape, or form, or that we wouldn't do things differently.

I'm sure there's a million things Obama would do differently if he had the chance, but I don't know.

What are your thoughts on this one?

Yeah, I guess

you're freely acknowledging

the failures of the Obama policy to effectuate

this transition.

I guess what I'd say is that, first of all, the war started in 2011, you know, and even by that chemical weapons attack in 2013, you'd seen the wild scale use of barrel bombs.

You'd seen horrific massacres.

Sometimes, weirdly in retrospect, it's like this chemical weapons happened attack happened in 2013.

Obama didn't do the red line.

And that kind of caused everything.

That happened in the middle.

And

we will never know if that kind of cruise missile strike would have somehow scrambled the decks.

But what we do know is that in the ensuing years, a lot has changed.

And part of what's changed is that Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia have been either distracted or weakened.

Part of what's changed is the ways in which the Syrian opposition got themselves together.

But I still think the most important thing

is that

if we had done the regime change, To your point, Tommy, then it's another U.S.

regime change war, like Afghanistan, like Iraq, like Libya, where oftentimes we are well-intentioned about who we would like to see take over the country.

But there's something about a foreign government, particularly the United States, bringing about the regime change that creates a particular kind of instability because you don't have the same legitimacy on the ground.

The U.S.

feels more compelled to pick winners and to start meddling in the politics.

Then, you know, maybe there's some foreign forces who become a target for people who want to drill things.

So I do think it is better that, you know, Obama or some other U.S.

president isn't the one who removed Assad, that it was Syrians who did this on their own.

Again, that is not to absolve us.

I always just say to people, don't just question this red line decision.

You know, question

what I said earlier.

You know, we were supporting the opposition while designating part of them as terrorists.

What was with your strategy for how you supported the opposition?

Some people questioned the decision to call for Assad to go before there was a plan essentially to make that happen.

And then that might have caused him to dig in harder and to be even worse.

I'm not sure about that, but that's worth looking at too.

To me, it's not that I'm defensive about the red line per se.

I mean, at the time, I wanted to

bomb Syria after that incident.

It's simply that it's kind of become this simplistic way of viewing this entire war.

This 13-year civil war was about a lot more than this one decision by Barack Obama, where he frankly would not have had any political support in the U.S.

to get involved in Syria militarily.

And again, the other thing I wanted to footstomp is is, I also think, you know, this is not a scorecard.

You know, part of what I hate watching Twitter around now, Tommy, is like,

it's like this is a take scorecard or

now it's a geopolitical chess piece.

Like, this is a human story for Syrians above all.

And

I just think the fact that they're the ones who did this, rather than it being like some think tankers in DC who think that they did it,

that's to the good because ultimately that that that creates a more legitimate transition in Syria.

Yeah, I think that's really well said.

Like you, I look back on those decisions, mistakes we made, think about them all the time.

On top of that, there was just sort of like the broader sweep of things the U.S.

had taken on by that time, including a surge in Afghanistan, a war in Libya that was not going great, et cetera, et cetera.

So there's a million different ways you can kind of look at the mistakes we made or didn't make.

Ultimately, this is about human beings and the Syrian people and the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of people who are sitting and rotting in prisons who are now free or who know the fate of their loved ones, even if it's the worst case.

There's millions of people abroad who have the opportunity to come home, but there is so much more work to do to make sure that this story ends hopefully and with a state that

supports and represents the interests of those people and not another set of kleptocrats or autocrats who are brutalizing another generation of Syrians.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's the opportunity here.

I mean, and just better.

You know, again, it doesn't have to be perfect, but

boy, it can get so much better than it's been for these people for decades.

And that's a truly hopeful thing.

Yeah.

Well, a truly historic day.

I think that's all I have, but I don't know if there's anything else you wanted to say.

I mean, maybe one last fuck you to Bashar al-Assad.

His father was an evil monster who took took power in a military coup.

And I think it was the 70s.

He didn't even want Bashar to lead.

His older brother was supposed to lead.

He got killed in a car accident.

So he said, okay, come back from London, you ophthalmist nerd, and let me teach you the ways of massacring civilians.

And here we are, but I hope he lives a very brief and awful life in Russia.

Yeah.

I mean,

he's a terrible asshole

who

did nothing for his people other than slaughter them.

And, you know, I don't know how long it'll be until he might have an accident on a balcony in Moscow or something.

But he's definitely in a worse place and deserves to be there.

My final thoughts, Tommy, is just.

You know, Putin's pissed at him, right?

Because Putin must be like, you stupid fucker, you had one job, which is keep an eye on your armed forces and don't let this happen.

I've been propping your pathetic ass for a decade.

Now you have served no value to me.

And

I'm going to keep you up in a lavish lifestyle forever.

Like, no.

I think you're right.

Like, there's a chance he suffers a accident.

And just think about Putin, too.

I mean, this guy was, you know, for the last 13 years, this was his proof that he was a strategic genius.

And this was his, you know, key, you know, foothold for the Russians in the Middle East.

And that's all gone now.

I mean, that's just money burnt.

That's the, it turned out he wasn't the grand chess master, you know, um, all along.

And that's the last thing I was going to say, Tommy, is a reminder that things can change fast.

You know, in these kleptocratic autocracies, you know, we sit here and, you know, try to game out how long they're last.

If this can happen in Syria, it can happen.

I mentioned Egypt, but it could happen in Russia.

You know, we, we don't know.

Nobody predicted that the Soviet Union would fall as fast as it did.

And so I think we've gotten yet another reminder that for all the difficulties democracy has had, ultimately, people would rather not live under assholes like Bashar al-Sad.

And ultimately, justice comes to a lot of those guys.

Amen.

Well, that's it for this bonus episode.

Thanks, everybody, for tuning in, and we'll be back regularly scheduled on Wednesday.

Wonder what regime will topple by then?

Yeah, what cool, make the buying regime.

Maybe, yeah, we'll see.

Just kidding.

It's just a joke.

All right.

See you, buddy.

See ya.

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