00:00:00.000Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantin Kissin. And this is a
00:00:09.860show for you if you're bored with people arguing on the internet over subjects they know nothing
00:00:14.700about. At Trigonometry, we don't pretend to be the experts, we ask the experts. Our brilliant
00:00:20.820guest this week is an author, filmmaker, and co-host of The Conflicted podcast, Thomas Small.
00:00:26.320Welcome to Trigonometry. Thanks for having me. Nice to be here.
00:00:28.920It 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?
00:00:35.040Well, I don't know that. You guys called me up, which I'm very pleased that you did.
00:00:38.740I'm Thomas Small. I'm American originally, though I've lived in England for about, well, in Europe for 19 years.
00:04:22.440I 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.
00:04:34.920So the Middle East is extremely enormous.
00:04:58.080There are all sorts of people, all sorts of religions, not just Muslims.
00:05:01.140Within Islam, there are so many different sects.
00:05:03.160So 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.
00:05:18.660that's where actually more and more the power is. And certainly when it comes to the way the Gulf
00:05:25.140perceives America, they tend and have always tended to perceive America very positively
00:05:31.320because it is, America is a great ally of theirs. They are a great ally of America.
00:05:37.980America's military umbrella has always protected the Gulf states from aggression during the Cold
00:05:46.660war, aggression from various Russian kind of moves within the Middle East, and now in
00:05:52.660their minds from Iran, which for them is the greatest, the greater threat. During the Obama
00:05:57.800period, the Gulf relationship became quite strained with America because Obama adopted
00:06:02.900a different, a new foreign policy pivoted towards Iran and wished to bring Iran out
00:06:07.720from the cold, in from the cold. And he negotiated the atomic treaty, you know, the atomic bomb
00:06:15.880treaty with them, which Trump has recently canceled, which, and so now the Gulf are sort
00:06:21.100of more, they're happier with Trump than they were with Obama, for sure.
00:06:24.760The average, like, Middle Easterner on the ground, you know, again, you gotta, you can
00:15:48.720I think a lot of my Middle Eastern friends say that.
00:15:53.860Certainly they say, you know, I mean, I have an Egyptian friend who, when the Arab Spring
00:15:58.380happened, which then at first ushered in a Muslim Brotherhood government, which was seen
00:16:03.800as threatening to some actors there and other actors who then sponsored a coup and returned
00:16:10.260a military dictator to power. I have an Egyptian friend who said, that's right, that's what
00:16:14.900we need. Egyptians can only be governed with an iron fist. An Iraqi friend says the same
00:16:20.260thing about Iraq. Iraqis have always been dominated by a strong man for 5,000 years.
00:16:25.840That's how it's run. They need one. We're crazy. That's what they say. I don't necessarily
00:16:30.620know if it's inevitable that those polities need to be run in an authoritarian way. It certainly
00:16:36.620is the case. I mean, I also think that there's a narrative which says that the countries of
00:16:44.340the Middle East were invented by the European colonial powers in an almost arbitrary way.
00:16:53.280This narrative is grossly exaggerated. It's not really true. I mean, most of the,
00:16:58.320And if you look at the infamous Sykes-Picot agreement and the map that they kind of drew,
00:17:04.460it actually isn't equivalent to the map as it exists in the Middle East today.
00:17:09.400People don't often recognize that fact because a lot of historical research has proved beyond a shadow of a doubt
00:17:15.380that when the Ottoman Empire, which ruled over that region for 400 years, collapsed following the First World War
00:17:23.040and there was a great scramble by the colonial powers to stamp their control over that region,
00:17:28.320They 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.
00:17:47.420And 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.
00:17:59.000And more or less, the borders correspond to Ottoman provinces.
00:18:02.740So 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.
00:18:12.900We played a role. There's no question we played a role.
00:18:15.240But what we're really seeing is the after effects of the collapse of a massive empire.
00:18:23.260It's 100 years ago now that it happened, but the consequences are with us.
00:18:26.840When a huge centralized, well-established, efficiently run for a lot of its history empire collapses, what happens?
00:18:36.420What kind of politics does that give rise to?
00:18:39.680What kind of leaders come to the fore?
00:18:43.080You know, in the case of the Middle East, military ones, authoritarians, kings, authoritarian kings, absolute monarchs, you know.
00:18:49.760So I guess my point was less about blaming the West necessarily.
00:18:54.000But, for example, the Soviet Union collapsed.
00:18:56.300And because it contained within it, broadly speaking, countries which were consistent in terms of ethnicity, in terms of language, etc.
00:19:06.420So Lithuania and Latvia and Estonia didn't need to have, you know, a massive war or any disputes.
00:19:11.740There were some conflicts regionally between different countries.
00:19:14.980But broadly speaking, those countries kind of made sense.
00:19:17.820Whereas 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.
00:20:14.940It is the consequence of the collapse of that arrangement and the introduction into the region of nationalism, ethno-nationalism,
00:20:22.500which Europeans invented as a kind of political principle, into a region the traditional governing structures of which couldn't cope with it.
00:23:41.780It's a mixture and it's a very uncomfortable mixture.
00:23:44.620I mean, a recent report came out, I can't remember what, but I found it very interesting,
00:23:50.300which basically proves by marshalling a whole amount of evidence that the Iraq War of 2003,
00:23:55.980for example, was not about oil. This is a great myth that oil companies, particularly American
00:24:04.460oil companies, utterly opposed the invasion of Iraq. They totally opposed it. It was not
00:24:10.140not in their interests whatsoever. The neocons that informed the foreign policy of George
00:24:17.920W. Bush didn't care. They actually were obsessed with the idea of bringing democracy to the
00:24:25.300Middle East. I think they were ideologically committed, neoconservative, hyper-liberals.
00:24:32.900They 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.
00:24:45.680A lot of people forget this, that democratic liberalism is a highly evolved, highly complex manufactured form of social governance.
00:25:09.020So that was really what that was about.
00:25:11.720The oil companies, the American oil companies opposed it.
00:25:14.720And following the war, the American oil companies have not profited from it.
00:25:17.560The 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.
00:25:33.800That'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?
00:25:44.900And she was going, well, actually, American companies didn't get any of the oil contracts for the actual oil.
00:25:51.480They got, like, Halliburton got some, like, service loans.
00:25:53.380At the beginning, Halliburton got some.
00:25:59.900The Gulf originally was important geostrategically in the British imperial period because of way stations along the route to India.
00:26:07.200So it was basically, the Gulf is geostrategically important just because of its location.
00:26:13.500It's just along these incredibly important waterways, the Red Sea, the Suez Canal, the Strait of Hormuz on the way into the Indian Ocean.
00:26:20.980So 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.
00:26:31.220The discovery of the world's largest oil and gas supplies increased that importance enormously.
00:26:37.260And so, yes, to some large extent, the Middle East, the actual Gulf,
00:26:42.640the heart of Arabia itself is important because of oil.
00:30:05.540I think he does seem to have this kind of bullish realism in his approach to things.
00:30:13.280Unlike George W. Bush, who was a neocon or at least influenced by neocons, which is an ideologically idealistic point of view.
00:30:22.100Democracy will spread, you know, through military means.
00:30:26.540He'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.
00:30:39.300including Iranian mullahs hell-bent on the destruction of the Israeli state.
00:30:45.020So Trump is more like, well, is Jerusalem effectively the capital of Israel?
00:31:14.460I think that's really what he is doing.
00:31:18.800He 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.
00:31:32.560Netanyahu was reelected to run Israel.
00:31:37.700The Arab states remain ever closer allied with that government to counter Iranian influence.
00:31:45.120Arabs on the street didn't rise up in great, tremendous protests.
00:31:48.920You know, there's Hamas and Israel fight, and they have been fighting recently, and that will continue.
00:31:56.580It just happened, because it's just recognizing facts on the ground, it seems to me.
00:32:01.320So it's essentially a more pragmatic approach, a more world-realistic approach.
00:32:05.240It seems to be a more realistic approach. I mean, it is filtered through a psychology of great wonderment to the average Twitter viewer.
00:32:15.020But there does seem to be something like a realist position informing it.
00:32:19.160And why is it that the left aligns itself so strongly with the Palestinian cause?
00:32:27.420Well, they didn't always, of course, which is interesting.
00:32:31.720Zionism 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.
00:32:56.540The kibbutz movement was communitarian, and Zionism was seen as a kind of utopian, left-leaning movement.
00:33:06.140That changed with time as the situation was reinterpreted,
00:33:11.300that Israel was seen as a colonialist movement, a foreign aggression sponsored by the great Satan, America.
00:33:19.140So in a Cold War context, America is the enemy of the left and supports the right.
00:33:24.480So 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.
00:37:06.560I mean, I am not an expert on the Israeli-Palestinian issue by any means,
00:37:12.380but I think I know enough not to really stand up and wave the flag for either side.
00:37:18.320It's an incredibly complicated, ultimately quite tragic situation
00:37:21.300of a conflict of interests and a conflict of power aims
00:37:25.580and a conflict of nationalisms and religions.
00:37:28.680And, you know, it's extremely complicated.
00:37:30.360Someone 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.
00:37:55.820So I think you just have to, it's complicated and sad.
00:38:00.700The Middle East is complicated and largely sad.
00:38:06.820Guys, we wanted to tell you we're very excited to say we've got a new sponsor, which is HelloFresh.
00:41:44.180I 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.
00:42:00.240It didn't seem like that was on the cards.
00:42:02.000four years later, it began. You know, originally, the episode, I think it's the fifth or fourth,
00:42:12.780fifth episode of our podcast, Conflicted, deals with the Syrian civil war. And Eamon had a lot
00:42:17.820of interesting things to say about it that I didn't know. One of the things he said was that
00:42:21.760the protests that broke out in Syria during the beginning of the Arab Spring, you know, which was
00:42:26.800this much, this region-wide uprising movement, the protests in Syria focused very clearly
00:42:33.020on, essentially, on police brutality in that country.
00:42:38.640It had become de rigueur for the police within Syria to kidnap young 11, 12-year-old boys,
00:42:45.440rape them and deposit them in dumpsters as a way of scaring local populations into behaving.
00:44:03.500And 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.
00:44:16.360Lots 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.
00:44:29.400Sadly, Syria is like the battleground for that in Muslim eschatology.
00:44:34.040So when civil war broke out there, it was a lot of radical Islamist extremist jihadists thought the prophecies are coming true.
00:44:46.000You see, you know, it's all happening in Syria.
00:44:49.000So they kind of piled in, hoping to lure the West into intervening because that's all part of the end of times scenario.
00:44:57.800I mean, in the scenarios, it's the Roman Empire which intervenes, and they think that the Roman Empire just stands for the West.
00:45:04.920Now, 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.
00:45:11.140And they believe the end of times will result in their favor.
00:45:16.000So Syria was to some extent like a sacrifice on the altar of those sorts of religious ideas,
00:45:23.280which is why there were so many Islamist groups.
00:45:27.040Iranian Islamist actors got involved because Iran has the same eschatological sort of ideas
00:45:32.900as the Sunnis that they then started to fight and it became a total mess.
00:45:36.500And then, you know, Turkey got involved obviously because the Kurds were involved and Turkey
00:45:40.900has Kurds and they don't want the Kurds to rebel in Turkey.
00:45:43.660And then because of the Tartus naval base, Russia got involved and then Obama didn't actually respect the red lines he'd drawn.
00:45:54.260So Russia realized, oh, we can just actually fight a war here.
00:45:58.320So they were throwing barrel bombs and bombing neighborhoods and America wasn't doing anything.
00:46:03.840Yeah. So as a result of which, there was tremendous migration away from Syria because who would, you know, want to live there?
00:46:15.480Terrible. 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.
00:46:26.300And a lot of those migrants wanted to get to Europe for safety reasons
00:46:30.920and also like many migrants from everywhere for economic reasons.
00:51:31.540I mean, his father was a tough bastard and a really wily one.
00:51:34.960I think that there was probably something amounting to psychological abuse in his childhood
00:51:40.600by being raised by that kind of a person.
00:51:43.340And I think it's pretty clear that when it became clear that he was going to be the president,
00:51:49.240when it wasn't expected before, his brother, as you said, was going to be.
00:51:52.280I think he was, you know, he was immediately put through rigorous dictator training, which, you know, people have said really changed him.
00:52:03.860I mean, and also you have to see, I mean, the Syrian regime is like a, it's really like a mafia arrangement.
00:52:10.840So Bashar al-Assad is a bit like Michael Corleone in The Godfather.
00:52:14.560You 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.
00:52:22.200He 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.
00:52:30.840The difference is Michael Corleone is a sympathetic character because he actually wants to get out.
00:52:34.540I don't think there is any indication whatsoever that Bashar al-Assad wants to get out, thinks that he's done anything wrong.
00:52:40.700I 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.
00:52:52.200He believed he did that. I suppose, to some extent, he did do that. In the meantime, he destroyed the country.
00:53:57.500It lasted from 2000, the year that he became president, to about 2003, 2004.
00:54:03.360And he did suddenly seem like he was going to be different from his father.
00:54:06.660And he was going to, you know, be warmer to the West and integrated into the global order better.
00:54:11.860But 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.
01:02:13.540So that may be very appealing to some people.
01:02:17.580I mean, it also just appeals to sadists. They exist. There are sadists everywhere, and there are Muslim sadists.
01:02:25.360And if you tell someone, oh, you're a sadist, and in the West they police sadism, why don't you come here?
01:02:30.460We're not policing sadism at all. We're empowering it. You can chop off heads and kill people indiscriminately.
01:02:36.000You know, that's appealing to a sadist.
01:02:38.260Then, you know, there's another group which is more middle class, more educated, because a lot of engineers,
01:02:42.040at the higher levels of these terrorist groups, there are a lot of, like, engineers and mathematicians,
01:02:46.940Because, 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.
01:03:10.560It is not a million miles away from a radical left-wing worldview.
01:03:15.320The kind of people who were like blowing themselves up and killing the czar in the run-up to the Russian Revolution
01:03:21.160and people who were resisting the Nazis and these two sides were fighting.
01:03:40.220Like, 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?
01:06:51.220It doesn't have a supernatural dimension, but it's equally predicated on crazy ideas.
01:06:57.020And 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.
01:07:21.240So let me just finish this line of question, Francis, and the time's almost up.
01:07:25.900What 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.
01:07:50.260I 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.
01:08:02.700I 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.
01:08:16.900I mean, the IRA was more successful at killing more people more frequently
01:08:20.960than Muslim terrorists have been here.
01:08:23.020Well, at least they'd call you up before to give you a bit of a warning.
01:08:27.440So how do you, I mean, I think that along with my friend Eamon,
01:08:32.840you know, the co-host of this podcast, who is a Muslim, a pious Muslim,
01:08:40.140He 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,
01:08:59.820have to preach against them and have to create networks of more liberal,
01:09:09.440more at ease with modernity, imams or preachers or movements, whatever.
01:09:15.220In general, they just need to combat inward, internally, they need to combat the Islamism.
01:09:21.940And I think that that makes sense to me.
01:09:24.560I mean, I grew up, you know, in a pretty liberal form of it,
01:09:28.760but a kind of, you know, evangelical, American, Reagan-voting,
01:09:34.060sort of fundamentalist Christian family.
01:09:37.560But, you know, really much on the liberal side of that, really.
01:09:41.040I mean, I wasn't like a Bible beater or anything.
01:09:43.380But I was associated with such people.
01:09:47.020And sometimes, you know, if you scratch the surface,
01:09:49.200have really strange ideas about America and about Jesus and America and America's destiny in some
01:09:57.760end-time scenario. I was raised to believe that the end times were nigh and that America was going
01:10:03.380to play this big role in it. It's kind of crazy. So how do you combat that idea? Well, you just
01:10:11.980expose people to less crazy ideas and hope that those crazy ideas push out the, those sane ideas