TRIGGERnometry - Can We Stop Terrorism and What Do Islamists Want？

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantin Kissin. And this is a

00:00:09.860 show for you if you're bored with people arguing on the internet over subjects they know nothing

00:00:14.700 about. At Trigonometry, we don't pretend to be the experts, we ask the experts. Our brilliant

00:00:20.820 guest this week is an author, filmmaker, and co-host of The Conflicted podcast, Thomas Small.

00:00:26.320 Welcome to Trigonometry. Thanks for having me. Nice to be here.

00:00:28.920 It is great to have you here. Tell everybody who you are, what's your story, how would you happen to be sitting in the chair that you are in right now?

00:00:35.040 Well, I don't know that. You guys called me up, which I'm very pleased that you did.

00:00:38.740 I'm Thomas Small. I'm American originally, though I've lived in England for about, well, in Europe for 19 years.

00:00:45.840 Correct decision.

00:00:46.900 So, yeah, so America seems like quite a long way away.

00:00:51.820 Who am I? I left America as a young man, and I wanted to, to be perfectly honest, I wanted to find God.

00:00:57.480 I wanted to become one with God, a very strange young man kind of thing to want to do.

00:01:01.520 I ended up spending several years in and out of Greek Orthodox monasteries in the Eastern Mediterranean.

00:01:09.520 And thinking of becoming a monk, deciding not to become a monk, traveling more widely around the Middle East,

00:01:16.160 deciding the Middle East was an interesting place.

00:01:19.300 Went to university here in London to study Arabic.

00:01:21.940 And then having spent a year in Damascus learning that language and then traveling more,

00:01:26.620 I became a documentary filmmaker, and I make films in Arabic for Arabs to watch.

00:01:33.680 And you also have the Conflicted podcast, which I introduced at the beginning. Interesting. I

00:01:40.360 listened to the first five minutes of the first episode, and I was like, okay, this is going to

00:01:44.540 be good. It does have that real capture feel to it. Tell people a little bit about how it happened,

00:01:51.380 what you do, and how you met your co-host, and a bit about him as well.

00:01:56.480 Conflicted, which I host along with my friend Eamon Dean, is, I think, different. I'm glad that

00:02:03.480 you liked it as you did. I mean, Eamon is a fascinating person. He is a Saudi-born guy.

00:02:10.980 At the age of 16, I think, or maybe 15, I can't remember, he joined the jihad in Bosnia and became

00:02:19.480 a jihadist. And then having wended his way through different jihad fronts, he ended up

00:02:27.860 joining al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, swearing allegiance to Osama bin Laden in person.

00:02:33.580 And then a year or so later realized, I don't really think we should be slaughtering thousands

00:02:40.280 of innocent people. So he left al-Qaeda and joined MI6 and became MI6's top double agent

00:02:46.500 inside al-Qaeda. Now, I met him while I was working on a film called Path of Blood, a feature film

00:02:53.680 that tells the story of an al-Qaeda campaign inside Saudi Arabia. I met up with him during

00:02:58.520 that period for research purposes, and we immediately hit it off, became friends. He is

00:03:03.880 a font of amazing stories, as you can imagine, with that biography. And his analytical powers,

00:03:12.400 especially when it comes to Middle Eastern politics

00:03:14.400 and ideological trends within the Middle East

00:03:18.320 are constantly fascinating.

00:03:20.420 So we decided, well, we were approached by a producer

00:03:23.760 to do a podcast because, you know,

00:03:26.440 he thought we would have something to offer.

00:03:28.200 And a bit like this show, it's quite conversational.

00:03:31.620 We're friends.

00:03:32.680 It's not antagonistic or, you know, aggressive.

00:03:37.920 It's just two friends talking about

00:03:39.440 this extremely complicated subject.

00:03:41.340 Have you ever joined the terrorist organization, Francis?

00:03:43.420 I don't think they'd have me, mate.

00:03:45.320 You don't have the general fitness.

00:03:47.220 Dude, you watch Path of Blood and you will see that they will have anybody.

00:03:51.340 I think they'd strap a terrorist vest on you and say, go.

00:03:54.460 Go, go, you will not be missed.

00:03:57.000 Don't be gone.

00:03:58.940 But so, I mean, you've got quite the backstory.

00:04:02.540 So you do documentary films in Arabic.

00:04:05.400 I mean, how do the Middle East perceive the West, in particular America, at this moment?

00:04:12.560 And in terms of focusing in on Trump and possibly the embassy in Israel.

00:04:18.840 Wow.

00:04:19.620 OK.

00:04:20.500 Let's start small.

00:04:21.660 Go big later.

00:04:22.440 I mean, the first thing is, is that people who have black and white views on the Middle East tend to reveal thereby that they don't know very much.

00:04:34.920 So the Middle East is extremely enormous.

00:04:37.380 It's extremely complicated.

00:04:38.820 So what the Middle East thinks about America is impossible to say. 1.00

00:04:42.000 What are you saying is it's a stupid question? 1.00

00:04:43.380 Yeah. 1.00

00:04:43.920 Well, it's not a stupid question. 0.99

00:04:45.380 It's a common question. 1.00

00:04:46.900 Commonly stupid question. 1.00

00:04:48.940 But, you know, the Middle East is diverse. 1.00

00:04:52.660 You know, Arabs are extremely diverse.

00:04:55.300 The Middle East has more than just Arabs.

00:04:56.900 There are Kurds.

00:04:57.480 There are Turks.

00:04:58.080 There are all sorts of people, all sorts of religions, not just Muslims.

00:05:01.140 Within Islam, there are so many different sects.

00:05:03.160 So it's complicated. I would say in general, I mean, and my sort of exposure to the Middle East tends to come more at a higher political level and mainly Gulf sort of centered because that's where the money is.

00:05:18.660 that's where actually more and more the power is. And certainly when it comes to the way the Gulf

00:05:25.140 perceives America, they tend and have always tended to perceive America very positively

00:05:31.320 because it is, America is a great ally of theirs. They are a great ally of America.

00:05:37.980 America's military umbrella has always protected the Gulf states from aggression during the Cold

00:05:46.660 war, aggression from various Russian kind of moves within the Middle East, and now in

00:05:52.660 their minds from Iran, which for them is the greatest, the greater threat. During the Obama 0.72

00:05:57.800 period, the Gulf relationship became quite strained with America because Obama adopted 0.97

00:06:02.900 a different, a new foreign policy pivoted towards Iran and wished to bring Iran out

00:06:07.720 from the cold, in from the cold. And he negotiated the atomic treaty, you know, the atomic bomb

00:06:15.880 treaty with them, which Trump has recently canceled, which, and so now the Gulf are sort

00:06:21.100 of more, they're happier with Trump than they were with Obama, for sure.

00:06:24.760 The average, like, Middle Easterner on the ground, you know, again, you gotta, you can

00:06:30.420 take your pick.

00:06:31.080 You have liberal Middle Easterners who probably see America as a good dish thing that, in 0.98

00:06:36.600 general, you know, inspires them, although they're probably annoyed that, like, they

00:06:40.920 invaded Iraq and contributed to the destruction of that massive country, to some extent. 0.95

00:06:45.880 You have Islamist Middle Easterners who think America is the great Satan. 0.98

00:06:51.200 You have everything in between. 0.51

00:06:52.660 Now, as it comes to Israel, the same thing applies.

00:06:55.780 In general, Muslims have, in general, opposed the state of Israel and opposed Zionism.

00:07:08.040 That was certainly the case in the high-water years of anti-Israeli sentiment, 70s, 80s, 90s.

00:07:13.920 Sorry, before you go on, just define Zionism for people because it's a word that gets thrown around.

00:07:18.600 A lot of people don't know what it means.

00:07:20.220 Well, I mean, I think the easiest way is to say that Zionism is Israeli nationalism.

00:07:29.900 It's the idea, the political idea, that the Jews deserve a nation state of their own

00:07:36.280 and that that nation state should be in the Holy Land, Zion, the mountain around which Jerusalem was built.

00:07:43.920 and that is called Zionism. So it's just like any form of nationalism. It's just the Jewish form. 0.58

00:07:50.940 Now, it's complicated because Jews are a great diaspora, as you know, and they don't all live 1.00

00:07:56.200 there, and many of them oppose the state of Israel, and it's all very complicated, but I think that's

00:08:00.760 what Zionism is. It's the Jewish nationalism focused on the Holy Land, and Muslims have tended 0.94

00:08:05.740 to oppose it. In more recent years, that has slightly changed. I think, I don't know,

00:08:15.440 the Arab in the street or the Muslim on the street may feel the same way, although I think

00:08:19.600 I get a sense that there's a kind of Israel-Palestine exhaustion, because the conflict is intractable,

00:08:28.140 it's going on forever and ever, there seems to be never any solution. I think a lot of

00:08:31.620 people are just worn out. A lot of Muslims, I should say, a lot of Arabs just kind of are sick 1.00

00:08:35.660 of it, I think. But certainly at the higher levels, there has been a massive thawing in relations

00:08:42.700 between Arab governments and Israel, because for various reasons, one is that they feel they have

00:08:49.460 a common enemy in Iran. So they have knit themselves quite closely together on the security

00:08:54.740 front, certainly, to combat that threat. And why this fear of Iran? Is it because

00:09:02.360 of what we hear that Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons?

00:09:05.840 Obviously, they're from a different faction of Islam than the Gulf states,

00:09:11.460 right? Well, yes, there are Shia. I mean, the Iranians are largely Shia Muslims,

00:09:17.300 particularly what's called Twelver Shia, which is a subset within the greater

00:09:21.960 Shia. And then on top of their Twelver Shiaism, they have embraced or has been imposed upon them 1.00

00:09:27.880 what we might call Khomeinism, named after the Ayatollah Khomeini, the leading light of the

00:09:33.440 1979 Iranian Revolution, which fused Shia-Iran, Shia-Iranian sort of religious ideas with Bolshevik

00:09:42.480 kind of revolutionary ideas and millenarian apocalyptic ideas into this new thing over

00:09:48.260 through the Shah and created this new state, the Islamic Republic of Iran, in the constitution

00:09:53.960 of which is a commitment to spread the revolution beyond its borders. Now, that is obviously

00:09:59.200 threatening in general, that you have a very powerful, oil-rich state with an enormous

00:10:03.620 military that in its constitution has sworn to sort of destabilize, topple, and conquer

00:10:10.620 other states. Now, whether they can actually do it, fine, who knows? But they are sworn

00:10:16.480 to do it, and it's in their constitution. So for the last 40 years, most of its neighbors have

00:10:21.640 felt threatened because Iran is literally threatening them. At the same time, for all 0.99

00:10:26.760 of that time, Iran has sponsored, organized, paid for an unbelievable network of non-state actors

00:10:36.200 throughout the region, militias, armies, jihadist groups, most of them Shia, not all of them Shia

00:10:42.000 because ultimately the mullahs of Iran are happy to get into bed with anyone

00:10:46.400 that might destabilize the nation-states of the Arab world.

00:10:51.200 So it's not like, the question shouldn't be why do they fear Iran?

00:10:55.800 It should be obvious.

00:10:56.920 Iranian proxies effectively control Iraq through Shia militias

00:11:01.400 that are constantly destabilizing that country.

00:11:03.380 They effectively control Lebanon through Hezbollah, which they pay for and run. 1.00

00:11:07.940 and Hassan Nasrullah, the head of Hezbollah, is an open agent of the Iranian state

00:11:14.400 and they basically have squeezed the Lebanese government.

00:11:19.220 There are definitely underground cells of Iranian activists,

00:11:23.920 funded activists and militants throughout the Gulf states

00:11:26.000 and the Houthis in Yemen are certainly Iranian-allied and Hezbollah-trained

00:11:31.420 and they have effectively conquered half of Yemen and controlled the government apparatus there.

00:11:36.340 So it's not, why are they afraid? There is actually a campaign right now by the Iranian state to destabilize those countries. 0.81

00:11:47.620 The Iranians would say, oh, this isn't offensive. This is defensive. 1.00

00:11:52.700 Our network of militias, and they're very open about this. They're especially open these days.

00:11:57.200 I don't know if you know that in the last few months, there have been terrible floods in Iran, terrible, terrible floods.

00:12:01.820 thousands of people have died really bad. And for the first time, Iran has actually flown in its 0.99

00:12:08.580 militants from its proxies elsewhere, Afghan jihadists who Iran sent to the fields of Syria.

00:12:17.240 Oh, of course they control Syria. I forgot that. Through Bashar al-Assad, they control Syria. So 0.65

00:12:20.660 that's another big thing that they now control. And they have flown in these proxies from outside

00:12:26.560 Iran, and they have ordered them to help with the flood recovery effort. And they've very much

00:12:32.960 sort of broadcast this on Iranian TV, saying, look, these are our friends. See, they're helping

00:12:36.860 us. They're helping us save you from floods. So they're open about these proxies, these militants

00:12:41.940 that they support. And I forgot. I've lost my train of thought. Well, the question was about

00:12:47.960 Iran and why the conflict between them and other. Well, that's the answer. Yeah. So sorry.

00:12:54.740 No, that's perfect. That's a perfect answer to that question.

00:12:57.460 It's a big question.

00:12:59.180 It's a big area.

00:13:00.760 I know what I was saying.

00:13:01.900 So the Iranians would say they're defending themselves. 0.90

00:13:04.560 So they think that the United States of America and its allies,

00:13:10.720 which according to Iranian sort of rhetoric is the great Satan,

00:13:14.820 has its designs on Iran and has always had its designs on Iran.

00:13:21.180 It's true that before the Iranian revolution during the period of the Shah,

00:13:24.740 Iran was very closely integrated into the global America, American dominated order.

00:13:30.680 Well, let's say the American side of the Cold War, in the Cold War. And it's true 1.00

00:13:35.960 that certainly the CIA, you know, got into various activities within Iran and

00:13:41.540 Iranians began to resent that fact. And so ever since the revolution, there's been

00:13:48.080 this idea that we are under threat from America. We have to protect ourselves. So

00:13:51.560 they would say these proxies protect us. They give us leverage. They can say to America,

00:13:57.900 you attack us and we will order our people to attack Beirut or attack Yemen or attack Baghdad. 0.95

00:14:04.480 That's what they would say. I think that that's nonsense. I think that they actually, 0.97

00:14:08.680 because that's what they openly declaim every Friday in their sermons, they actually wish to,

00:14:13.060 in some kind of religiously inflected way, conquer the holy lands and Mecca and bring in the end

00:14:18.280 times and all this stuff. I've got to say, I've admired my restraint. When you're saying they're

00:14:22.560 funding terrorist cells, on my end of my tongue was like, it's one of them, the Labour Party.

00:14:26.520 Oh, below the bell, below the suicide bell.

00:14:33.140 Listen, let me ask you a broader question about the Middle East, because as we were talking

00:14:38.040 before we started... Because my question wasn't broad enough. No.

00:14:40.940 when when you start to study and understand attempt to understand this region and you

00:14:49.000 obviously understand it very well you you say i think rightly that everything becomes more

00:14:54.080 complicated but i i almost feel like if you want to understand why the middle east is so complicated

00:14:59.180 you just have to look at the map of it because of the straight lines that you see everywhere and

00:15:04.660 you go back to the british and the french carving these countries out of thin air creating places 1.00

00:15:10.760 like Syria where you've got all kinds of different tribes living in one country and almost like

00:15:15.540 the only way to control that kind of place is to be a dictator like Assad and Hussein in Iraq, 0.82

00:15:20.720 again, an artificially created country or Bashar al-Assad or Gaddafi in Libya, like all of these 0.97

00:15:26.740 places, they're so multi-ethnic and multi-religious and all these groups have been fighting each other

00:15:33.340 for centuries. Is it inevitable almost that you end up with these strongmen dictators in all these

00:15:38.500 places because of the history of colonialism and the legacy that we left?

00:15:44.460 Is it inevitable?

00:15:46.100 Again, gosh, what a huge question.

00:15:48.720 I think a lot of my Middle Eastern friends say that.

00:15:53.860 Certainly they say, you know, I mean, I have an Egyptian friend who, when the Arab Spring

00:15:58.380 happened, which then at first ushered in a Muslim Brotherhood government, which was seen

00:16:03.800 as threatening to some actors there and other actors who then sponsored a coup and returned

00:16:10.260 a military dictator to power. I have an Egyptian friend who said, that's right, that's what

00:16:14.900 we need. Egyptians can only be governed with an iron fist. An Iraqi friend says the same 1.00

00:16:20.260 thing about Iraq. Iraqis have always been dominated by a strong man for 5,000 years.

00:16:25.840 That's how it's run. They need one. We're crazy. That's what they say. I don't necessarily

00:16:30.620 know if it's inevitable that those polities need to be run in an authoritarian way. It certainly

00:16:36.620 is the case. I mean, I also think that there's a narrative which says that the countries of

00:16:44.340 the Middle East were invented by the European colonial powers in an almost arbitrary way.

00:16:53.280 This narrative is grossly exaggerated. It's not really true. I mean, most of the,

00:16:58.320 And if you look at the infamous Sykes-Picot agreement and the map that they kind of drew,

00:17:04.460 it actually isn't equivalent to the map as it exists in the Middle East today.

00:17:09.400 People don't often recognize that fact because a lot of historical research has proved beyond a shadow of a doubt

00:17:15.380 that when the Ottoman Empire, which ruled over that region for 400 years, collapsed following the First World War

00:17:23.040 and there was a great scramble by the colonial powers to stamp their control over that region,

00:17:28.320 They couldn't really just control it. And there was an upswell from the ground, as you would imagine, as the imperial power retreats of various attempts on their own on the part of the local actors to gain control, you know, various tribal alliances and movements and, you know, some ethnic, some religious.

00:17:47.420 And there was a great scramble. And in the end, a lot of those borders were determined by those actors and their relationship with the new colonial powers.

00:17:59.000 And more or less, the borders correspond to Ottoman provinces.

00:18:02.740 So I think too much is made of this as if like the problems in the Middle East are to do with the West just kind of messing it up.

00:18:12.900 We played a role. There's no question we played a role.

00:18:15.240 But what we're really seeing is the after effects of the collapse of a massive empire.

00:18:23.260 It's 100 years ago now that it happened, but the consequences are with us.

00:18:26.840 When a huge centralized, well-established, efficiently run for a lot of its history empire collapses, what happens?

00:18:36.420 What kind of politics does that give rise to?

00:18:39.680 What kind of leaders come to the fore?

00:18:43.080 You know, in the case of the Middle East, military ones, authoritarians, kings, authoritarian kings, absolute monarchs, you know.

00:18:49.760 So I guess my point was less about blaming the West necessarily.

00:18:54.000 But, for example, the Soviet Union collapsed.

00:18:56.300 And because it contained within it, broadly speaking, countries which were consistent in terms of ethnicity, in terms of language, etc.

00:19:06.420 So Lithuania and Latvia and Estonia didn't need to have, you know, a massive war or any disputes.

00:19:11.740 There were some conflicts regionally between different countries.

00:19:14.980 But broadly speaking, those countries kind of made sense.

00:19:17.820 Whereas Iraq, for example, you know, you have Sunnis, Shia, Kurds, who all pretty much have been fighting for a very long time, as you just explained with Iran, don't really get on very well.

00:19:29.820 Kurds want their own country. 1.00

00:19:31.380 And you look at almost any country in the region and they have an element of that.

00:19:37.340 Syria, again, another example. 0.95

00:19:38.800 Yeah, the diversity. I mean, I think, again, historically, especially during the Ottoman

00:19:44.040 period, the Middle East was extremely peaceful because the whole region was controlled by two 1.00

00:19:50.820 empires, the Ottoman and the Safavid and its successor empires in Iran. So two states controlled

00:19:56.160 what are now a myriad of states. It was Europe that was not peaceful during those centuries.

00:20:03.040 Europeans were slaughtering each other constantly.

00:20:06.100 But the Middle East was stable.

00:20:08.460 So this idea that like Shia and Sunni have been fighting forever and Kurds, it's not really true.

00:20:13.460 Again, it's not really true.

00:20:14.940 It is the consequence of the collapse of that arrangement and the introduction into the region of nationalism, ethno-nationalism,

00:20:22.500 which Europeans invented as a kind of political principle, into a region the traditional governing structures of which couldn't cope with it.

00:20:32.660 because it was such a patchwork.

00:20:34.520 You know, a Kurdish village next to an Assyrian village

00:20:37.720 next to an Arab village that's Shiite

00:20:39.220 next to an Arab village that's half Christian, half Sunni.

00:20:42.480 How do you, and in a region that has had for centuries

00:20:46.980 a governing philosophy based on your religion,

00:20:49.240 not based on your ethnicity or your language.

00:20:52.240 So how do you square that weird circle?

00:20:54.720 Well, it causes conflict.

00:20:57.400 So that, I think, is more, it's a more recent phenomenon

00:21:00.900 than that idea like they've been fighting each other forever.

00:21:03.600 It's not really true.

00:21:04.680 They haven't been fighting each other forever.

00:21:06.780 The strongmen dictators of the Arab world, of the Middle East,

00:21:10.080 have tried to forge through violence nation states

00:21:14.220 out of an incredible patchwork of people

00:21:17.080 who didn't feel united based on nationality originally.

00:21:22.500 They do now.

00:21:23.120 I mean, to some large extent, that effort succeeded.

00:21:26.780 And Iraqis do feel Iraqi, and Saudis do feel Saudi,

00:21:29.720 and Egyptians certainly feel Egyptian.

00:21:32.340 But that just took, well, it took the same amount of violence as it took us in Europe.

00:21:36.180 We were very violent as we were forging these new identities.

00:21:39.480 So that's that side, which explains, if I may kind of go on a tangent,

00:21:43.700 which explains actually the appeal and the rise of Islamism as a political philosophy

00:21:48.340 because these people, you know, they actually had thought of themselves first and foremost as Muslims,

00:21:56.460 Not as Kurds, not as Iraqis, and not as Syrians. 0.94

00:21:59.920 So it was much easier for a kind of political philosophy that attempted to unite them into one polity,

00:22:07.680 which that idea underlies movements like the Muslim Brotherhood and whatever.

00:22:11.520 That's why that has so much appeal.

00:22:13.520 It appeals instinctively because they have that identity.

00:22:16.980 Whereas in the Christian world, a philosophy that was predicated on the fact that we're all Christians

00:22:23.520 wouldn't get off the ground because actually, you know, the people of the West are majority

00:22:28.120 Christian, but it doesn't actually anchor our identity. Well, we don't have a history of the

00:22:32.280 caliphate. Well, we don't have a history of the caliphate, but we did have a history of a great

00:22:36.860 Christian imperium, which then came unstuck in the 16th century and then evolved into nation-states,

00:22:43.900 which then fought each other brutally, which then has given rise to movements of transnational

00:22:48.700 movements like the eu and like the united nations you know so the you know these again i'm giving a

00:22:56.100 very complex answer to this huge question yeah um and i hope that it's not too confusing no no no

00:23:01.960 it's very coherent and you know very interesting why why is it that oh this is going to be another

00:23:10.160 broad question we always see you know america getting involved britain getting involved

00:23:14.620 and then it never seems to end well.

00:23:18.580 And then you always get people,

00:23:19.980 majority of them on the left,

00:23:21.080 going, the only reason they're getting involved

00:23:22.580 is because of oil, all the rest of it.

00:23:25.040 How much of this is the West getting involved

00:23:27.720 in these countries because, you know,

00:23:29.600 they want it to be stable,

00:23:30.840 they want them to live under a democracy,

00:23:32.360 they want freedom of law, all the rest of it?

00:23:34.960 And how much of it is because of oil

00:23:36.680 or other nefarious activities?

00:23:40.060 I couldn't quantify it.

00:23:41.780 It's a mixture and it's a very uncomfortable mixture.

00:23:44.620 I mean, a recent report came out, I can't remember what, but I found it very interesting,

00:23:50.300 which basically proves by marshalling a whole amount of evidence that the Iraq War of 2003,

00:23:55.980 for example, was not about oil. This is a great myth that oil companies, particularly American

00:24:04.460 oil companies, utterly opposed the invasion of Iraq. They totally opposed it. It was not

00:24:10.140 not in their interests whatsoever. The neocons that informed the foreign policy of George

00:24:17.920 W. Bush didn't care. They actually were obsessed with the idea of bringing democracy to the

00:24:25.300 Middle East. I think they were ideologically committed, neoconservative, hyper-liberals.

00:24:32.900 They actually thought that in some kind of – like through some magic that – I think they think that the natural state of mankind is democratic liberalism.

00:24:45.680 A lot of people forget this, that democratic liberalism is a highly evolved, highly complex manufactured form of social governance.

00:24:56.100 It's not natural at all.

00:24:57.440 It is highly unnatural.

00:24:58.800 But they sort of thought that.

00:24:59.820 They thought you lob a grenade into the middle of the Middle East and you topple the dictators and democracy will flourish.

00:25:07.480 They believed that.

00:25:09.020 So that was really what that was about.

00:25:11.720 The oil companies, the American oil companies opposed it.

00:25:14.720 And following the war, the American oil companies have not profited from it.

00:25:17.560 The oil contracts that the independent Iraqi government, largely influenced now by Iran, ironically, have awarded, the oil contracts they've awarded have not gone to American companies.

00:25:33.800 That's true. Actually, we had a former presidential advisor on the show and we didn't talk with her about this, but I kept badgering her in the pub about this and going, yeah, but wasn't it about oil?

00:25:44.900 And she was going, well, actually, American companies didn't get any of the oil contracts for the actual oil.

00:25:51.480 They got, like, Halliburton got some, like, service loans.

00:25:53.380 At the beginning, Halliburton got some.

00:25:55.020 Yeah.

00:25:55.200 That's right.

00:25:55.780 But it wasn't that big.

00:25:57.320 But there are other areas in the middle, like the Gulf.

00:25:59.580 Yeah.

00:25:59.900 The Gulf originally was important geostrategically in the British imperial period because of way stations along the route to India.

00:26:07.200 So it was basically, the Gulf is geostrategically important just because of its location.

00:26:13.500 It's just along these incredibly important waterways, the Red Sea, the Suez Canal, the Strait of Hormuz on the way into the Indian Ocean.

00:26:20.980 So it would be an important place anyway for any global order that sought to maintain free market, free open trade routes because it's so important.

00:26:31.220 The discovery of the world's largest oil and gas supplies increased that importance enormously.

00:26:37.260 And so, yes, to some large extent, the Middle East, the actual Gulf,

00:26:42.640 the heart of Arabia itself is important because of oil.

00:26:48.100 And the thing is, is that simply so?

00:26:51.240 I mean, there's a kind of paranoid conspiracist perspective that would say

00:26:54.940 that we only get involved in the Middle East because of oil, as if that's an option.

00:27:00.800 You know, people don't quite understand how important oil is to the functioning of the entire world,

00:27:05.440 how the oil price, the price of oil underpins basically the price of everything because oil

00:27:12.600 fuels this incredibly, amazingly powerful and productive global economy. Everything

00:27:19.300 depends on the price of oil. The price of oil quintupled overnight. The global order would

00:27:25.640 just kind of collapse because everything would get so expensive to produce. No one could afford

00:27:30.660 it. It would cause massive price inflation. So it's not arbitrary. There's no choice but

00:27:35.840 to care about oil and to make sure that it is stable, that the price is clear, that the

00:27:39.680 price reflects more or less market conditions. People who think that you could just kind

00:27:45.800 of wash your hands of caring about that problem, they don't understand how important it is.

00:27:52.880 I know it's just another great answer because I never really thought of it like that. I

00:27:58.100 I never thought that actually, of course, everything is dependent on oil.

00:28:01.480 Therefore, it makes complete sense for them to be involved.

00:28:05.680 Now, half the stuff you're wearing now is made of oil.

00:28:08.460 Thanks, mate.

00:28:09.140 No, no, I'm serious.

00:28:09.940 Yeah.

00:28:10.520 Plastic, most of your shoes is made of oil.

00:28:13.540 People don't actually understand the importance of petroleum as a product.

00:28:17.780 They think of it like it's in cars.

00:28:19.560 They just think, well, we'll just drive less or something.

00:28:21.640 They don't understand that as a product, petroleum.

00:28:24.060 Now, you can be some kind of, you know, Luddite or some kind of, you know, romantic pastoralist or something.

00:28:30.800 You know, in fact, there's a part of my soul that I wanted to live.

00:28:33.460 I wanted to be a monk at one point, for goodness sake.

00:28:35.160 So I'm not wholly invested in, you know, ever, you know, in consumerism and stuff.

00:28:39.980 If that's what you want, great.

00:28:41.280 I mean, in fact, nothing is preventing you from living that life.

00:28:43.780 But if you think that the world is going to embrace that, then you're just fooling yourself.

00:28:48.920 You know, people actually don't want to go back to subsistence farming levels.

00:28:53.460 Strangely enough, live till 30, die from toothache.

00:28:56.240 They don't want to.

00:28:56.560 They don't want to.

00:28:57.120 Maybe God wants them to.

00:28:59.500 But and so looking at the Middle East, what's Trump's impact been? 0.91

00:29:03.760 Because a lot of people go, you know, he's a racist. 0.99

00:29:07.340 He's a bigot. 0.97

00:29:07.920 He does this. 0.81

00:29:08.520 He does that.

00:29:09.180 He's, you know, and then, you know, the embassy now in Jerusalem, it's an inflammatory gesture.

00:29:14.620 But what actually has been his impact?

00:29:17.240 Well, I mean, I mentioned his impact in the Gulf.

00:29:19.580 The Gulf states were pleased to see the end of Obama.

00:29:21.700 They think that Trump is a man they can work with better to counter Iran. 0.63

00:29:26.440 And that seems to be happening as we record this because there's this great sense that is there going to be a war, in fact.

00:29:32.420 I mean, Trump has said – he said last night, I don't want war with Iran.

00:29:36.140 Who knows?

00:29:38.100 The Israel question is interesting.

00:29:40.300 I mean, I don't know Trump.

00:29:42.800 I would not – I didn't vote because I've lived here for a long time and I don't really think of my – I don't really think I should vote.

00:29:49.620 Hey, I'm Russian.

00:29:50.180 I voted.

00:29:50.620 I wouldn't have voted for Trump.

00:29:59.320 I don't understand his psychology.

00:30:03.820 I don't pretend to.

00:30:05.540 I think he does seem to have this kind of bullish realism in his approach to things.

00:30:13.280 Unlike George W. Bush, who was a neocon or at least influenced by neocons, which is an ideologically idealistic point of view.

00:30:22.100 Democracy will spread, you know, through military means.

00:30:26.540 He's not like Obama, who was also an idealist, but more of a kind of neoliberal academic center leftist type that, you know, if we just hold hands and wish very hard, everyone will be nice to each other.

00:30:39.300 including Iranian mullahs hell-bent on the destruction of the Israeli state.

00:30:45.020 So Trump is more like, well, is Jerusalem effectively the capital of Israel?

00:30:51.680 Yes.

00:30:52.140 Has it been so for over 40 years?

00:30:53.940 Yes.

00:30:54.840 Then it is.

00:30:55.720 So he doesn't necessarily have the nuanced appreciation of what that means.

00:31:01.560 But it's just like recently by his ratifying Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights,

00:31:07.080 You know, they've run the Golan Heights for decades.

00:31:10.020 So he just says, let's get over it and move on.

00:31:12.940 You know, Israel runs it.

00:31:14.460 I think that's really what he is doing.

00:31:18.800 He called the bluff of the more liberal, you know, establishment, say, or foreign policy establishment, because the blowback for these moves has been very minor.

00:31:32.560 Netanyahu was reelected to run Israel.

00:31:37.700 The Arab states remain ever closer allied with that government to counter Iranian influence.

00:31:45.120 Arabs on the street didn't rise up in great, tremendous protests.

00:31:48.920 You know, there's Hamas and Israel fight, and they have been fighting recently, and that will continue.

00:31:53.320 So in a way, it's a fait accompli.

00:31:56.580 It just happened, because it's just recognizing facts on the ground, it seems to me.

00:32:01.320 So it's essentially a more pragmatic approach, a more world-realistic approach.

00:32:05.240 It seems to be a more realistic approach. I mean, it is filtered through a psychology of great wonderment to the average Twitter viewer.

00:32:15.020 But there does seem to be something like a realist position informing it.

00:32:19.160 And why is it that the left aligns itself so strongly with the Palestinian cause?

00:32:27.420 Well, they didn't always, of course, which is interesting.

00:32:31.720 Zionism was originally quite left inflected and it was a nationalist movement, which we think of as a right-wing thing, but Zionists themselves, the leading lights of Zionism, who tended to be, well, a large proportion of them tended to be kind of upper middle class educated Europeans, they tended to be liberally inclined and slightly even more like radically inclined.

00:32:56.540 The kibbutz movement was communitarian, and Zionism was seen as a kind of utopian, left-leaning movement.

00:33:06.140 That changed with time as the situation was reinterpreted,

00:33:11.300 that Israel was seen as a colonialist movement, a foreign aggression sponsored by the great Satan, America.

00:33:19.140 So in a Cold War context, America is the enemy of the left and supports the right.

00:33:24.480 So you can see then why the friend of Israel, America, being on the right means that the enemy of Israel, the Palestinians, is on the left. 0.88

00:33:32.360 So left-wing people support them.

00:33:34.600 You have someone like Jeremy Corbyn, a person like that, like Noam Chomsky.

00:33:40.100 For him, in a paranoid way, he sees America as effectively an evil actor on the world stage.

00:33:47.180 and anything, resisting anything to do with America must thereby be good,

00:33:52.720 which is why he has tended to be vocal in support of Iran and Venezuela and such in Cuba

00:34:00.040 and places like that that position themselves as opposed to the American empire.

00:34:04.020 Great places to live, by the way.

00:34:07.460 And also, it is true that the Palestinians have been given something like a raw deal

00:34:15.720 by history, by the Israeli government, and by Israelis, and by their fellow Arabs, actually,

00:34:22.900 who have not done them any favors. I think Palestinians haven't done themselves so many 1.00

00:34:27.740 favors. It's a pity, I think, that they first tended to throw their longing for prosperity

00:34:36.160 and dignity with the PLO, which was a very left-wing, Bolshevik-inspired movement led

00:34:44.460 by Yasser Arafat, of course, and then more recently, Hamas, which is a Muslim Brotherhood

00:34:50.860 Islamist movement, and that hasn't served much purpose for the poor Palestinians who

00:34:57.700 just exist unhappily in their somewhat degraded state.

00:35:04.140 I mean, I haven't been to Palestine for a long time, so I don't actually know what it

00:35:08.140 is like on the ground.

00:35:08.840 When I did visit it, you know, they were building the wall there, and I had friends in Bethlehem

00:35:15.180 Well, Beit Jala, in fact, a Christian Palestinian family I went and stayed with.

00:35:18.920 And, you know, it was pretty depressing.

00:35:22.500 You know, you could look down at this wall and, you know,

00:35:25.140 clearly the economic differential between themselves

00:35:27.880 and what they saw on the other side of the wall was vast.

00:35:30.800 But then at the same time, you know, suicide bombers and lobbing rockets

00:35:34.560 and, you know, to some extent the Palestinian cause embraced violence

00:35:39.620 as its means of achieving its objectives.

00:35:44.980 And when you embrace violence against a far greater enemy,

00:35:49.540 you're going to lose.

00:35:50.640 So they might think of adopting other approaches.

00:35:54.620 It's easy for me to say that.

00:35:55.600 I've often wondered, imagine if a kind of Palestinian Gandhi could arise

00:36:00.260 and employed pacifist means for achieving those ends.

00:36:07.080 Who knows what would happen?

00:36:08.020 Would it to some extent neutralize the power of Israeli aggression to get its aims?

00:36:13.820 And would it, who knows?

00:36:15.080 But that kind of a figure hasn't really arisen, which is a pity.

00:36:17.720 What I find interesting about how that issue is in relation to your question is viewed in the West

00:36:22.860 is you get people who clearly know nothing about the issue.

00:36:26.900 Someone like Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, in one of her first interviews that she did after being elected,

00:36:32.800 she was asked about Israel and Palestine and why she supports Palestine.

00:36:36.560 and it was transparent for all to see

00:36:39.460 that she had no idea what she was talking about at all.

00:36:42.040 She knew nothing about it

00:36:43.280 and yet she was vehemently pro-Palestinian.

00:36:47.000 And it seems to me like it's become an issue

00:36:49.040 almost like these big American political issues.

00:36:53.960 Are you pro-gun control or against gun control?

00:36:55.940 Are you pro-abortion or against them?

00:36:57.900 And what you think about it

00:36:59.900 is determined not so much about what the facts are

00:37:01.820 but which party you're in.

00:37:03.840 It's a flag-waving exercise, I think. 0.98

00:37:06.560 I mean, I am not an expert on the Israeli-Palestinian issue by any means,

00:37:12.380 but I think I know enough not to really stand up and wave the flag for either side.

00:37:18.320 It's an incredibly complicated, ultimately quite tragic situation

00:37:21.300 of a conflict of interests and a conflict of power aims

00:37:25.580 and a conflict of nationalisms and religions.

00:37:28.680 And, you know, it's extremely complicated. 0.99

00:37:30.360 Someone who just says, you know, the Palestinians are only victims and the Israelis are only evil, are as stupid as a really, really, really radical Zionist who would basically say the Palestinians are all terrorists and they never even lived in this land until the 1910s and, you know, etc. 0.99

00:37:55.820 So I think you just have to, it's complicated and sad. 1.00

00:38:00.700 The Middle East is complicated and largely sad.

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00:40:38.460 without any of the drama.

00:40:43.640 Speaking of conflicts,

00:40:44.940 probably the biggest conflict recently

00:40:48.520 and also in terms of the impact on the West,

00:40:51.320 the conflict probably that is driving

00:40:54.280 many of the political shifts and problems

00:40:57.660 and challenges and transformations

00:40:59.960 and also maybe opportunities that we see now in the West

00:41:02.700 with nationalism and all of this kind of stuff.

00:41:06.940 a lot of it seems to be linked to the conflict in Syria

00:41:09.500 and then the ensuing refugee crisis.

00:41:12.100 And it's like one big snowball that's happened.

00:41:16.380 So in five minutes or less, I mean, not in five minutes or less,

00:41:20.480 but just explain for anyone who doesn't understand or know much about it,

00:41:25.460 how has that happened?

00:41:26.780 What has happened?

00:41:27.340 Was it the collapse of Iraq and the emergence of ISIS there

00:41:31.160 that then spread into Syria? 1.00

00:41:32.540 Is that really a stupid question? 1.00

00:41:34.000 You look at me like it is. 1.00

00:41:34.960 No, no, that's not stupid, but, I mean, it's not accurate, but it's not a stupid question. 0.98

00:41:39.080 This is the episode I'm getting destroyed on. 0.99

00:41:41.700 It's not a stupid question, no.

00:41:44.180 I lived in Syria in 2007, 2008, and in that year, none of us who were living there would have thought that the country was going to become the byword for national collapse and civil war and death. 0.87

00:42:00.240 It didn't seem like that was on the cards.

00:42:02.000 four years later, it began. You know, originally, the episode, I think it's the fifth or fourth,

00:42:12.780 fifth episode of our podcast, Conflicted, deals with the Syrian civil war. And Eamon had a lot

00:42:17.820 of interesting things to say about it that I didn't know. One of the things he said was that

00:42:21.760 the protests that broke out in Syria during the beginning of the Arab Spring, you know, which was

00:42:26.800 this much, this region-wide uprising movement, the protests in Syria focused very clearly

00:42:33.020 on, essentially, on police brutality in that country.

00:42:38.640 It had become de rigueur for the police within Syria to kidnap young 11, 12-year-old boys,

00:42:45.440 rape them and deposit them in dumpsters as a way of scaring local populations into behaving. 0.81

00:42:53.140 And that's terrible.

00:42:54.740 And so they were rallying.

00:42:56.460 Something like that happened in a southern town.

00:42:59.020 They empowered, I guess, or inspired by the Arab Spring.

00:43:02.400 They rose up and said, well, we actually would like this to stop.

00:43:04.860 They petitioned the president, Bashar al-Assad, whom they had no interest in toppling.

00:43:09.240 You know, come on, just stop this.

00:43:11.280 You know, bring the police under control.

00:43:13.320 Instead of doing that, he ordered or allowed the police to fire on the crowds.

00:43:18.640 And then it just became a violent uprising.

00:43:23.280 Syria is extremely important geographically.

00:43:27.140 It's right there in the middle.

00:43:28.420 It borders Turkey, which is a very strong NATO state, which had for 400 years ruled Syria, of course.

00:43:35.120 It borders Jordan, which is a linchpin in the American security apparatus.

00:43:42.440 The Jordanian secret sort of CIA, effectively, is one of the world's best and most important in combating Islamic terrorism. 0.94

00:43:50.880 It borders Israel.

00:43:51.760 We know what that means. And it borders Lebanon, largely a failed state for 35 years.

00:43:56.360 So, you know, it's very – and Iraq, which by that point was kind of a failed state as well.

00:44:00.680 So it's very important.

00:44:03.500 And Syria also has the misfortune of being a place where a lot of apocalyptic stories that Muslims and Islamists especially tell themselves about the end of days. 0.86

00:44:16.360 Lots of villages are meant to play key roles in the story that brings the return of Jesus and the judgment of the world and the ushering in of the end times.

00:44:29.400 Sadly, Syria is like the battleground for that in Muslim eschatology. 1.00

00:44:34.040 So when civil war broke out there, it was a lot of radical Islamist extremist jihadists thought the prophecies are coming true.

00:44:46.000 You see, you know, it's all happening in Syria. 0.83

00:44:49.000 So they kind of piled in, hoping to lure the West into intervening because that's all part of the end of times scenario.

00:44:57.800 I mean, in the scenarios, it's the Roman Empire which intervenes, and they think that the Roman Empire just stands for the West.

00:45:04.920 Now, so they were trying to lure the West in because they thought that if they could do that, then the end of times would happen. 0.62

00:45:11.140 And they believe the end of times will result in their favor.

00:45:16.000 So Syria was to some extent like a sacrifice on the altar of those sorts of religious ideas,

00:45:23.280 which is why there were so many Islamist groups.

00:45:27.040 Iranian Islamist actors got involved because Iran has the same eschatological sort of ideas

00:45:32.900 as the Sunnis that they then started to fight and it became a total mess. 0.73

00:45:36.500 And then, you know, Turkey got involved obviously because the Kurds were involved and Turkey

00:45:40.900 has Kurds and they don't want the Kurds to rebel in Turkey.

00:45:43.660 And then because of the Tartus naval base, Russia got involved and then Obama didn't actually respect the red lines he'd drawn.

00:45:54.260 So Russia realized, oh, we can just actually fight a war here.

00:45:58.320 So they were throwing barrel bombs and bombing neighborhoods and America wasn't doing anything.

00:46:01.900 And then ISIS rose.

00:46:03.840 Yeah. So as a result of which, there was tremendous migration away from Syria because who would, you know, want to live there? 1.00

00:46:15.480 Terrible. And, you know, a lot of that migration went into Turkey, which, you know, and then the UN and other institutions set up refugee camps.

00:46:26.300 And a lot of those migrants wanted to get to Europe for safety reasons

00:46:30.920 and also like many migrants from everywhere for economic reasons.

00:46:36.020 And that trickle became a flood.

00:46:40.020 I mean, I think there was some bad, there was some manipulation by the Turkish government.

00:46:46.480 They were letting a lot of migrants in.

00:46:50.180 They weren't policing migration because they wanted to use it as a bargaining chip

00:46:54.740 with particularly the Germans, but EU in general for various concessions, which they received,

00:46:59.860 which is why then they stopped letting the migrants through. So it all became a mess. 1.00

00:47:06.040 And famously, Angela Merkel kind of said, come, come, come. And then like 2 million over a course

00:47:10.560 of the summer came and that freaked out the Hungarians. And absolutely, the poor Greeks 1.00

00:47:15.980 were already on their knees. They couldn't cope with all of these migrants. 1.00

00:47:19.640 And Italians. And of course, it had a big impact even in this country. I mean, 0.97

00:47:23.300 And even the Brexit referendum was affected by people's concerns.

00:47:27.800 I think that's right.

00:47:28.400 And when two million people come, as much compassion as you want to have, that's going to have an impact on the society.

00:47:36.420 And there's no getting away from that, which is why I say it's had a huge impact here in the West as well as in Syria. 0.99

00:47:42.380 Let me ask another incorrect and stupid question. 0.99

00:47:45.220 I've got a whole barrel there. 0.99

00:47:46.520 i i feel like my sense is that the reason someone like bash al-assad doesn't want to go

00:47:54.480 uh didn't want to go when he when it may have been time there was no one's calling for that

00:47:59.680 anymore but there was a time when they were uh is that if i'm thinking if i were him right because

00:48:05.520 this guy as far as i know his background he's not some you know evil religious fanatic who's

00:48:12.640 who spent his childhood 0.93

00:48:13.640 slitting people's throats 0.89

00:48:14.800 for entertainment. 0.99

00:48:15.520 He's an ophthalmologist.

00:48:17.940 Not an ophthalmologist.

00:48:19.380 They're not all evil.

00:48:20.300 Yeah, yeah.

00:48:21.800 So he was educated in the UK

00:48:23.700 as far as I know, right?

00:48:25.120 He went to ophthalmology school

00:48:27.020 in the UK.

00:48:27.620 Yeah.

00:48:28.780 And he wasn't supposed

00:48:29.880 to be president.

00:48:30.960 His brother was.

00:48:31.840 His older brother.

00:48:33.120 His brother died in like

00:48:34.220 a car crash or a plane or something.

00:48:35.680 And then he suddenly found himself

00:48:36.840 having to do this.

00:48:38.760 So as far as I see,

00:48:40.460 he doesn't strike me

00:48:41.800 as this kind of just evil person

00:48:45.040 who's just born evil

00:48:46.260 and continues to be evil throughout their life

00:48:48.140 for no reason, right?

00:48:49.720 So, but I put myself in his position

00:48:52.260 and I go, well, what happened to the other people

00:48:54.400 who went or who gave up

00:48:56.440 or who tried to work with the West

00:48:58.780 or who didn't try and fight, if you like?

00:49:02.100 Saddam Hussein, right?

00:49:04.080 His son's brutally murdered in the street.

00:49:06.400 He himself hanged, right?

00:49:07.760 Colonel Gaddafi

00:49:09.300 gave up his

00:49:10.820 mass weapons

00:49:12.440 or mass destruction

00:49:13.120 program because

00:49:13.800 he was promised

00:49:14.360 he was given

00:49:15.200 assurances by the

00:49:16.080 West

00:49:16.320 you're nodding

00:49:17.720 for a change

00:49:18.260 so I'm not

00:49:18.820 talking completely 0.69

00:49:19.520 rubbish 0.98

00:49:19.800 I'm preparing 0.99

00:49:20.800 my

00:49:21.380 so you're just 1.00

00:49:22.760 going stupid 1.00

00:49:23.440 stupid 1.00

00:49:23.800 no no 1.00

00:49:24.620 can I just say

00:49:26.580 this has been

00:49:27.000 my favorite episode

00:49:27.940 so far

00:49:28.560 I guess 1.00

00:49:30.180 you're the stupid 1.00

00:49:31.020 one most of the 1.00

00:49:31.660 time

00:49:31.840 and now his

00:49:33.640 flaws have been

00:49:34.160 exposed 1.00

00:49:34.420 he is the stupid 1.00

00:49:35.000 one 1.00

00:49:35.300 I'm just the ignorant one on this, so we say. 0.96

00:49:40.440 So here's a guy who looks around and he goes, 0.93

00:49:44.040 well, anyone who's tried to work with the West

00:49:46.280 or who hasn't full-heartedly opposed the West, right, ends up dead.

00:49:51.920 Colonel Gaddafi was given these assurances.

00:49:54.960 The West pulled back, bombed, I think as far as they either bombed his convoy

00:49:59.300 or let the rebels know where his convoy was going.

00:50:02.520 I don't know that. That's the case.

00:50:03.960 I think so. I think so.

00:50:05.300 Rebels show up, beat him up, rape him with a bayonet and kill him. 1.00

00:50:07.860 I know that. 1.00

00:50:08.680 I've seen that.

00:50:09.600 So if that's your situation and you know what's going to happen to you and your family and your wife and your children,

00:50:17.920 yeah, guess whoever needs to be gassed.

00:50:20.140 Most people, that would be their reaction.

00:50:22.060 Do you know what I'm saying?

00:50:22.800 I do.

00:50:25.140 I mean, I'm not sure if the comparisons are entirely apt.

00:50:28.580 I mean, Saddam Hussein didn't work with the West, and so he got it in the end. 0.62

00:50:36.520 Gaddafi, I mean, okay, to some extent, the West betrayed him.

00:50:42.780 I mean, I don't feel any sympathy for him.

00:50:45.500 I'm not saying he's a great guy.

00:50:47.620 I feel like, yeah, everyone should be like...

00:50:49.640 Ben Ali of Tunisia, who left, you know, now lives in Saudi Arabia, I think, in some comfort, I think. 0.91

00:50:57.740 I think that's, he certainly went to Saudi Arabia initially and lived there.

00:51:01.320 So it's, you know, I think there were other things on the table.

00:51:04.900 Bashar al-Assad might have made arrangements to live in one of Putin's magnificent palaces in Russia, for example.

00:51:13.200 Maybe they would have offered him safe haven and protected him from...

00:51:16.760 He wants to live in Russia. I'm Russian. I don't even want to live in Russia. 0.76

00:51:19.820 Or Iran, you know, might... 0.72

00:51:22.240 They could share a mansion with Edward Snowden.

00:51:24.360 Yes, exactly.

00:51:26.120 So, I mean, Bashar al-Assad, I don't understand his psychology.

00:51:29.460 I think, I mean, evil, is he evil? 0.99

00:51:31.540 I mean, his father was a tough bastard and a really wily one. 0.98

00:51:34.960 I think that there was probably something amounting to psychological abuse in his childhood 0.99

00:51:40.600 by being raised by that kind of a person.

00:51:43.340 And I think it's pretty clear that when it became clear that he was going to be the president,

00:51:49.240 when it wasn't expected before, his brother, as you said, was going to be.

00:51:52.280 I think he was, you know, he was immediately put through rigorous dictator training, which, you know, people have said really changed him.

00:52:03.860 I mean, and also you have to see, I mean, the Syrian regime is like a, it's really like a mafia arrangement. 0.88

00:52:10.840 So Bashar al-Assad is a bit like Michael Corleone in The Godfather.

00:52:14.560 You know, he didn't, he also wasn't meant to take over the family business, but then Sonny was killed and he tried to get out, but he just couldn't.

00:52:22.200 He had to be, you know, he just becomes this great mobster and he has to shoot his own brother at the end of Godfather II and then he dies alone after his daughter's killed in Godfather III.

00:52:30.840 The difference is Michael Corleone is a sympathetic character because he actually wants to get out.

00:52:34.540 I don't think there is any indication whatsoever that Bashar al-Assad wants to get out, thinks that he's done anything wrong.

00:52:40.700 I think he thinks with some justification, I mean, I can see his point of view, that he saved Syria from Islamists, from radical Sunni ISIS-style Islamists.

00:52:52.200 He believed he did that. I suppose, to some extent, he did do that. In the meantime, he destroyed the country.

00:52:59.880 So, yeah, I think...

00:53:03.160 I guess what I'm saying is, did he have a choice? Because if he left, he probably would have been killed, is what I'm saying.

00:53:09.880 It depends. I mean, those people, Gaddafi didn't leave. Gaddafi stayed. He resisted the rebels. He was caught. He was raped to death.

00:53:17.480 Saddam Hussein didn't leave. He hid. He was found by the rebels. He was hanged. 0.98

00:53:22.200 So Bashar al-Assad didn't even attempt to negotiate some kind of deal with the globe,

00:53:30.220 with the UN, say, to get out.

00:53:33.540 It could have been handled.

00:53:35.100 There's no question that it could have been handled.

00:53:37.280 As I say, Ben Ali of Tunisia now lives in Saudi Arabia,

00:53:41.320 and no one's calling for him to go to The Hague to stand for any kind of trial.

00:53:45.820 So I don't think it's about that, really.

00:53:48.580 And earlier in the Nadis, Bashar al-Assad did actually kind of come in from the cold with the West and formed suddenly this.

00:53:56.180 It was called the Damascus Spring.

00:53:57.500 It lasted from 2000, the year that he became president, to about 2003, 2004.

00:54:03.360 And he did suddenly seem like he was going to be different from his father.

00:54:06.660 And he was going to, you know, be warmer to the West and integrated into the global order better.

00:54:11.860 But then when the Iraq War happened, he, fearing he was maybe next, turned away from the West again, allied more closely again with Iran and also contributed vastly to the destabilization of Iraq by allowing Sunni jihadists out of Damascus prisons actually and sending them into Iraq to cause havoc there. 0.52

00:54:38.560 So, you know, he was not a great guy.

00:54:43.800 Well, certainly not a great guy.

00:54:45.420 I was just thinking of that when you were talking about The Godfather.

00:54:47.660 We're going to need a warning.

00:54:48.860 There's going to be spoilers for The Godfather if you haven't seen it.

00:54:51.400 Oh, yeah, sorry, sorry.

00:54:51.960 Actually, we're a controversial podcast.

00:54:53.780 If you could do it with Game of Thrones and introduce some spoilers in just to piss off some people.

00:54:58.280 Well, actually, I was going to ask, do you watch Game of Thrones?

00:55:00.400 No, I don't.

00:55:01.380 In fact, I told a friend yesterday, I said, I don't watch Game of Thrones.

00:55:05.040 I work closely with the Gulf states, and it's a real Game of Thrones.

00:55:11.760 Well, see, you don't watch Game of Thrones either.

00:55:13.800 I was going to tell you about this great meme that I saw, but now it's all wasted.

00:55:17.860 Yeah, absolutely.

00:55:19.140 So what is the state of the caliphate at the moment?

00:55:23.400 Does it still exist?

00:55:24.440 What is happening around that area?

00:55:26.400 Well, I mean, ISIS, you mean?

00:55:29.640 It doesn't exist so much.

00:55:31.600 I mean, it doesn't really exist as a state anymore.

00:55:35.200 I mean, it's been deprived of its geographical possessions.

00:55:39.200 It certainly exists as a movement.

00:55:42.780 And there are still fighters and terrorists who are causing problems in that area.

00:55:47.240 And it continues to inspire jihadists and radical Islamists elsewhere.

00:55:54.240 Whether it coordinates with them directly or not, I don't know.

00:55:57.340 People don't necessarily know, but certainly it inspires.

00:55:59.680 And in the name of ISIS, things continue to happen. 0.69

00:56:04.860 So, you know, the phenomenon of radical jihadism remains.

00:56:13.740 It's not going away.

00:56:15.860 But even though, do you think the state doesn't exist anymore and it's been defeated?

00:56:21.480 Yes, I believe that to be the case.

00:56:23.080 I mean, when is a state defeated?

00:56:25.180 I mean, you know, the caliph, Baghdadi, he's still alive.

00:56:28.780 He's still around. He released a video last week, I think, for the first time in several years

00:56:32.780 announcing the fact that, you know, the cause goes on.

00:56:36.760 So does it exist? Does it not exist?

00:56:38.840 I mean, it doesn't control, it doesn't militarily control anything like the kind of territory that it did.

00:56:46.220 And the territory that it may control would be more like rural territory based on like warlordism,

00:56:53.020 old-school kind of control, which would ebb and flow, but not like an actual state apparatus anymore,

00:56:59.420 I think. Why was ISIS so successful? Why was ISIS so successful? Well, the Syrian Civil War

00:57:07.020 basically caused a vacuum of power to open up in the, you know, the eastern. So the eastern

00:57:15.820 Syrian desert blends into the Western Iraqi desert. Before recent times, that zone was kind of open

00:57:25.780 and was part of a wider Arabian desert zone where all the tribes would, you know, the Bedouin tribes

00:57:33.440 would move quite freely. It's only in recent years as the nation-state model has been imposed on those

00:57:40.660 areas that anything like a difference has opened up. But the collapse of the Saddam Hussein regime

00:57:46.160 and then the collapse of full control by the Bashar al-Assad regime over Syria reopened that

00:57:51.680 zone. And it's interesting that that zone is basically the zone that fell under the control

00:57:58.220 of ISIS, which was a Sunni Arab movement that was closely united with local tribal Sunni

00:58:08.740 warlord sort of actors. They bought off their allegiance, I think, to some extent,

00:58:15.340 to the extent that they were successful and getting extremely rich because they had taxation

00:58:20.360 and it was a very rich movement. They were able to maintain the loyalty of those more local kind

00:58:27.400 of actors. But the short answer, they were successful because of the conditions of the

00:58:33.900 collapse of Syria. It gave a jihadist group an opportunity to control land. In fact, it had 0.54

00:58:39.860 happened before them in Yemen when, after the Arab Spring there, caused destabilization of the

00:58:50.140 previous regime and prevented the capital Sana'a from projecting its power adequately across the

00:58:56.860 whole country, even though it had never really controlled the whole country directly because

00:58:59.920 it's such a chaotic country. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which was based in the Hadramaut

00:59:05.020 area, which is on the sort of east side of Yemen, was able to effectively control a huge amount of

00:59:11.820 that country and erect state-like structures and stuff. So that had already happened. So,

00:59:16.260 you know, when the nation state crumbles in the Middle East, Islamist actors tend to 1.00

00:59:24.140 become empowered, which is why someone like Eamon, and I would agree with him,

00:59:29.160 My co-host in Conflicted would say, above all, we must support the nation states of

00:59:34.400 the Middle East.

00:59:35.020 We mustn't allow movements to destabilize those nation states, even if that means in

00:59:40.220 the short term, putting up with illiberal governments.

00:59:43.780 That's what he would say.

00:59:44.520 And that was the common understanding.

00:59:48.920 It's the old school kind of Henry Kissinger style rail politic understanding.

00:59:53.440 You must deal.

00:59:54.520 You must support stability above all. 1.00

00:59:56.360 and if that means you have to get into bed with some assholes, 1.00

00:59:59.080 well, then you've got to get into bed with some assholes. 1.00

01:00:02.140 And so the one question that I really wanted to ask before this interview 0.99

01:00:05.800 was always why is it, and again, it's a really difficult question

01:00:09.900 to answer, almost impossible, but why are they so effective

01:00:13.480 at recruiting people from the West?

01:00:15.900 Because, you know, the ISIS, you think why would anybody want to go

01:00:19.640 to Syria or the caliphate, you know, what is the attraction? 0.98

01:00:23.760 well i think great views sorry great views yeah good weather i think that's hot get a tan that

01:00:33.920 question is just a sub set of i mean it's it's falls within a wider question of why is it why

01:00:41.440 are they successful at recruiting so many people yeah i mean recruiting so many muslims you know

01:00:46.900 they recruit people in the west because we have a lot of muslims in the west um and a tiny tiny

01:00:52.960 minority of Muslims, but enough to cause problems in Syria, were attracted to the message of ISIS.

01:01:00.920 Why? It is really hard to understand. I don't understand why anyone was ever attracted to

01:01:06.820 Bolshevik terrorist cells. I don't understand that either. I'm not a radical. I do not seek

01:01:15.180 to kill people in pursuit of some utopian aim, and I certainly do not seek to kill myself

01:01:21.380 in that aim. I don't, you know, I don't understand it. ISIS tends to attract, 0.61

01:01:28.780 or I mean, jihadist groups tend to attract a wide range of people. They can kind of fall into two

01:01:34.900 basic camps. You have an underclass kind of person who, you know, let's say always a Muslim, 1.00

01:01:41.520 obviously, because it's a Muslim movement, an Islamic movement. So an underclass Muslim who 0.53

01:01:47.580 who maybe was involved in criminality of some kind,

01:01:53.120 you know, drugs, like all forms of criminality,

01:01:55.820 actually drugs tend to play a role,

01:01:58.840 yet they're Muslim, so they may seek some sense

01:02:02.460 they want to redeem themselves from their sin,

01:02:08.020 and jihadist groups say,

01:02:09.680 come, blow yourself up or fight the jihad with us 0.98

01:02:12.720 and your sins are forgiven. 0.83

01:02:13.540 So that may be very appealing to some people.

01:02:17.580 I mean, it also just appeals to sadists. They exist. There are sadists everywhere, and there are Muslim sadists. 0.99

01:02:25.360 And if you tell someone, oh, you're a sadist, and in the West they police sadism, why don't you come here? 0.97

01:02:30.460 We're not policing sadism at all. We're empowering it. You can chop off heads and kill people indiscriminately.

01:02:36.000 You know, that's appealing to a sadist. 0.99

01:02:38.260 Then, you know, there's another group which is more middle class, more educated, because a lot of engineers,

01:02:42.040 at the higher levels of these terrorist groups, there are a lot of, like, engineers and mathematicians,

01:02:46.940 Because, you know, who's making the bombs? It's complicated. It's complicated to make a bomb. So it appeals to that kind of a person. Why? They're more, I think, ideologically committed. They just believe in the worldview that the Islamists peddle, which is, you know, kind of like it's like a paranoid, conspiratorial, revolutionary worldview. 0.95

01:03:10.560 It is not a million miles away from a radical left-wing worldview.

01:03:15.320 The kind of people who were like blowing themselves up and killing the czar in the run-up to the Russian Revolution

01:03:21.160 and people who were resisting the Nazis and these two sides were fighting.

01:03:27.980 They're just kind of radical.

01:03:29.240 I don't understand.

01:03:29.940 I really, to this day, I just don't understand why people do it.

01:03:33.680 See, the question I think most people in this country would want to know is, why is it happening here?

01:03:38.760 Like, what do they want?

01:03:40.220 Like, if there was a button that we could press that did something so that people would start blowing themselves up on the streets of Britain, what would that button, what would the label next to that button be?

01:03:53.620 Is it leave Iraq?

01:03:55.680 Is it withdraw American bases from Saudi Arabia?

01:03:58.620 What is it that these people want?

01:04:02.020 But that's what people say, right?

01:04:04.100 You hear it.

01:04:04.620 That's why I'm repeating it.

01:04:05.920 So what is it that they want?

01:04:10.220 ISIS wants to lure the West into an almighty battle in the Middle East because they believe that if they do that,

01:04:28.220 it will trigger an end-of-time scenario where holy spiritual warriors will come down from heaven and vanquish the enemy.

01:04:39.460 So that's what they want.

01:04:40.900 It's a good plan. 0.99

01:04:42.940 I mean, they are, you know, they're crazy. 0.99

01:04:47.540 They really are crazy. 0.99

01:04:48.980 You know, you have to, you just read their, they believe this. 0.93

01:04:52.440 So they're poking, you know, I think, I think if I had to understand their strategy,

01:04:56.500 if they just can convince enough Western fellow travelers to blow themselves up at pop concerts in Manchester 0.84

01:05:05.900 or suddenly go on a rampage with knives and kill people in London Bridge 0.95

01:05:09.240 or shoot up a nightclub in Paris 1.00

01:05:16.080 or slice the neck of a priest in France while he's celibate. 0.99

01:05:21.180 If they can just poke the bear enough, maybe he'll come in and fight. 0.94

01:05:27.400 It's hard for us to understand that.

01:05:28.720 A lot of people think that they want America out of the Middle East.

01:05:33.080 And they sort of say this.

01:05:34.340 it's part of their rhetoric. I think it's because that's how they attract recruits,

01:05:40.700 as if they position themselves as freedom fighters. We want America out. But it's not true.

01:05:46.060 They actually want America in because they think if America comes in, then the end of times will

01:05:51.840 happen. I think that's my understanding. That's crazy. That is absolutely... Well, I mean,

01:05:56.120 you have to be crazy to do what they do. These people are crazy. I mean, but also a hundred 0.99

01:05:59.620 years ago, there were organized networks of radical Marxist Bolshevik terrorists everywhere

01:06:04.580 who thought somehow through acts of violence, all of the working class ever would rise up,

01:06:10.940 slaughter the bourgeoisie, and utopia would emerge. They thought that. They're also stupid.

01:06:16.640 That's crazy. But that was different because in Russia, for example, they had a very concrete 1.00

01:06:21.380 plan for what they wanted to do. They wanted to overthrow the people who were oppressing them,

01:06:27.020 They would say we're oppressing the working class and make everybody equal.

01:06:31.440 And, you know, someone comes from Russia, everybody was equally poor, right?

01:06:34.780 We achieved that, right?

01:06:36.280 Do you know what I'm saying? 1.00

01:06:37.240 But this is just religious, like, bad shit mental stuff. 0.99

01:06:41.260 I myself, I think that radical leftist utopian activism is equally religious in most ways. 0.99

01:06:49.600 I mean, it's just, it's materialist.

01:06:51.220 It doesn't have a supernatural dimension, but it's equally predicated on crazy ideas.

01:06:57.020 And ISIS has a governing. What does it want to do in terms of governance? Well, we saw. It erects an extremely draconian form of Sharia law over people while kind of running a mafia-style operation that fleeces people of their wealth in order to fund their... It's not actually so different from the Bolsheviks, to be honest. They were all equal, too. 0.51

01:07:21.240 So let me just finish this line of question, Francis, and the time's almost up.

01:07:25.900 What you're saying then is that the only way that we can really, well, as I understand it, based on what you've said, it's not what you're saying, but based on what you've said, the only way we can stop terrorism in the West is just a security.

01:07:42.500 It's a security issue.

01:07:43.640 In other words, we have to catch these people before they do this.

01:07:48.140 No, that's not what I'm saying.

01:07:50.260 I didn't know. I don't know how to stop terrorism in the West. I don't know. I know that it would be very hard to completely stop it.

01:08:02.700 I think in general, in the West, we are very safe and that there isn't actually that much terrorism and that the West, especially this country, has gone through periods of more terrorism.

01:08:16.900 I mean, the IRA was more successful at killing more people more frequently

01:08:20.960 than Muslim terrorists have been here. 0.88

01:08:23.020 Well, at least they'd call you up before to give you a bit of a warning.

01:08:27.440 So how do you, I mean, I think that along with my friend Eamon,

01:08:32.840 you know, the co-host of this podcast, who is a Muslim, a pious Muslim,

01:08:40.140 He believes that for this phenomenon to stop Muslims themselves, like him, who believe that the Islamist inflected ideologies are not only bad in general, but also wrong interpretations of Islam,

01:08:59.820 have to preach against them and have to create networks of more liberal,

01:09:09.440 more at ease with modernity, imams or preachers or movements, whatever.

01:09:15.220 In general, they just need to combat inward, internally, they need to combat the Islamism. 1.00

01:09:21.940 And I think that that makes sense to me.

01:09:24.560 I mean, I grew up, you know, in a pretty liberal form of it,

01:09:28.760 but a kind of, you know, evangelical, American, Reagan-voting,

01:09:34.060 sort of fundamentalist Christian family.

01:09:37.560 But, you know, really much on the liberal side of that, really.

01:09:41.040 I mean, I wasn't like a Bible beater or anything.

01:09:43.380 But I was associated with such people.

01:09:47.020 And sometimes, you know, if you scratch the surface,

01:09:49.200 have really strange ideas about America and about Jesus and America and America's destiny in some

01:09:57.760 end-time scenario. I was raised to believe that the end times were nigh and that America was going

01:10:03.380 to play this big role in it. It's kind of crazy. So how do you combat that idea? Well, you just

01:10:11.980 expose people to less crazy ideas and hope that those crazy ideas push out the, those sane ideas

01:10:18.240 Let's push out the crazy one.

01:10:19.800 But beyond that, I don't know.

01:10:20.900 Obviously, security as well.

01:10:23.120 I mean, the security services have to protect us

01:10:24.780 from all forms of organized violence, don't they?

01:10:30.820 Hopefully.

01:10:31.400 Hopefully, yeah.

01:10:33.240 Well, I mean, we can talk for a minute.

01:10:36.460 I know, sorry.

01:10:37.280 No, no, no.

01:10:38.080 Nothing to do with you.

01:10:39.600 What I should have said, actually,

01:10:41.460 what I was going to say is I feel like

01:10:43.240 none of the topics that we've opened up

01:10:45.980 got anywhere near resolving.

01:10:47.820 but you gave some really fascinating insight

01:10:50.700 and I think what this gives people

01:10:52.560 who are interested in these topics

01:10:53.860 is an insight into what you guys talk about

01:10:56.620 on Conflicted

01:10:57.620 watch Conflicted

01:10:58.660 listen to Conflicted

01:10:59.560 yeah absolutely

01:11:00.380 personally I'm disappointed

01:11:01.580 we didn't solve terrorism

01:11:02.560 yeah

01:11:03.000 that was my

01:11:04.140 that was the whole point of this

01:11:05.180 yeah

01:11:05.440 we failed

01:11:06.300 yeah well I blame that on me 1.00

01:11:08.120 on my stupid questions 1.00

01:11:08.940 yeah I did mate 1.00

01:11:09.780 otherwise we could have solved

01:11:10.700 the whole ISIS thing 0.99

01:11:11.500 still have time for Hernandos

01:11:12.580 anyway

01:11:12.960 okay so for our own

01:11:14.800 I don't need Hernandos 0.78

01:11:16.480 I live down on people who eat a Nandoz.

01:11:19.680 I know, and that's why, just like ISIS, our mission is ultimately doomed.

01:11:23.840 Right.

01:11:24.300 I had a Nandoz last week, don't worry.

01:11:26.240 Did you enjoy it?

01:11:27.960 Invariably, you do enjoy it.

01:11:29.520 I feel a little bit guilty.

01:11:30.940 You do feel a bit guilty.

01:11:32.540 But the last question that we always ask is, we ask all our guests,

01:11:36.980 is what's the one thing that we're not talking about

01:11:39.100 that we really should be talking about as a society?

01:11:42.180 Well, this has nothing to do with the Middle East.

01:11:44.340 It has to do with sort of the West, I think, but I think what we're not talking about is

01:11:49.340 how the crisis of liberalism that we're now experiencing everywhere.

01:11:55.460 Liberalism is in crisis.

01:11:58.160 Liberals call this the rise of populism.

01:12:01.020 So-called populists call this whatever they want to call it, but liberalism is in crisis,

01:12:06.480 And what we're not talking about is the extent to which that is to do with the retreat from

01:12:15.360 within our cultural sphere of Christianity, of which it seems to be liberalism is a secular

01:12:22.480 ghost.

01:12:25.160 I think liberalism thought that you could have all the good things that Christianity

01:12:30.120 brought with none of the bad by just stripping Christianity out of anything supernatural, 0.92

01:12:35.100 and then you have this secular liberalism.

01:12:39.000 But it doesn't seem to do the job.

01:12:42.440 I don't know what the answer is because I don't think, you know,

01:12:44.940 I don't expect there to be this mass revival of Christianity or anything.

01:12:49.500 But I find often when people are debating current issues

01:12:53.600 and all of the conflicts that are raging now in our society,

01:12:56.960 the fact that quite uniquely in human history we are living

01:13:03.560 in the sort of rubble of a vast religious tradition that we don't know anything about

01:13:10.920 or really think about ever, I often think, well, maybe it would help if we knew more

01:13:17.620 about it.

01:13:18.980 That's a very good point.

01:13:20.840 And it was something we've talked about with a couple of previous guests, but the sense,

01:13:25.080 and we're both non-believers, but this just sense that religion is something that binds

01:13:29.880 people together into local communities through their church or whatever institution and more

01:13:35.720 broadly as an identity, kind of like you talked about with Islamists having an identity that goes

01:13:41.340 beyond the nation-state or within the nation-state in Christian countries. The loss of that doesn't 0.69

01:13:47.120 seem to be replaceable, or the loss of meaning doesn't seem to be replaceable in quite the same

01:13:52.600 way. Yeah, not the same way. It is replaceable. Other things bind people together. The question

01:13:57.100 what are those things? And are they good? Are they good? I mean, religion wasn't by any means

01:14:01.200 wholly good either, because it could also bind people together in a bad way. It caused a few

01:14:06.480 arguments, didn't it? Yes, certainly. And it continues to do so. But I'm not actually talking

01:14:10.640 so much about religion's power of binding people together. I think I'm talking more about the fact

01:14:16.400 that maybe, in this case, a religion like Christianity might actually, in some weird way,

01:14:23.380 be true about some things

01:14:26.060 that we're not even thinking about.

01:14:28.240 You know, it may address

01:14:29.660 whole aspects of reality

01:14:30.980 that we don't even think about.

01:14:33.620 We're not encouraged to think about.

01:14:34.940 Like what?

01:14:35.800 Oh, like, I mean, like...

01:14:38.360 Give us one before we let you go.

01:14:39.620 I mean, you know, I am a Christian,

01:14:41.700 though a very idiosyncratic one.

01:14:44.380 And so, you know, like,

01:14:45.960 the concept of, like, divine grace,

01:14:48.200 that there is animating

01:14:49.540 human beings, their lives, and history,

01:14:52.560 something like grace that you can orient yourself towards through various means, usually by being

01:15:00.480 good, and you can orient yourself away from. But that grace is actually a real thing, an actual

01:15:06.380 thing that is real. Not material, it is spiritual, but it's real and may cause, it may lead to

01:15:12.860 flourishing. And if it's not around, you may not flourish, spiritually I mean, because obviously

01:15:18.820 materially. My God, do we flourish. But I think a lot of people feel that spiritually we're not

01:15:25.560 flourishing. But then I guess people don't really believe that spirit is real. That's really what

01:15:33.360 I mean. Is there spirit? Is it real? In Russia, we have a lot of it. Okay. That was a weird ending.

01:15:43.320 sorry

01:15:43.620 that was brilliant

01:15:44.840 listen

01:15:45.560 thank you so much

01:15:46.440 for coming on

01:15:47.000 we have been so busy

01:15:49.160 we haven't had a chance

01:15:50.080 to listen to all the episodes

01:15:51.160 but I will be going

01:15:52.580 right now

01:15:53.320 pretty much

01:15:53.880 and listening to all of it

01:15:54.860 thank you very much

01:15:55.540 I think it's going to be

01:15:56.680 absolutely fascinating

01:15:57.540 it's a pity we couldn't

01:15:58.860 have Eamon here

01:15:59.460 but when he's

01:16:00.660 able to leave

01:16:02.040 his security

01:16:03.020 whatever

01:16:04.280 we'd love to have you

01:16:05.440 both back on

01:16:06.160 oh great

01:16:06.940 I'd love to come back

01:16:07.680 Eamon has to come

01:16:09.220 you'd love him

01:16:10.200 yeah

01:16:10.440 I think so

01:16:11.980 and I'll ask him 1.00

01:16:13.220 less stupid questions 1.00

01:16:14.140 because I've now been 1.00

01:16:15.060 informed by you. 0.98

01:16:15.880 They weren't stupid. 1.00

01:16:16.780 You said they were stupid. 1.00

01:16:18.000 Yes, because they were. 1.00

01:16:18.900 No, this is good.

01:16:19.800 He needs the ego

01:16:21.180 to be checked.

01:16:21.620 This never happens.

01:16:23.180 It's always me

01:16:24.320 making fun of Francis

01:16:25.300 for mistakes

01:16:26.360 that he actually makes

01:16:27.500 justly so.

01:16:28.720 It's all good.

01:16:29.580 So I'm happy

01:16:30.060 to take this one

01:16:30.880 and learn from

01:16:32.100 this experience.

01:16:32.880 But anyway,

01:16:33.640 Conflicted,

01:16:34.360 absolutely brilliant podcast.

01:16:35.640 Check it out, guys.

01:16:36.640 Are you on Twitter yourself

01:16:37.960 or the podcast?

01:16:38.680 I am on Twitter.

01:16:39.240 I'm not the most

01:16:39.800 active Twitter user.

01:16:40.760 I actually think 1.00

01:16:41.460 Twitter is pretty stupid. 1.00

01:16:42.680 So do I, but we use it very actively. 0.99

01:16:45.480 So why didn't you tell us your Twitter handle just in case?

01:16:48.080 I think it's at smallthom, T-H-O-M like Thomas, at smallthom, I think.

01:16:53.120 Yeah, cool.

01:16:53.660 Well, we'll put it in the video. 0.99

01:16:55.120 As always, follow us on stupid Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at TriggerPod. 0.97

01:17:00.180 Subscribe to the YouTube channel. 0.97

01:17:02.060 Remember that this is also available as a podcast to listen to,

01:17:06.000 as my producer is reminding me right now by just sitting there.

01:17:09.480 And as always, subscribe to the YouTube channel.

01:17:12.260 as I said

01:17:12.780 give us an iTunes review

01:17:14.000 if you enjoy this episode

01:17:15.800 subscribe to us on Patreon

01:17:17.400 or give us money

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01:17:18.680 it allows us to

01:17:19.520 continue to do the show

01:17:20.720 and also

01:17:21.580 if you've got any ideas

01:17:22.560 of how to solve ISIS

01:17:23.640 give us a tweet

01:17:24.620 and on that note

01:17:26.860 we'll see you next week

01:17:28.100 bye bye

01:17:28.260 see you in a week time

01:17:28.940 bye

01:17:42.260 We'll be right back.

TRIGGERnometry - September 15, 2019

Can We Stop Terrorism and What Do Islamists Want？

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