The Ben Shapiro Show - December 09, 2024


SYRIA FALLS

Topics
Al-Jolani Syria mess
Hosted by
Ben Shapiro
Mentioned
Bashar Assad Donald Trump Druze Barack Obama Joe Biden Jeremy Boring Al Jelani Jordan Vladimir Putin Yahya Sinwar Dana White Erdogan Omar Abdulaziz David Lloyd George George W. Bush Benjamin Netanyahu Hassan Nasrallah George Clemencow Saddam Hussein Jake Sullivan and 10 more
The Evolution of a Rockstar | Gene Simmons Alleged UnitedHealthcare CEO Shooter CAPTURED…HERE’S WHAT WE KNOW

Episode Stats


Length

52 minutes

Words per minute

193.22

Word count

10,086

Sentence count

769

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

38

sentences flagged

Hate speech

80

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

The Assad regime in Syria is gone. We'll bring you all the details, how it happened, and what it means. First, I have some major news to share with you today: Starting in January, The Daily Wire will become an official partner of UFC. That's right, The Weekly Wire is stepping into the octagon with the world's premier mixed martial arts organization.

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Ben Shapiro Show" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Well, folks, the Assad regime in Syria is gone.
00:00:02.000 We'll bring you all the details, how it happened, what it means.
00:00:05.000 First, I have some major news to share with you today.
00:00:07.000 Starting in January, Jeremy's Razors will become an official partner of UFC. That's right, The Daily Wire is stepping into the octagon with the world's premier mixed martial arts organization.
00:00:17.000 More details coming up later in the show.
00:00:19.000 Very cool stuff.
00:00:20.000 Alrighty, so...
00:00:21.000 A tectonic shift in the Middle East just happened over the weekend.
00:00:24.000 On Sunday morning, Syrian rebels finally took Damascus.
00:00:29.000 They took Bashar al-Assad's palace.
00:00:31.000 The Assad regime is no more.
00:00:33.000 Assad has fled to Moscow where he is being granted some sort of asylum because the Russians, of course, backed the Assad regime.
00:00:39.000 There's a lightning campaign that basically came from nowhere.
00:00:42.000 I want to show you a couple of maps so you understand exactly what's going on.
00:00:45.000 Because when we talk about what's happening in Syria, what we have to understand is that Syria is an artificial creation post-World War I by the West, by the French, by the British. 0.93
00:00:55.000 And because of that, like many other states in the Middle East, it is unworkable and has been unworkable for a very long time. 0.99
00:01:01.000 You have a large number of groups of various religious belief systems, many of them unbelievably radical, many of them terrorists, all fighting one another.
00:01:11.000 And the Assad regime was a secularist Ba'athist regime, like Saddam Hussein, with a wild left-wing view of economics.
00:01:19.000 Essentially, it was just a fascist dictatorship engaged in mass human rights abuses at scale.
00:01:24.000 Over the course of the Assad regime, some 12 million Syrians were displaced.
00:01:28.000 Many of them ended up in Turkey.
00:01:30.000 Many of them ended up in Jordan.
00:01:31.000 Many of them ended up in Europe.
00:01:32.000 The Syrian refugee crisis had massive ramifications for European politics.
00:01:37.000 And that was driven by the civil war that happened in Syria between 2011 and just ended over the weekend, 2024.
00:01:44.000 Although, as we'll see, I think the civil war is likely to continue for a long time to come.
00:01:49.000 Because this is an unworkable patchwork of various groups in various areas of the country.
00:01:54.000 But we'll start with the actual region because in order to understand what's going on in Syria, you have to understand that there are a lot of hands in Syria.
00:02:02.000 A lot of different countries, a lot of different interests who had their hands in Syria.
00:02:06.000 So let's look at the regional map of the Middle East so you understand where Syria is placed on the map.
00:02:11.000 So the regional map of the Middle East, you will see that Syria is located alongside the Mediterranean Sea.
00:02:18.000 It stretches all the way from Iraq in its east to the Mediterranean Sea in the west.
00:02:22.000 The sort of southwestern border of Syria is Israel.
00:02:26.000 The very tip of the southwest part of Syria borders Israel.
00:02:30.000 Because Syria had repeatedly invaded Israel, in 1967, Israel won its war against Syria and ended up taking the Golan Heights.
00:02:37.000 The Golan Heights have been annexed to Israel as recognized by the United States, specifically because they're being used as basically a vantage point from which to shoot into Israel.
00:02:47.000 So that is one border of Syria.
00:02:49.000 Another border of Syria is Lebanon.
00:02:51.000 Syria has had a long-standing fraught relationship with Lebanon.
00:02:54.000 Syria helped destroy Lebanon as a functioning Christian state in the Middle East.
00:02:58.000 Back in the 1980s, Syria effectively just occupied Lebanon and stayed there all the way from the 1980s through 2005 and helped wreck the system in coordination with Hezbollah. 0.86
00:03:10.000 Syria, the Assad regime, has been working in conjunction with Iran.
00:03:14.000 As you can see on the map, Syria to its east is bordered by Iraq, and beyond that, Iran.
00:03:19.000 And so Iran had a large influential swath of land, basically a Shia crescent of radicalism that stretched all the way from Iran across northern Iraq through Syria and to Lebanon. 0.78
00:03:31.000 This giant chain of Islamic terror pushed by the Shia regime. 1.00
00:03:36.000 To the south of Syria is Jordan.
00:03:39.000 Jordan is a Sunni Arab state.
00:03:41.000 It is governed by the Hashemite dynasty.
00:03:44.000 It has always been a fragile state because, again, it is a monarchy in a region where its population does not share the same ethnicity as the actual kingdom.
00:03:53.000 And 60-70% of the population of Jordan is Sunni Arab Palestinian and quite radicalized.
00:04:02.000 And so, again, the entire Middle East is a basket case. 0.91
00:04:04.000 And if you look to the north of Syria, what you see is Turkey, which has a major hand in what just happened over the weekend. 0.64
00:04:11.000 Turkey, of course.
00:04:12.000 It is run by Erdogan, who is a neo-Ottoman dictator.
00:04:16.000 He turned Turkey from a functioning democracy and a member of NATO into a sort of radicalized Islamic state, not in the same mold as, say, the Taliban or in the mold of what's about to happen next in Syria, but in his own methodology. 0.51
00:04:31.000 It is a militant Islamist state that supports Hamas.
00:04:34.000 And that was supportive of many of the rebel groups that just drove their way through Syria.
00:04:38.000 Okay, so that is where Syria is placed on the map.
00:04:40.000 And because you can see its juxtaposition to all these places, you can also see there are a lot of interests involved.
00:04:44.000 So, for example, the Russians, very, very interested in Syria because they wanted to secure ports on the Mediterranean Sea in Syria, which they actually did with the acquiescence of the Assad regime.
00:04:55.000 So among the foreign players who were involved in Syria, Iran, which was using it as a thoroughfare and propping up the Assad regime, Russia, which was using it As a base and propping up the Assad regime.
00:05:04.000 Turkey, which did not like the Assad regime, and also was attempting to make its own incursions into Syria because a lot of people in Syria are Kurds.
00:05:15.000 And the Turks don't like the Kurds in the same way they don't like the Armenians.
00:05:18.000 And so they've been attempting to kill the Kurds, in fact, in the middle of all of this chaos in Syria.
00:05:23.000 They've been launching airstrikes on civilian areas in Kurdish areas of Syria.
00:05:27.000 And the border of Israel, Israel wants to defend itself and make sure that it is not the victim of yet another land incursion from Syria.
00:05:34.000 So Syria, as you can see, geopolitically is just a mess.
00:05:37.000 Okay, that is not even getting into the internal politics.
00:05:39.000 That's just where it is in the Middle East.
00:05:41.000 Okay, now we get to the situation in Syria today.
00:05:45.000 So the map of Syria today shows that it is split into a bunch of different territories.
00:05:51.000 So as you can see from this particular map, and this one comes courtesy of the New York Times, a fine map, this map shows a series of separate territories.
00:06:01.000 So you have certain opposition groups, That are in the south of Syria, bordering the Golan Heights and bordering Jordan.
00:06:09.000 Some of those are radical Sunni Islamists.
00:06:12.000 Some of those are Druze. 0.99
00:06:14.000 Druze are a different group who are, again, they're Sunni Muslims, but they tend to be significantly less radical than many of the other Sunni Muslims in the area.
00:06:25.000 Meanwhile, you have the main rebel coalition, which is located...
00:06:29.000 In the northwest of Syria, that main rebel coalition is run by a person named al-Jolani.
00:06:38.000 As we'll get to in a moment, al-Jolani is in fact a radical and probably an al-Qaeda and ISIS-affiliated terrorist.
00:06:43.000 He certainly was in his past.
00:06:44.000 He probably still is.
00:06:46.000 That is the main rebel coalition.
00:06:48.000 He was backed by the Turks because, again, he is up in the north.
00:06:51.000 He was backed by the Turks. 0.76
00:06:52.000 Meanwhile, if you look to the northeast region, You'll see that the Kurds are in control of a large swath of that area.
00:06:59.000 That didn't used to be under the control of the Kurds.
00:07:01.000 That used to be under the control of ISIS. ISIS was very much located in that area.
00:07:04.000 There are prisons holding tens of thousands of ISIS prisoners in those Kurdish areas.
00:07:08.000 So, after the Assad regime fell, the United States has been launching airstrikes in these ISIS kind of hotbeds in the Kurdish area of Syria in order to prevent ISIS from reconstituting.
00:07:19.000 As said, it's a complete mess.
00:07:21.000 Turkey, as you can see from this map, also has taken over huge swaths of the north of Syria.
00:07:27.000 So that is the map of Syria as it currently stands.
00:07:31.000 So now I want to go through what has happened over time with these various forces.
00:07:36.000 So if you look at the governmental forces and their allies, for example...
00:07:41.000 The governmental force and their allies in 2014. So the civil war broke out in 2011. We'll go through a brief timeline of the civil war in Syria and how it ended.
00:07:49.000 And then we're going to talk about what happened with each of these various groups over the course of the war.
00:07:52.000 So in 2011, a civil war broke out in Syria.
00:07:56.000 That was one of the spillover effects of the so-called Arab Spring.
00:07:59.000 Bashar Assad cracked down on the protesters.
00:08:02.000 He labeled them all Sunni al Qaeda affiliates.
00:08:04.000 Some of them certainly were Sunni al Qaeda affiliates, not all of them.
00:08:07.000 He began using harsher and harsher tactics.
00:08:09.000 The United States, the EU, the Arab League soon introduced sanctions targeting senior members of the Assad regime.
00:08:15.000 Meanwhile, on the other side of that, Iran and Russia decided that they were going to continue to support and indeed increase their support For Bashar Assad, by September 2011, organized militias on the one side, backed by the EU, the US, the Arab League, are at total war with the Assad regime.
00:08:31.000 And remember, there's a big debate in the United States at the time over what level of support to grant to these rebels, because, again, many of these rebels were al-Qaeda affiliates, and not all these groups are the same.
00:08:42.000 By 2012, Syrian rebels were gaining control of some segments of Syria, including the second biggest city in Syria after Damascus called Aleppo.
00:08:49.000 You'll remember Aleppo talked a lot about in 2012. Assad was fighting back.
00:08:55.000 Now again, Assad was the enemy of many in the West, but also of Turkey, of Saudi, of Qatar as well.
00:09:02.000 Qatar played sort of a weird role here because Qatar was supporting many of the rebels, but at the same time, Qatar is sort of a caspa of Iran.
00:09:08.000 As usual, Qatar is on all sides of every issue.
00:09:10.000 In August of 2012, Barack Obama, then President of the United States, famously suggested that if Bashar Assad used chemical weapons on his own people, meaning Syrians, that would be a red line that would result in U.S. backing, heavier U.S. backing for the Syrian rebels.
00:09:25.000 Hey, well then, in 2013, Syria did use chemical weapons.
00:09:29.000 Assad used chemical weapons in the suburbs of Damascus, killing hundreds of people on August 21st, 2013. The West backed down U.S., France, and the U.K. That red line was totally false.
00:09:39.000 And basically, Barack Obama ended up handing control of Syria to the Russians.
00:09:44.000 The Russians said they would get rid of the chemical weapons there, which obviously didn't happen.
00:09:49.000 Even this weekend, Israeli Air Force operations were bombing chemical weapons factories in Syria to prevent them from falling into the hands of al-Qaeda, ISIS, radical Islamist, radical Sunni Islamist terrorists.
00:10:00.000 Well, by the end of 2013, Sunni terrorists are totally in lead of the opposition. 0.98
00:10:06.000 Okay, so whatever sort of moderate elements there were to the anti-Assad rebellion were basically gone.
00:10:11.000 This was the same year that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, founded ISIS, which was the Islamic state in Iraq and Syria, right?
00:10:19.000 So again, look at that map.
00:10:20.000 What you will see is that Iraq and Syria are right next door to one another.
00:10:23.000 So large swath of eastern Syria, part of western Iraq, ends up under the auspices of ISIS.
00:10:29.000 So after ISIS began beheading Americans, the United States and our allies launched an air campaign to limit ISIS's gains.
00:10:35.000 But ISIS seemed to be a fairly durable presence in eastern Syria and also in western Iraq.
00:10:39.000 Folks, we'll get to more of this timeline in a moment.
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00:13:02.000 Meanwhile, 2015, Russia starts becoming more and more active in Syria, launching strikes on behalf of the Assad regime.
00:13:10.000 Russia and Assad essentially level Aleppo. 0.63
00:13:12.000 Remember in 2015, terrible pictures from Aleppo.
00:13:16.000 The entire city basically leveled.
00:13:17.000 It was filled with civilians.
00:13:18.000 It wasn't all terrorists.
00:13:23.000 The combined effect of U.S. assaults on ISIS under Donald Trump by 2017, by Kurdish forces in the north of Syria, and by Bashar Assad start to have a severe impact on ISIS. So ISIS's ideological rivals, including one called the Nusra Front, decided to merge into a group called Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which will henceforth be known as HTS. HTS becomes pretty important to the story.
00:13:50.000 The leader of HTS is this al-Jolani character, who, as we say, was a member of both al-Qaeda and ISIS, and then broke off and formed HTS and started fighting ISIS. Okay, so they captured territory that was held by ISIS in the area of Idlib.
00:14:05.000 Idlib is in sort of the northwest of the country.
00:14:07.000 And when we fast forward, you'll see that that was the base from which these rebels then just took over the rest of the country or at least the population centers of the country over the course of the last week.
00:14:15.000 So 2017-2018, the U.S. and our allies began actually striking Syrian government weapons depots after the use of chemical weapons.
00:14:23.000 The rebels were pushed back into Idlib.
00:14:25.000 Russia and Turkey established a buffer zone between the Idlib rebels and the Assad forces.
00:14:30.000 But that rebel territory ended up being controlled by the Turkey-backed HTS. So HTS, again, is this offshoot, this breakaway group from ISIS and from Al-Qaeda.
00:14:39.000 And they end up being backed by Turkey. 0.98
00:14:41.000 They are Sunni Muslim terrorists. 1.00
00:14:44.000 They are radical. 0.99
00:14:45.000 All they pretend that you're hearing in the media today, that the people who just took over Syria, actually they might be moderate.
00:14:50.000 Actually they might be...
00:14:50.000 No, no, no.
00:14:52.000 Okay, so again, welcome to the Middle East where there are no good solutions, there are only problems. 0.99
00:14:56.000 It's a rough region of the world and there are a lot of bad people fighting a lot of other bad people as a general rule.
00:15:03.000 Now, after that comes to a bit of a close, Assad is then ushered back into the Arab League.
00:15:08.000 Assad is seen as somewhat legitimate again.
00:15:10.000 And things seem to sort of shift into low-grade civil war mode.
00:15:15.000 And here is where we can take a look at the maps again.
00:15:18.000 So if you look at the government forces just before all of this happened, what you'll see is in 2014, the government forces controlled large swaths of eastern Syria, Including places like Aleppo and Hama and Homs and Damascus.
00:15:33.000 2017, they controlled a very similar area.
00:15:35.000 2019, they controlled even more area.
00:15:37.000 And by 2024...
00:15:39.000 They controlled an enormous amount of area, like more area than they had controlled back in 2014, including incursions into Idlib, which was, again, a heavily Sunni terror, al-Qaeda offshoot, ISIS, Turkey-backed group.
00:15:54.000 Okay, so Syria seemed to be, the Assad regime seemed to be in pretty good position at the beginning of 2024. Okay, now take a look at the opposition forces.
00:16:03.000 Okay, so what you can see is the opposition forces here.
00:16:07.000 Their territory had been shrinking.
00:16:08.000 In 2014, they controlled Idlib.
00:16:10.000 They controlled parts of Aleppo.
00:16:12.000 They controlled outskirts of Damascus.
00:16:14.000 2017 shrinks.
00:16:16.000 2020 really, really shrinks.
00:16:18.000 They're basically stuck in Idlib.
00:16:19.000 And that was the case all the way up until 2024. So opposition forces have shrunk all the way down to Idlib.
00:16:25.000 And now take a look at ISIS. So ISIS, as we say, was in eastern Syria.
00:16:29.000 And then it was basically shrunk over the course of the American-led war against ISIS. Work with the Americans in that.
00:16:39.000 And the Assad regime was also pushing against ISIS. So ISIS once held up to a third of Syria.
00:16:45.000 In 2015, they held large swaths of the north.
00:16:47.000 These areas are now held by Kurdish forces and the Turks who came into Syria and created their own very, very large buffer zone that they now occupy because, again, they hate the Kurds.
00:16:56.000 So 2015, 2016, 2017, you see ISIS shrinking, shrinking, shrinking.
00:17:00.000 By 2018, they basically have like a couple of areas they hold in eastern Syria.
00:17:04.000 So ISIS shrinks down. 0.99
00:17:06.000 Okay, and then finally you have Kurdish forces and Turkish forces.
00:17:10.000 So look at Kurdish forces.
00:17:11.000 Here's a map of the Kurdish forces.
00:17:12.000 What you see is that the Kurds controlled some border areas near Turkey in 2014. That grows in 2017, grows in 2019. By 2024, a large swath of northeastern Syria is controlled by the Kurds, who again are friendlier to the west, friendlier to the United States, friendlier to Israel.
00:17:30.000 So the Kurds, if there are good guys in Syria, the Kurds are the closest thing to the good guys in Syria. 1.00
00:17:36.000 And maybe some of the Druze in the south of Syria.
00:17:38.000 And finally, Turkish forces who have had a major outsized impact.
00:17:42.000 Okay, so the Turks controlled a relatively small area.
00:17:47.000 Actually, it's not that small.
00:17:48.000 An area of sort of northwestern Syria in 2017. They increased that to large swaths of the border by 2020. Those are controlled by Turkish military operations.
00:17:57.000 Okay, so what exactly happened?
00:17:59.000 What exactly changed?
00:18:00.000 Okay, fast forward to 2024. So, the Assad regime basically has no money.
00:18:05.000 Okay, the Assad regime, because again, it is a Ba'athist dictatorship, With nothing to trade and has been engaged in a civil war for 13 years, their currency is effectively worthless. 0.90
00:18:15.000 Like right now, if you take a look at the actual currency of Syria versus the American dollar, right now $1 goes for 16,000 Syrian pounds or 16,000 Syrian lira, as the case may be.
00:18:31.000 And it's been dropping fast because, again, nothing gets produced over there.
00:18:33.000 So massive inflation rates.
00:18:35.000 The Assad regime is paying all of its troops with this.
00:18:38.000 And so Assad is basically being propped up by outside forces.
00:18:41.000 Remember, again, back to that map.
00:18:44.000 Remember the map of the Middle East.
00:18:45.000 So remember, who has an interest in Assad being upheld?
00:18:49.000 Not Turkey. 0.99
00:18:50.000 Turkey doesn't like Assad very much.
00:18:52.000 Turkey would prefer that its own ambitions extend into Syria.
00:18:57.000 Israel is sort of indifferent about Assad because Israel sees that Assad is still upholding mostly kind of the buffer area in the Golan Heights, which extends to Mount Hermon, which again goes into Syria.
00:19:10.000 It's kind of a high point regionally in terms of geography.
00:19:13.000 You can see from the top of Mount Hermon down into Damascus.
00:19:15.000 So Israel is sort of divided on Assad.
00:19:17.000 On the one hand, they don't like Assad because he is used as a tool and a proxy by Iran.
00:19:22.000 On the other hand, they understand that if Assad goes, a Sunni Muslim dictatorship is likely to follow. 0.96
00:19:26.000 Like a terrorist dictatorship.
00:19:29.000 So Israel is kind of, you know, on both, they don't know what to do about Syria, particularly.
00:19:35.000 It's their one quiet front in the latest war.
00:19:38.000 Iran, meanwhile, is using Assad as their cutout. 0.61
00:19:40.000 So they're smuggling weapons via Hezbollah, who is a force on behalf of Assad in Syria.
00:19:47.000 And they're doing that all the way into Lebanon.
00:19:51.000 So, that's Iran's. 0.98
00:19:52.000 And Russia has an interest in upholding Assad because Assad has a deal with them where Russia gives them weaponry, Russia gives them forces, Russia gives them all sorts of resources, and in return, they have access to some coastal bases in Syria.
00:20:04.000 So, what happened in 2023?
00:20:06.000 You'll remember at the very end of 2023, something kind of big happened.
00:20:08.000 October 7th, Iran decided to activate all of its terror groups at once.
00:20:12.000 So it activated Hamas. 0.80
00:20:13.000 Yahya Sinwar launches October 7th.
00:20:15.000 1,200 Jews are killed in Israel.
00:20:17.000 250 are pulled into Gaza and are still being held in the terror tunnels.
00:20:23.000 And then Hezbollah in Israel's north, Lebanon, right? 0.68
00:20:27.000 They start firing thousands of missiles over the course of a year into northern Israel.
00:20:31.000 8,000 to 10,000 rockets and missiles into northern Israel, clearing out Israel's north.
00:20:36.000 So, over the course of the subsequent year, Israel proceeds to take out Yahya Sinwar and virtually all of Hamas' military resources. 0.60
00:20:45.000 Beginning in October of this year, Israel totally devastates Hezbollah, totally devastates it.
00:20:50.000 They launch the beeper attacks, followed by the radio attacks, followed by a full-scale air campaign against all of Hezbollah's weaponry, followed by a ground invasion of Lebanon in order to push Hezbollah out of southern Lebanon.
00:21:02.000 They kill the leadership of Hezbollah, including Hassan Nasrallah, who is the chief leader, not only a charismatic figure, but a leader in operations.
00:21:09.000 And they're also doing operations in Syria to prevent Syria from being used as a thoroughfare for Hezbollah resources.
00:21:15.000 Okay, so Iran is getting absolutely shellacked.
00:21:18.000 Absolutely shellacked.
00:21:19.000 Meanwhile, Russia is being absolutely shellacked.
00:21:22.000 Russia is bogged down in this war that it declared in Ukraine in February 2022. They're losing hundreds of thousands of people over there.
00:21:29.000 There's an enormous amount of material.
00:21:31.000 They simply don't have the money or the capacity to uphold the Assad regime.
00:21:36.000 So, as a byproduct of both the Ukraine war, so Russia can't come to Assad's aid, but mostly as a result of Israel chopping off the arms of the Iranian octopus in places like Syria, in places like Lebanon, in places like Hamasistan, because of that, Iran cannot uphold the Assad regime. 0.61
00:21:54.000 And so, after Israel's October offensive against Hezbollah, which again was a governing party in Lebanon and has now been pretty much devastated, and was also a force on behalf of Assad, Assad had no allies to call upon.
00:22:07.000 The legs of the stool upon which his regime was standing got kicked out from underneath him.
00:22:11.000 And as a result, the stool fell.
00:22:13.000 Well, it turned out that it saw it as some sort of a powerhouse of the region.
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00:24:22.000 So this was not that the Sunni Muslim terrorist groups suddenly became good at war.
00:24:28.000 Again, remember those maps.
00:24:29.000 They were at a low ebb at the beginning of 2024. That's not what happened here.
00:24:33.000 What happened here is that Assad was basically an eggshell skull.
00:24:37.000 They tapped him, he fell.
00:24:39.000 There was no one to come to his support.
00:24:40.000 Russia couldn't come with its historic levels of support because they were weakened in Ukraine.
00:24:45.000 Iran has been totally hamstrung. 1.00
00:24:47.000 Iran's air defenses are gone.
00:24:49.000 Iran is totally vulnerable.
00:24:50.000 Its own regime is tottering.
00:24:52.000 And so the rebels took advantage and they toppled the regime.
00:24:55.000 That's effectively the story here.
00:24:57.000 So any story about how it's like the innate charisma of the HTS leaders, Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, that's not true.
00:25:03.000 That's not what happened here.
00:25:05.000 What happened here is that Turkey, backing HTS, backing many of these Sunni Muslim terrorist groups, hating the Assad regime and wishing to expand its own sphere of influence into Syria, backed HTS in taking advantage of the chaos of caused by Iran's withdrawal and Russia's withdrawal.
00:25:21.000 And HDS then took over large swaths of Syria.
00:25:25.000 Okay, so who are sort of the big winners and who are sort of the big losers here?
00:25:30.000 Well, it depends on what emerges. 0.97
00:25:31.000 The biggest losers, pretty obviously, Russia is a big loser. 0.98
00:25:34.000 Russia loses a lot of impact because, again, Russia had backed the Assad regime. 0.96
00:25:38.000 Now, Russia is attempting to broker something with regards to the new regime because they always do. 0.99
00:25:42.000 But Russia is a big loser. 0.99
00:25:43.000 The biggest loser by far is Iran. 1.00
00:25:46.000 Iran has lost its entire crescent of Islamic Shia terror. 0.99
00:25:51.000 Like, it's gone.
00:25:52.000 It just doesn't exist anymore.
00:25:54.000 Hamas, gone.
00:25:55.000 Hezbollah, gone.
00:25:56.000 Assad, gone.
00:25:57.000 Right?
00:25:57.000 These are all massive blows to the Iranian regime, all caused by Iran.
00:26:01.000 Iran started it. 0.86
00:26:03.000 This is one of the ultimate F-around and find-out in human history.
00:26:07.000 Iran launches a seven-front war on Israel, and they end with three of their proxies off the map, completely.
00:26:14.000 Hamas, Hezbollah, and Assad, gone.
00:26:18.000 That's what happens when you F around with a first world country. 0.95
00:26:21.000 If you F around with the United States on September 11th, we destroy your forces in Afghanistan and in Iraq. 0.53
00:26:26.000 Regardless of what comes after, that's what happens.
00:26:29.000 And if Iran decides they're going to launch a multi-front terror war against Israel, Israel will hit back and hit back hard.
00:26:37.000 And the Iranian regime is in serious trouble right now.
00:26:41.000 They've failed on every possible front.
00:26:43.000 And with the Trump administration coming in and presumably increasing sanctions on the Iranian regime, the Iranian regime is going to have one of two choices.
00:26:50.000 Either they're going to have to cut some sort of deal with the West, in which they abandon their nuclear efforts, and presumably move towards some form of non-tyranny, or they're going to be forced to collapse.
00:27:01.000 Because I can promise you that the state of Israel is not going to sit around waiting to see what Iran does next with its nuclear weapons, not after Israel already took out their air defenses. 0.62
00:27:09.000 So, who's the big winner in Syria?
00:27:11.000 The big winner in Syria is Turkey, mostly. 0.97
00:27:15.000 Turkey took an enormous amount of territory.
00:27:17.000 HTS, obviously a very big winner in all of this.
00:27:20.000 The Kurds, it's unclear what happens.
00:27:22.000 The Kurds have basically cleared an enormous amount of territory in, again, northeastern Syria.
00:27:26.000 Well, now they're going to be at war directly with the Turks.
00:27:29.000 The Turks are going to be pouring forces into that region and resources into that region. 0.92
00:27:32.000 So the Kurds could get really hurt.
00:27:35.000 As for the Israelis, the Israelis... 1.00
00:27:38.000 Again, they can be happy that the Iranian regime has lost power to use Syria as its tool, but the people replacing that regime are al-Qaeda jihadists and ISIS jihadists. 0.54
00:27:49.000 In fact, here is some video of some of the rebel fighters talking about what comes next.
00:27:58.000 They're saying that they're thanking Allah by his exalted power, the one who has helped us, neither by our strength.
00:28:04.000 Here is the home of Islam, here is the Levant. 0.90
00:28:09.000 Here is Omar Ibn Abdulaziz.
00:28:12.000 Here is the land of Islam. 0.95
00:28:13.000 Here is Damascus. 0.77
00:28:16.000 Here is the land of Muslims.
00:28:17.000 From here, oh Jerusalem. 0.91
00:28:19.000 From here, oh Jerusalem, they will come. 1.00
00:28:23.000 Be patient, oh people of Gaza, be patient. 0.99
00:28:25.000 Again, the people who just took over in Syria are allies of Hamas. 0.69
00:28:29.000 The Iranians had created an alliance with Hamas, but many of the people who just invaded Damascus are big fans of Hamas.
00:28:35.000 They also have talked about toppling the Saudi regime.
00:28:38.000 Because again, they're Al-Qaeda affiliates.
00:28:39.000 They're ISIS affiliates.
00:28:41.000 Now the leader of this particular terrorist group is a person, as I've mentioned, whose name is al-Jolani.
00:28:48.000 And again, many things can be true at once. 0.89
00:28:50.000 Assad was an absolute butcher.
00:28:52.000 Assad is responsible for the death of probably half a million Syrians on the other side, including huge scores of civilians. 0.97
00:28:59.000 He had actually set up in one of his jails.
00:29:02.000 An actual crematorium, apparently.
00:29:05.000 I mean, like, truly a brutal dictator, truly a brutal person.
00:29:07.000 Also, not a lot of good solutions, as it turns out, in the Middle East.
00:29:11.000 Because, for example, the Assad regime, much friendlier to Christians in Syria than presumably this new Sunni Islamic terror group will be. 0.91
00:29:20.000 Now, again, it's possible that the Druze will be sort of a repository of pro-Christian feeling in the south of Syria, about 10% of the population of Syria is Christian.
00:29:28.000 It's possible the Kurds. 0.98
00:29:29.000 The Kurds are kind of widely known as the most pro-Christian faction in Syria, but they're being attacked by the Turks.
00:29:35.000 So it's a complete mess over there.
00:29:37.000 So who exactly is Al-Jolani?
00:29:41.000 So, his name is Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, and he apparently boarded a bus in Damascus in March 2003, heading across the desert to Baghdad with fellow volunteers eager to repel the looming American invasion of Iraq.
00:29:52.000 This is according to the Wall Street Journal.
00:29:53.000 When he returned home in 2011 after a five-year stint in an American-run prison camp in Iraq, it was as an emissary of ISIS founder Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
00:30:01.000 He arrived in Syria with bags full of cash and a mission to take the extremist movement global.
00:30:05.000 Last week, 42-year-old Jelani triumphantly entered Aleppo, Syria's second-largest city, as the leading commander of the Turkish-backed rebel force dominated by his group, HTS. Unexpected and swift, his victory marks one of the most dramatic moments in the Middle East that had no shortage of drama.
00:30:23.000 So, he is currently doing things to try and appear moderate.
00:30:26.000 He's issued edicts to his men ordering the protection of Christians and Shihids demanding that his men not exact retribution. 1.00
00:30:31.000 He said, in the future, Syria, we believe diversity is our strength, not a weakness.
00:30:34.000 He's obviously playing for American aid and for the EU audience.
00:30:39.000 Guys, don't give money to people who are members of Al-Qaeda and ISIS. It's a bad idea.
00:30:44.000 The Taliban said the exact same things when they took over in Afghanistan, and now it's back to being a Taliban hellhole. 0.92
00:30:52.000 A Christian woman in Aleppo said, quote, the day they took over Aleppo before seeing them, I felt like the Titanic was sinking.
00:30:58.000 But then she said everyone was shocked because they were treating us nicely.
00:31:00.000 They look scary.
00:31:01.000 They look exactly the way you imagine when someone says a terrorist. 0.99
00:31:03.000 Long beards and crazy hair. 0.96
00:31:04.000 But they're nice.
00:31:05.000 We'll find out for how long.
00:31:06.000 They are nice, obviously.
00:31:07.000 So, this guy was born Ahmed Hussein Al-Sharaa.
00:31:10.000 He adopted the Namdegar Jolani, a reference to his family's roots in the Golan Heights.
00:31:14.000 He says that his family was from the Golan Heights.
00:31:17.000 And then in 67, when Syria attacked Israel and they lost the Golan Heights, then his family lost what land they had in the Golan Heights.
00:31:24.000 One of the big questions for Israel is going to be whether Jelani tries to, again, direct these rebel fighters against Israel.
00:31:29.000 If that happens, Israel will unleash its military power on those rebel fighters.
00:31:32.000 One of the things that's been happening here is that the gap that's been left by the Iranian power in the region is now being filled by the Turkish power in the region.
00:31:39.000 And again, Turkey is allied with Hamas.
00:31:41.000 Turkey, again, it's unbelievable they're a NATO member, and there should be significant ramifications for Turkey's abject siding with terrorists across the region.
00:31:50.000 Turkey is a nefarious power in the region now. 0.99
00:31:53.000 And they are very heavily militarized.
00:31:55.000 They have an excellent military.
00:31:56.000 In any case, al-Jelani broke with ISIS in 2012, and then he broke with al-Qaeda in 2016. And this guy's got a hell of a CV. He's got a hell of a resume.
00:32:05.000 And then he's fought both organizations.
00:32:07.000 And according to the Wall Street Journal, he steered the HTS away from the transnational jihadist movement that is more interested in waging war on America and the West and sees national borders in the Muslim world as an artificial construct imposed by infidel colonialists.
00:32:20.000 Aaron Zelin, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
00:32:23.000 So we'll see.
00:32:24.000 You know, not a great credential.
00:32:26.000 He says him and his group's break with Islamic State and Al-Qaeda is very genuine.
00:32:29.000 They haven't been part of these entities longer than they were with them.
00:32:31.000 It's now been essentially eight and a half years they've forsworn global jihad.
00:32:35.000 Instead, they're focusing in squarely on Syria.
00:32:40.000 But even according to the Wall Street Journal, they are a blend of Islamism and nationalism that is closer to the Afghanistan's Taliban and Palestinian Hamas, which sounds kind of bad.
00:32:50.000 And so, as it turns out, there are no good answers in the Middle East.
00:32:54.000 So, what exactly is going to come next here? 0.99
00:32:58.000 Well, if the Biden administration is idiotic, then they certainly won't do what they are talking about. 0.96
00:33:03.000 So the Biden administration apparently is now discussing the possibility of taking HTS off the terror list. 0.99
00:33:11.000 There's a $10 million bounty, by the way, on Aljelani's head from the U.S. State Department because he is a terrorist.
00:33:17.000 And it turns out releasing terrorists from Gitmo, he was actually in Gitmo, turns out it's a bad strategy as a general rule.
00:33:23.000 A senior administration official said, quote, it's kind of a broad kaleidoscope of groups.
00:33:26.000 I think we have to be smart and also very mindful and pragmatic about the realities on the ground.
00:33:31.000 He said, HTS is saying the right things.
00:33:33.000 So far, they're doing the right thing.
00:33:34.000 They're not the only group.
00:33:35.000 There's a series of opposition groups that came that reached Damascus from the south, and they are very different.
00:33:39.000 Some of those are Druze, for example. 0.99
00:33:41.000 So, as always, it is a giant cluster F. Again, welcome to the Middle East where there are no good answers. 1.00
00:33:48.000 And it is worth pointing out that, again, the fate of a lot of people in Syria remains very much in doubt.
00:33:55.000 And there are a bunch of different groups that are now competing for leadership in Syria.
00:33:59.000 They range from, for example...
00:34:02.000 The Syrian Interim Government and Syrian National Army, who are essentially Turkish interests in Syria, controlled by the Turkish Armed Forces.
00:34:09.000 To the Syrian Salvation Government and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, who are the radical Islamists who just took control of Damascus.
00:34:15.000 The Syrian Free Army, which is an American-backed force that originally operated on the Syrian-Jordanian border.
00:34:21.000 They don't hold a ton of territory at this point.
00:34:25.000 There's also the Kurds, right? 0.56
00:34:27.000 That would be the Rojava SDF. That's the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria.
00:34:32.000 And they are by far the most pro-Western group in the region.
00:34:37.000 And finally, the Southern Operations Room, who again is a coalition of Sunni and Druze groups in South Syria, they too are sort of pro-Western.
00:34:45.000 So it's a giant mess.
00:34:47.000 In a moment, we'll get into what comes next.
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00:35:49.000 Do not let the IRS take advantage if you get the help you need with Tax Network USA. Here at The Daily Wire, we don't just win cultural battles.
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00:36:40.000 Alrighty, so what comes next over here?
00:36:42.000 Well, again, the people in the Middle East who have absolutely demonstrated their strength over the course of last year, the Israeli government, obviously the IDF, and the Turks.
00:36:55.000 Right now, again, when it comes to Israel, Israel only wants to guard its border.
00:36:58.000 And so they've extended that border outward to the other side of the Hermon Mountain, which was sort of the Syrian side of the border zone.
00:37:06.000 And they're doing that in order to prevent Syrian rebels, these radical Sunni Islamist groups who are allied with Hamas, from moving up on the Israeli border.
00:37:14.000 Meanwhile, the Turks are encroaching heavily into the territory of Syria.
00:37:20.000 So those are sort of the big developments.
00:37:23.000 On its part, Benjamin Netanyahu put out a statement suggesting correctly that it was Israel that kicked out one leg of the support for the Assad regime by taking out the Iranian proxies throughout the region.
00:37:34.000 This is a historic day for the Middle East. 0.98
00:37:38.000 The collapse of the Assad regime, the tyranny in Damascus offers great opportunity, but also is fraught with significant dangers. 0.89
00:37:48.000 This collapse is a direct result of our forceful action against Hezbollah and Iran, Assad's main supporters. 0.87
00:37:55.000 It set off a chain reaction of all those who want to free themselves from this tyranny and its oppression.
00:38:01.000 But it also means we have to take action against possible threats.
00:38:04.000 One of them is the collapse of the Separation of Forces Agreement from 1974 between Israel and Syria.
00:38:11.000 This agreement held for 50 years.
00:38:13.000 Last night it collapsed.
00:38:15.000 The Syrian army abandoned its positions.
00:38:17.000 We gave the Israeli army the order to take over these positions to ensure that no hostile force embeds itself right next to the border of Israel.
00:38:27.000 This is a temporary defensive position until a suitable arrangement is found.
00:38:32.000 Equally, we send a hand of peace to all those beyond our border in Syria, to the Jews, To the Kurds, to the Christians, and to the Muslims who want to live in peace with Israel.
00:38:44.000 We're going to follow events very carefully.
00:38:47.000 If we can establish neighborly relations and a peaceful relations with the new forces emerging in Syria, that's our desire.
00:38:55.000 But if we do not, we'll do whatever it takes to defend the state of Israel and the border of Israel.
00:39:04.000 Now, again, it is worth noting, this is a very small piece of territory that Israel is currently moving into in order to defend its own border, as opposed to, say, the Turkish territory, which constitutes an 8,835 square kilometer buffer zone in the north of Syria.
00:39:18.000 Again, the Turks are the ones who are really benefiting from all of this. 1.00
00:39:21.000 Also because they're attempting to provide a strategic Islamic counterweight to the Saudis. 0.94
00:39:25.000 The Saudis are very nervous about all of this because, you know, whenever you have a radical Sunni Muslim group that rises in the Middle East, the threat is to try and radicalize the Saudi population. 0.86
00:39:35.000 So the Saudis have said that they don't want outside interference here.
00:39:39.000 They put out a statement saying the kingdom affirms its support for the brotherly Syrian people and their choice, but also appealed for concerted efforts to preserve the unity of Syria and the cohesion of its people so as to prevent it from falling into chaos and division.
00:39:49.000 Jordan, for its part, again, is threatened because Jordan has a very long border with Syria as they close their border crossing into Syria as well.
00:39:56.000 A Syrian army source told Reuters, armed groups have been firing at Syria's Nassib border crossing into Jordan.
00:40:01.000 So Jordan is worried about this as well.
00:40:04.000 So what is likely to happen next?
00:40:05.000 The answer, as usual in the Middle East, is probable chaos. 1.00
00:40:09.000 So Simon Sebag Montefiore, who's a historian of the region writing at the Free Press, he says, Russia, which had been promised to share of the Ottoman Near East, had fallen under Bolshevik rule.
00:40:29.000 They left Britain and France under the ambitious liberal imperial pioneers David Lloyd George and George Clemencow, who called their new provinces mandates as confirmed by the League of Nations.
00:40:38.000 Britain was given a new entity called Iraq and another named Palestine.
00:40:41.000 Today, that would be Israel, the Palestinian Authority territories, and the Kingdom of Jordan.
00:40:44.000 France received Greater Syria. 0.81
00:40:46.000 That would be Syria and Lebanon. 0.98
00:40:47.000 Initially, Paris planned to divide its mandate into smaller states.
00:40:50.000 For the Maronite Christians, that would become Lebanon, the Druze, the Alawites, and the Sunnis in Damascus. 0.94
00:40:56.000 The Kurds were promised their own state that was prevented by Turkey in 1922-23.
00:41:00.000 In the end, the French decided against creating several smaller states and instead created Lebanon to be ruled by their Maronite Christian allies in partnership with Sunnis and Druze and also Syria.
00:41:08.000 And both these states are completely unworkable.
00:41:10.000 In fact, the only states that were created by the British and French mandates that still exist as actual states are Israel and the Kingdom of Jordan.
00:41:20.000 And the Kingdom of Jordan is basically being held up by allies at this point.
00:41:23.000 It turns out that all of the various ethnic groups, all of the various rivalries between them, have torn apart virtually every other state that was artificial lines drawn in the sand by the British and the French in the aftermath of World War I. As Montefiore says, the failure of all these states, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, are just part of a wider instability created by the failure of many of the post-imperial, post-colonial states formed by the Great Powers after 1945 in the Middle East and Africa in the 1960s. 0.84
00:41:51.000 Many of the latter will either degrade into chaotic warlands and exurgencies ruled not by states but by militias, become protectorates of new colonial powers like China, or survive as federalized states made up of autonomous entities.
00:42:01.000 It's already true in Africa. 1.00
00:42:02.000 It might be true for the Middle East. 1.00
00:42:04.000 He says Syria may emerge as a single state tolerant of its many ethnic minorities, but that is very unlikely, or it may be further federalized into autonomous entities ruled by the Kurds, the Alawites, and a central sector under Sunni rule, hopefully not of repressive Islamists.
00:42:17.000 Each will be protected by or dominated by outside powers.
00:42:20.000 This may just be the start of another round of civil war.
00:42:21.000 Turkey already has its army in its Turkish-occupied zone, plus its own Syrian proxy militia in Syria, and of course it's friendly with HTS.
00:42:29.000 Israel may develop its own relationship with the Kurds and the Druze.
00:42:32.000 Russia will probably depart, but it will probably try and retain its enclave along the Mediterranean coast.
00:42:38.000 Al Jelani will either try to remake himself as a Syrian leader for all sects or stay true to the diehard Islamism of his career with disastrous results for all Syrians. 0.51
00:42:46.000 As far as the United States, and it's very far away from the United States, the United States' interests are generally going to be relegated to very small interests.
00:42:55.000 Like, for example, preventing the rise of ISIS again.
00:42:58.000 Which would mean, as the United States has been doing, bombing ISIS bases or preventing jailbreaks from ISIS jails in the Kurdish areas of Syria.
00:43:07.000 The United States does not have large-scale interests at stake in Syria.
00:43:09.000 It means arming up allies to make sure that there's not another full-scale invasion of Israel, for example, via the Golan Heights.
00:43:15.000 The Trump administration is already going to do that.
00:43:17.000 The Trump administration does not want to get involved.
00:43:19.000 And I think that President Trump is totally right not to want to get heavily involved there because it's an absolute, as we say, cluster F.
00:43:25.000 President Trump put out a statement saying Assad is gone.
00:43:28.000 He has fled his country.
00:43:29.000 His protector, Russia, Russia, Russia, led by Vladimir Putin, was not interested in protecting him any longer.
00:43:33.000 There was no reason for Russia to be there in the first place. 0.94
00:43:35.000 They lost all interest in Syria because of Ukraine, where close to 600,000 Russian soldiers lay wounded or dead in a war that should never have started and could go on forever.
00:43:42.000 Russia and Iran are in a weakened state right now, one because of Ukraine and a bad economy, the other because of Israel and its fighting success.
00:43:48.000 Likewise, Zelensky and Ukraine would like to make a deal and stop the madness. 0.84
00:43:50.000 They've ridiculously lost 400,000 soldiers and many more civilians.
00:43:53.000 There should be an immediate ceasefire and negotiations should begin.
00:43:56.000 Too many lives are being so needlessly wasted.
00:43:58.000 Too many families destroyed.
00:43:59.000 If it keeps going, it can turn into something much bigger and far worse.
00:44:01.000 I know Vladimir well.
00:44:02.000 This is time to act.
00:44:03.000 China can help.
00:44:04.000 The world is waiting.
00:44:05.000 As far as Trump's suggestion via Truth Social that the United States does not have large-scale interests in getting involved with Syria, that is true. 1.00
00:44:13.000 The United States has small-scale interests that I think are going to be extremely limited and should be extremely limited to, for example, making sure that there is an incursion over Israel's borders or that Jordan doesn't fall, which would be quite bad, or that the Kurds don't get overwhelmed by the Turks. 0.62
00:44:26.000 And a lot of the pressure on Turkey, which I think is going to be the main job of the Trump administration in the region because Turkey is getting incredibly aggressive, a lot of that is going to be done diplomatically and economically.
00:44:36.000 So when President Trump says, stay out, I think he means it, and I think he should mean it. 1.00
00:44:41.000 He put out a second statement, by the way, along these lines.
00:44:44.000 This is a little bit earlier, saying, quote, opposition fighters in Syria in an unprecedented move have totally taken over numerous cities in a highly coordinated offensive and are now on the outskirts of Damascus, as this is before.
00:44:55.000 Russia, because they're so tied up in Ukraine, with the loss of their 600,000 soldiers, seems incapable of stopping this literal march through Syria, a country they've protected for years.
00:45:02.000 This is where former President Obama refused to honor his commitment of protecting the red line in the sand, and all hell broke out with Russia stepping in.
00:45:08.000 Now they are, like possibly Assad himself being forced out, it may actually be the best thing that can happen to them. 0.99
00:45:12.000 There is never much of a benefit in Syria for Russia other than to make Obama look really stupid. 0.99
00:45:16.000 In any event, Syria is a mess, but is not our friend. 1.00
00:45:19.000 The United States should have nothing to do with it.
00:45:20.000 This is not our fight.
00:45:21.000 Let it play out.
00:45:22.000 Do not get involved.
00:45:23.000 And again, generally speaking, that is true.
00:45:26.000 And you can see the left-wing press already encouraging, like, heavy involvement over there.
00:45:29.000 With whom?
00:45:30.000 To whom? 0.82
00:45:31.000 What the hell are you talking about?
00:45:33.000 Like, seriously, what level of involvement are you talking about?
00:45:36.000 Like, Washington Post has a piece up today, titled, Why the U.S. Needs to Help Build a New Syria.
00:45:42.000 Um, no.
00:45:45.000 I mean, no.
00:45:45.000 The answer is no.
00:45:46.000 We should identify who our closest allies are in the region, say the Kurds and the Druze.
00:45:50.000 We should provide them with arms to defend themselves.
00:45:53.000 We should allow Israel the ability to defend its own border. 0.63
00:45:56.000 We should prevent the Turks from killing the Kurds by arming the Kurds, not by getting directly involved in any of this stuff and by putting economic pressure on Turkey.
00:46:02.000 And that's kind of it.
00:46:04.000 That's kind of it.
00:46:05.000 And we should instead allow the Iranian regime to live with the consequences of its own terrible decisions. 0.94
00:46:11.000 The Washington Post says, And the suggestion by the Washington Post,
00:46:40.000 The Middle East badly needs a success story.
00:46:42.000 A pluralistic democratic Arab country committed to upholding human rights.
00:46:45.000 Yeah, good luck.
00:46:46.000 Good luck with that.
00:46:47.000 The answer is no.
00:46:47.000 We should not be...
00:46:48.000 No.
00:46:49.000 Democracy creation in Syria is not on the slate for the Trump administration, nor should it be.
00:46:53.000 That is not a reality.
00:46:54.000 It never was a reality. 1.00
00:46:55.000 It's stupid. 1.00
00:46:56.000 It was stupid in Iraq. 1.00
00:46:57.000 It's stupid here. 1.00
00:46:58.000 It's really dumb. 1.00
00:46:59.000 There are places in the Middle East where, theoretically, democracy could flourish. 0.98
00:47:03.000 Actually, one of those, ironically, is Iran, where the Persian population and the population of Iran more generally is much more Western friendly and much more friendly to the ideas of democracy.
00:47:11.000 That ain't true in Syria.
00:47:12.000 That ain't true.
00:47:14.000 Let the Kurds protect the Kurds, let the Druze protect the Druze, let the Jews protect the Jews and let the Turks stay out of all of it. 0.97
00:47:19.000 I mean, that should basically be via soft mechanisms of power and simply allowing countries to do what they need to do.
00:47:25.000 The American role here.
00:47:27.000 But again, the addiction to getting involved in every hand and every pie, the left addictions, they get involved and they don't stay involved long enough to actually see the thing through.
00:47:36.000 It's always the worst available answer to all of these problems.
00:47:40.000 Joe Biden stumbled out to a podium and barely was able to read off a teleprompter.
00:47:44.000 Here's his statement on the Assad regime falling.
00:47:47.000 What happened in the Middle East?
00:47:51.000 After 13 years of civil war in Syria, More than half a century of brutal authoritarian rule by Bashar Assad and his father before him.
00:48:02.000 Rebel forces have forced Assad to resign his office and flee the country.
00:48:07.000 We're not sure where he is, but there's word that he's in Moscow.
00:48:12.000 At long last, the Assad regime has fallen. 0.97
00:48:17.000 Hilariously, this schmuck then got up and suggested that that was because of his action in Ukraine and allowing Israel to fight its terrorist enemies. 0.96
00:48:24.000 He's been slow-walking aid in both places, in both places, while attempting to negotiate with the Iranians. 0.98
00:48:29.000 The utter gall of Joe Biden and the Obama foreign policy team.
00:48:33.000 Remember, it was in mid-2023, like just before October 7th, that Jake Sullivan, the national security advisor, declared that Joe Biden had created a peaceful Middle East.
00:48:42.000 Yeah, it's been great, Bob.
00:48:44.000 Well done, everybody.
00:48:45.000 So, here is the bottom line.
00:48:47.000 As always, it's a mixed bag. 1.00
00:48:48.000 Assad, one of the most evil dictators in modern times, not only deserves to go, he deserves to die. 0.99
00:48:52.000 I mean, for the amount of human suffering and carnage she has created, one of the worst people on earth, Bashar Assad. 1.00
00:48:57.000 Also, the people replacing him suck and are probably Sunni Islamist terrorists, affiliates with al-Qaeda and ISIS. And anybody who's counting on them to become moderate democratic liberals or something, you're high on your own supply. 0.99
00:49:09.000 Stop it.
00:49:11.000 So, it is likely that civil war will continue.
00:49:13.000 It is likely that the Turks will begin flexing their muscle. 1.00
00:49:16.000 Erdogan is proving himself to be a formidably Machiavellian player in the Middle East.
00:49:21.000 But the sort of big takeaway for next steps is actually outside of Syria.
00:49:25.000 It's actually in Iran.
00:49:26.000 The big untold story here has very little to do with Syria.
00:49:29.000 It has to do with as Iranian power wanes, as Iran is driven out of Lebanon, as they're driven out of Syria, as they're driven out of Yemen, which they will be, as they are driven out of wide swaths of Iraq, as this happens, The Iranian regime is in serious trouble and they're either going to have to figure out a way to move forward that does not involve the development of nuclear weapons or they're going to find themselves on their last legs as well.
00:49:51.000 And as far as Russia, Russia was proved weak here.
00:49:53.000 Russia had a heavy stake in Syria.
00:49:55.000 Russia was invested in Syria.
00:49:57.000 Russia was providing weaponry to Syria.
00:49:58.000 One further note.
00:50:01.000 The forward deployment of Israeli forces in Syria to destroy, for example, chemical weapons depots.
00:50:07.000 That's a good thing.
00:50:08.000 You don't want chemical weapons falling into the hands of al-Qaeda and ISIS affiliates.
00:50:12.000 Back in 2007, when George W. Bush was president, the Israeli military blew up a nuclear facility created by the North Koreans in Damascus or created by Damascus in Syria.
00:50:22.000 Would it have been better if there were nuclear weapons there?
00:50:24.000 Right now, nuclear proliferation in this area of the world tends to be a really, really bad thing.
00:50:29.000 So, that is the story from Syria.
00:50:31.000 We'll see how it plays out. 1.00
00:50:32.000 Don't let wishes be the father of stupidity in the Middle East. 1.00
00:50:36.000 Should be sort of the moral of the story. 1.00
00:50:38.000 Strong defense.
00:50:39.000 Strong allies.
00:50:41.000 By the way, as far as the Abraham Accords, which is one of the chief foreign policy priorities for the Trump administration, this very much favors the Abraham Accords because the Saudis are very much afraid of this new Sunni Islamist terrorist regime that is likely arising in Syria.
00:50:54.000 And so they're very likely to side with the Israelis, with Jordanians, with the Egyptians in trying to prevent the rise of a rival terror-backing power in the Middle East.
00:51:06.000 In just one second, we'll get to President Trump, who traveled over to France to take part in the reopening of Notre Dame, which was reconstructed after a giant fire.
00:51:14.000 If you're not a member, become a member.
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00:51:19.000 Folks, have you heard of the audience have you heard of the audience effect?
00:51:44.000 It's a fascinating psychological phenomenon where people behave differently when they know they're being watched.
00:51:48.000 They become more guarded, more self-conscious, and even without explicit supervision, the mere sense of being observed can fundamentally limit our freedom of expression.
00:51:54.000 Well, here's something unsettling.
00:51:55.000 When you're online, you are, in fact, being watched.
00:51:57.000 Thank you.