Americans Rail Against Health Insurance Industry After CEO’s Murder; Syria Expert On New Outbreak Of War
After the murder of UnitedHealthcare's CEO, Americans took to social media to express their hatred of the health insurance industry. Glenn dissects the roots of this outrage and why insurance companies' exploitative practices are shielded from scrutiny. Plus, Syria expert Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi discusses the latest outbreak of war in the country.
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight...
In broad daylight in Manhattan earlier today, the CEO of the health insurance giant UnitedHealthcare was fatally gunned down in what was clearly a targeted assassination.
While there's no doubt that this CEO, 50-year-old Brian Thompson, was the deliberate target, essentially nothing is known yet about the killer who remains at large, nor therefore his motive.
Anything is possible from an ideologically motivated assassin to someone aggrieved by this health insurance company to someone driven largely by mental illness or conspiracy theories, a personal motive or anything else.
There's little point in speculating on any of that.
Presumably we will know more at some point about who this individual is and what motivated this killing.
But what is notable, quite striking in fact, It was not exactly that people were celebrating or justifying the killing of this executive, though of course there was some of that.
More notable was the widespread bitterness at this health insurance giant in particular, but even more so the health insurance industry in general.
The internet was awash in sardonic and even pretty bitter comments.
Wondering, for example, whether the ambulance that took the fatally wounded executive to the hospital was included in his insurance network, whether the company would concoct reasons why the attack or the life-saving procedures attempted were somehow excluded from his coverage, the kinds of commentary of people in large numbers, very large numbers, who obviously held extremely negative, borderline,
inhumane interactions with health insurance companies that caused them to react not with empathy or compassion toward hearing a human being who is a father and a husband and son having been murdered, inhumane interactions with health insurance companies that caused them to react not with empathy or compassion toward hearing a human being
Now, as it turns out, the healthcare company of which he was the CEO happens to be the parent company of the private health insurance company that our family has used for 20 years in Brazil until it was sold by this health insurance giant earlier this year.
And we had our own very similar abusive and quite outrageous story, which, though we were far better financially equipped to withstand the most people, makes me understand quite well what the outpouring of anger was today.
Not toward the shooter, But toward the victims industry.
And I want to examine a little bit about why that is.
Then, back in 2011, President Obama authorized the CIA to conduct one of its notorious dirty wars.
This one that had the intention of removing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad from power.
The resulting chaos and violence in that country attracted all sorts of foreign influences and fighters to that country, including the two groups that the U.S. has long declared were its most hated and dangerous enemies, first al-Qaeda and then ISIS.
Yet the United States fought not on the opposite sides of those terrorist groups in Syria, but on the same side, given that both of those groups, as well as the United States and its ally in Israel, sought to remove Assad from power.
And many of the weapons that the CIA ended up shipping to Syria and leaving there ended up in the hands of the exact terrorist groups that we had spent the last decade reconstructing much of our political life and just deconstructing our civil liberties in the name of combating.
The situation in Syria has been more or less stable until the last couple of weeks when suddenly several of those foreign fighting groups, which the United States still characterizes as terrorist organizations, made major and rapid advancements in seizing key Syrian territory, including cities such made major and rapid advancements in seizing key Syrian territory, including cities such as Aleppo, Assad's allies, including Russia and Iran, are now mobilizing to try and stop these advances, but the picture remains quite unclear.
Why did this violence happen now?
What is the likely outcome of it?
What are the risks of this kind of a war exploding?
To help us understand and sort through all of this, we will be speaking to Ayman Jawad Al-Tamimi, who is a well-known scholar on Syria and an often cited expert on the region, who will help us understand what this outbreak of violence means and what is behind it.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
The CEO of one of the planet's largest health insurance giants was murdered in cold blood on the streets of Manhattan very early this morning when he was preparing to attend a long-scheduled conference of investors and other associates of his company.
And it was clear that the assassin knew exactly who he was, waited for many people to pass by until his target, the CEO of this company, appeared.
And then he then gunned him down in cold blood.
Here from ABAP News earlier today from the Associated Press, you see the headline, UnitedHealthcare CEO was fatally shot in a, quote, targeted attack outside of a New York hotel, officials say.
Brian Thompson, 50, was shot around 6.45 a.m., As he walked alone to the New York Hilton Midtown from a nearby hotel, police said.
The shooter appeared to be lying in wait for several minutes before approaching Thompson from behind an opening fire, New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said.
Police have not yet established a motive.
Quote, many people passed the suspect, but he appeared to wait for his intended target, Tisch said, adding that the shooting, quote, does not appear to be a random act of violence.
Surveillance video reviewed by investigators shows the shooter emerging from behind a parked car, stopping and pointing a gun at Thompson's back, holding it with two hands and firing multiple times from several feet away.
The suspect continues firing, interrupted by a brief gun jam, as Thompson stumbles forward and falls to the sidewalk.
From watching the video, it does seem that he's proficient in the use of firearms, as he was able to pretty clearly...
It's clear that malfunctions pretty quickly, New York Police Department Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenney said.
NBC News found this tidbit that seems to be revealing, the title of which is Brian Thompson's wife, said that threats had been made against UnitedHealthcare's CEO before the shooting.
Thompson's wife, Paulette Thompson, told NBC News that the executive told her, quote, there were some people that had been threatening him.
She said she didn't have details but suggested that those threats may have been involved with issues with insurance coverage, meaning presumably that people who thought that they had health insurance coverage and were paying premiums to this health insurance giant ended up being denied coverage in a way they thought was unfair.
Oftentimes that can make people face the prospect of financial ruination.
It can add to a great deal of stress at a time when they or their family are facing some sort of serious illness and it generates a lot of anger, which is why this industry in particular is one of the most hated in the United States.
For those of you interested in watching A surveillance video that actually shows the shooting.
It shows it pretty vividly.
So if you don't like to see this kind of graphic violence, you should look away.
It's just about 22 seconds long.
But their video makes quite clear, very, very clear, that this is not a robbery.
It's not a botched assault.
It's an extremely directed, intentional assassination of a person for whom the killer was waiting.
And here you see on the video exactly what those news outlets were describing.
So there you see the shooter in a very calm, quite intentional way.
I would almost describe it as professional, pulling out a gun that is aimed directly at the person whom he's seeking to kill.
He puts no other civilians or anyone else in risk.
He walks right up to him, continues to shoot him until he's on the ground, until he's dead.
And that is why there seems to be little doubt that this was a targeted assassination.
And then you see the shooter leaving online.
I lived in Manhattan.
I know exactly where this Hilton is.
It's basically in the middle of Midtown.
It's a gigantic hotel right on, if I recall correctly, 50th and 51st Street and 7th Avenue.
actually looked quite closely to it.
So it is a shooting, I wouldn't say in broad daylight, since it seems to be about 6.30 a.m., although certainly the streets of Manhattan are starting to be full at that time.
And the fact that the executive was there for a scheduled and publicly announced conference that is held each year for UnitedHealth Group gave added weight to the obvious theory that this person was looking to murder the CEO of UnitedHealth Healthcare Group.
And even though the motive is unknown, the actual act and the intentionality of the shooter seems to be extremely clear.
Now, it's very difficult sometimes to talk about the reaction of, quote, the so-called internet, because the internet is so gigantic That you can always find pretty much anything that you look hard enough to find.
Anytime anybody is killed, you can find expressions of celebration or happiness or people being deliberately cruel, especially while hiding behind the anonymity.
It doesn't really say much about anything, given that the internet is large enough that, as I said, you can find every kind of reaction to pretty much every event.
But in this case, it wasn't just a kind of hand-picked, selective, stray group of commentators who were reacting in a certain way.
It was a very significant, immediate, and visceral reaction that wasn't really so much about celebrating the death of this person who really very few people outside of this industry had even heard of.
It wasn't really any sense that some sort of blow for justice had been struck.
No one thinks that the healthcare industry, no matter how much you hate it, is going to be destabilized in any way.
Obviously there's going to be some other executive immediately replacing the CEO. It's not going to have any real effect on the industry itself.
But what was so striking about it is that, you know, I generally believe that most people are psychologically healthy, which means that when they see somebody being shot down, gunned down with no provocation, their immediate instinct is to feel some degree of empathy and sadness for that person.
And it turns out he's married, he has children, he's a...
Therefore, a father and a spouse and a parent and a son to his parents, both of whom I believe are still alive as well.
So there's obviously a human tragic element to this in the sense that there are people who are going to be grieving, who know this person, who are colleagues of him, etc.
But for most people who don't think of him as a person about whom they're grieving...
He became a symbol of the health insurance industry that polls have long shown people have a great deal of visceral hatred for.
And it immediately became apparent based on the reaction, as I said, not of stray comments, but of a large-scale sector of internet sentiment, not on the right or the left, but across the political spectrum, that was really quite sardonic in its critique of the healthcare industry.
Here is the Facebook page of UnitedHealth Group, the company that he led, and here's their announcement.
Quote, we are deeply saddened and shocked at the passing of our dear friend and colleague, Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare.
Brian was a highly respected colleague and friend to all who work with him.
We are working closely with the NYPD and we ask for your patience and understanding.
During this difficult time our hearts go out to Brian's family and all who are close to him.
So a very sort of standard corporate statement that expresses all the right sentiments.
And yet, you had a great deal of reaction underneath the Facebook page, and I forgive all of you because it's certainly true for myself if you've forgotten that Facebook exists, let alone how it works, but typically after a Facebook posting, When people comment, there's different emojis they can use to express particular emotions in response to those comments.
Facebook tallies, a running tally of how many different people are choosing each particular emoji.
And here you see there were 8,400...
Responses to this official announcement from this company, a very, as I said, kind of standard announcement, absolutely nothing offensive or provocative about it.
And of those 8,400, the vast majority, 5,500, shows this emoji that's basically a laughing emoji.
People just kind of expressing some sort of glee or happiness about the fact that This person was gunned down.
And again, I don't think this was focused on the individual himself.
No one knew who he was really.
No one felt any particular animosity toward him.
The animosity is being directed toward the health insurance industry itself for reasons that I think are really worth exploring.
There's about a thousand people who used a tearful emoji.
Another thousand people who used some sort of strange one and then some people who gave a thumbs up.
But clearly the overwhelming response both here and everywhere I saw on the internet was this sort of Expression of some kind of sense of justice that had been achieved, given how much suffering and cruelty this industry represents to so many people.
Just to give you a sense of the kind of reaction beyond just the emojis when people are actually being able to express themselves.
As I said, it wasn't the kind of celebration of death or killing that you often see if some particularly hated figure is murdered or if they died and people celebrated.
That really wasn't the ethos.
It was more, as I said, a kind of very pervasive and strongly felt anger toward the industry itself.
So here were just a couple of representative comments that appeared on TikTok of the sorts of things that I saw over and over and showed people with whom I work and other people who observed this as well.
Here was one person who said, quote, I'm sorry, prior authorization is required for thoughts and prayers, meaning...
The second commenter said, The third commenter said, was his trip to the ER really an emergency?
According to his own company, my husband's heart attack wasn't actually an emergency, and we were out $3,000, the full deductible, so a personal grievance against his company.
Where presumably the woman's husband had an emergency and somehow the health insurance company to whom they were paying premiums took the position that it wasn't covered as an emergency and they ended up having to spend $3,000 on top of dealing with the stress, the obvious stress of dealing with a heart attack.
Here's the fourth type of comment, the fourth user quote.
It's crazy what my first thought was when I saw this news event and then I looked at all these comments and realized I'm not alone in my thoughts.
And I think this is exactly the sort of thing that no matter where you look, you saw.
Here's a user on Twitter on X earlier today whose reaction was UnitedHealthcareCEO denied access to this life.
Another user said to the person who just got the UnitedHealthCEO outside the Hilton Hotel, did you know there are other CEOs?
The liberal commentator, the left liberal commentator, Ken Klippenstein, observing all of this, said, quote, And then here was CBS News reporting on an article, and I believe this was cited by Tim Poole as well, who is generally associated with the right, and had a very similar reaction.
When he heard about this, he posted an article that essentially was along these lines.
UnitedHealth uses faulty AI to deny elderly patients medically necessary coverage, lawsuit claims.
And the article, which was from 2023, said the following, quote, Overriding determinations made by the patient's physicians that the expenses were medically necessary.
Quote, the elderly are prematurely kicked out of facilities nationwide or forced to deplete family savings to continue to receiving necessary medical care.
All because UnitedHealth's AI model, quote, disagrees with their real-life doctor's determinations, according to the complaint.
Here from ProPublica, just a couple of days ago, was an article headline, How UnitedHealth's Playbook for Limiting Mental Health Coverage Puts Countless Americans' Treatment at Risk.
Quote, For years it was a mystery.
Seemingly out of the blue, therapists would feel like they'd tripped some invisible wire and became a target of UnitedHealth Group.
A company representative with the Orwellian title, quote, Care Advocate, Would call and grill them about why they'd seen a patient twice a week or weekly for six months.
And case after case, United would refuse to cover care, leaving patients to pay out of pocket or go without it.
The severity of their issues seemed not to matter.
Around 2016, government officials began to pry open United's black box.
They found that the nation's largest health insurance conglomerate had been using algorithms to identify providers that determined were giving too much therapy and patients that believed were receiving too much care.
Then the company scrutinized their cases and cut off reimbursements.
By the end of 2021, United's algorithm program had been deemed illegal in three states, but that has not stopped the company from continuing to police mental health care with arbitrary thresholds and cost-driven targets.
ProPublica found after reviewing what is effectively the company's internal playbook for limiting and cutting therapy expenses, the insurer's strategies are still very much alive, putting countless patients at risk of losing mental health care.
Optum, its subsidiary that manages its mental health care coverage, is taking aim at those who give or get, quote, unwarranted treatment, flagging patients who receive more than 30 sessions in eight months.
The insurer estimates its, quote, outlier management strategy will contribute to savings of up to $52 million, according to the company's documents, meaning a crucial part of their profit plan is to take people who have been paying them premiums,
In anticipation of a moment when they unexpectedly might need health coverage, physical or mental health care coverage, And they use deliberately overly broad AI programs or other mechanisms to deny people coverage that their own physicians attest that they actually need,
leaving them with the choice of either facing financial difficulties, if not financial destruction, or being without the crucial physical and mental health care that their own physicians tell them that they absolutely need.
A separate ProPublica expose from February of last year, the headline of which was UnitedHealthcare tried to deny coverage to a chronically ill patient.
He fought back exposing the insurer's inner workings.
Now, let me just tell you a little bit of a personal experience that I've had to explain to you why I found so much resonance in this reaction.
Obviously, it goes about saying, I hope, that none of this is to justify the targeting of the killing of executives of these health insurance companies.
We don't even know if that was part of the motive.
We have no idea if anger toward these companies ideologically or personally was part of it.
So obviously I'm not in any way justifying what was done.
What instead I'm doing is trying to evaluate why it would be that the internet was so full of people looking at a story that by all accounts is tragic.
Just somebody who's an executive in a company walking on the street, minding his own business and getting gunned down in cold blood.
Usually people would just immediately empathize at least with that, would sort of condemn the violence.
But in this case, the overwhelming, visceral, immediate response was one of great anger toward the health insurance company and therefore a kind of bitter mockery of exactly what this health insurance industry is all about.
And polls have long shown that there are few industries held in lower esteem and greater contempt than the health insurance industry.
And I think this incident, not just the incident itself, the killing, but the reaction to it, is an opportunity to understand why.
So, as it turns out, this company, this healthcare giant, is the parent company of the private healthcare insurance carrier that my family has used for almost 20 years in Brazil.
Both my husband and I, despite being young and healthy, have long paid very high premiums to ensure maximum coverage.
Not because we expected to ever get ill but because we know that in life you can never plan for those sorts of things that it's very possible and you want to make sure that if you encounter a catastrophic illness or an accident That you won't be faced with the choice of either having to deny coverage medical care to yourself or if you have to get medical care coverage that you can't afford having to face financial
ruination.
That's the whole point of why you pay High premiums to health insurance companies.
And once we had kids, we put the kids on the program, the price went up even further, and we've been paying very high health premiums, very high premiums for private health insurance in Brazil that works very similar to the United States.
In fact, the health insurance company we were using was owned by UnitedHealth until they sold it about eight months ago.
So the whole time we were using it, it was owned by this company.
And for all those years they profited on us.
We were young and healthy.
We barely ever needed coverage.
Occasionally we went to the doctor or to the ER for a very quick and fleeting reason.
Very cheap and there was coverage and they paid for it without the slightest problem.
Which is usually how it works.
And it's not until you actually need real coverage, real health insurance coverage, because you suddenly have an illness or an accident that requires a great deal of care and therefore medical expense to they start concocting reasons why, even though it's completely false, they have some because you suddenly have an illness or an accident that requires a great deal of care and therefore medical
And that's exactly what happened to my family when my husband ended up with a very serious illness that required his going to the emergency room in August of 2022, getting admitted to the ICU where he spent nine months battling for his life, having a nightmare for our family,
About a month into it, we learned that the health insurance company that we had been paying premiums to for 20 years, owned by UnitedHealthcare, had somehow decided that they were not in fact responsible for paying for the cost of his hospitalization.
And that hospital is one that we had been used in the past that they paid for.
There was a whole, long, lengthy, legalistic reason that they concocted and invented as to why there was no coverage.
This is obviously an experience that happens to so many people, which is why they hate these health insurance industries.
Because it's not just that they deliberately screw you over.
They choose the worst, most vulnerable time in your life when you have a catastrophic illness in your family.
When they suddenly place on top of the emotional difficulty of dealing with that, the prospect of financial destruction.
Now, what ends up happening is that you rely on the hospital.
You're obviously, the only thing you care about is not the money.
You only care about the health of the person in your family.
And so the hospital will then come to you once the insurance company denies coverage and will force you to sign a contract where you assume responsibility, you admit responsibility personally for all of the costs thus far incurred and that will be incurred into the future.
As a result of your healthcare company denying you covered it at the moment, all you care about is making sure that your loved one gets the best treatment possible so you'll sign anything.
It's basically like putting a gun to your head, especially if, as was the case in our family, he can't be moved to another hospital.
And so we ended up signing something assuming all financial responsibility requiring us to pay a very large sum of money every month until this multi-million dollar cost was ended up being paid.
And the whole time I wasn't particularly worried in part because we had the fortune of being able to endure those high costs that most families would never have been able to spend.
I knew that eventually we were going to sue the insurance company and we were going to win and get coverage.
We also had the backup that my husband was part of Congress and therefore entitled to reimbursement of medical expenses that we incurred based on that as well.
So in the context of the emotional horror of what was happening, the financial aspect of it never registered.
But after he spent nine months in the ICU, eventually he did not survive.
He ended up dying in the hospital.
Obviously, it took several months to care about anything other than the grief and the mourning of that.
Once I actually began to focus on what had happened, that we had spent 20 years paying very high health premiums for exactly this purpose, Only for them at the exact moment that they know that you are most vulnerable and devastated and incapable of fighting against anything and they invent reasons why somehow this coverage that had always applied to that hospital and this type of care suddenly doesn't any longer.
Knowing that you're powerless to do anything, especially at that moment, once I began focusing on that, I started getting extremely angry about it.
And again, we were lucky enough that we weren't facing financial destruction.
We were able to hire lawyers.
We have the backup policy of his membership in Congress guaranteeing it.
it.
But for most families, if they were in that situation, they would never have been able to pay anything remotely like what we were forced to pay every month just to ensure the hospital continued to treat him, let alone the multi-million dollar bill that continues to linger.
And we've since sued the insurance company.
We've won in the first couple of phases.
Our lawyers say there's no chance that the insurance company will have any hope of winning.
Clearly, the coverage applies, and that's what makes it so enraging, is that they purposely deny you coverage knowing that they, in fact, are responsible.
Because even in the best case scenario where you can hire good lawyers, it takes so long to work its way through the court system.
In the meantime, you're having to pay this money or you're out of pocket for this money and need it.
Or just knowing that how much time and energy is going to pass by and the risk that you might lose at the end is Eventually means that they will get you to accept some kind of deal where they say we'll only pay 80% and not the 100% that we're required to under the policy you've been paying for for the last 20 years,
which means you'll end up eating 15-20% of that cost that is rightfully theirs simply to make sure that you don't face financial destruction by risking a court ruling that for some reason might conclude that they're not in fact responsible.
It is something that is really quite devastating.
And although, as I said, we were lucky enough where I've never really had to confront the possibility of financial ruination because of this nine-month ICU stay, that's only because we're very fortunate compared to most other people.
And I'm not trying to be a saint about it, but I've spent a long time thinking about what it must be like for other families to have faced the same horror and destruction And just emotional devastation of going through that kind of a healthcare crisis within your own family very unexpectedly.
And then to on top of that, even though you think you're insured because you've been paying premiums to a health insurance company for 20 years, on top of that, be faced with the very likely possibility of bankruptcy.
Or having your entire financial security for yourself and your family wiped out because these companies decide, these health insurance companies are constructed to purposely deny coverage at the very moment that you actually need it.
That's why there's so much hatred through this pharmaceutical industry.
And for people who are even less economically fortunate, they end up having to beg and plead every time they need to see a doctor to convince the health insurance company that it's necessary.
As that woman said, my husband had a heart attack and they decided to characterize it as a non-emergency and refused to cover it on that basis.
Here from Gallup in 2019, the title is Big Pharma Sinks to the Bottom of the U.S. Industry Rankings.
Quote, the pharmaceutical industry is now the most poorly regarded industry in Americans' eyes, ranking last on a list of 25 industries that Gallup tests annually.
Americans are more than twice as likely to rate the pharmaceutical industry negatively, 58%, as positively, 27%, giving it a net positive score of negative 31.
The restaurant industry is rated most positively.
And needless to say, and by the way, we can go back to this chart here as well, just to kind of underscore that of all the different companies that people hate and that connive to deny coverage at the time when people are most desperate for it, when their health is at risk or when their family's health are at risk.
Let's go back to that chart here.
Here you see claim, this is from Value Penguin, a study in May of this year, claim denial rates by insurance companies.
And it shows what percentage of claims are most frequently denied by each of these large health insurance companies.
And the company that denies the least amount of claims, only 7%, is Kaiser Permanente.
It's followed by Oscar and Ambetter at 12 and 14%.
The industry average is 16%.
So the industry average is they deny 16% of claims.
Here you see UnitedHealthcare.
Whose CEO was targeted, again, for reasons we don't know, but again, I'm commenting on the reaction to this happening.
They are dead last.
They deny one third of all claims that are made by people who are their customers, by people who have been paying premiums.
Is it actually difficult to understand why there was so much outpouring of bitterness and anger?
Again, not toward this individual person but the reaction when they hear that the CEO of a health industry giant, the one at the bottom of the list, People who connive or companies that connive most frequently to deny coverage at the time that you're most desperate when your health is at risk or the health of a loved one is at risk and then they put you through not just the health anxiety and stress or worse but the financial destruction as well.
And then, obviously, at the same time that they do that, when they're hated by the public, they're flooding our political system with all sorts of donations to make sure that none of their abuses are ever really curbed.
Hear from Open Secrets, which does an excellent job of bringing transparency to the flow of money through our politics.
If you look at the contributions of the United Health Group, there you see at the top, United Health Group, This is the amount of money that they've contributed and poured into the political system since 1990, $34 million.
But then on top of that, they spend $100 million on lobbying since 1998. So they're paying all sorts of former staffers, members of Congress, regulators, people who have influence in Washington, So you can have the public hating these companies and this company in particular as much as it wants,
but because of how our political system works, because they pour huge amounts of money into the swamp of Washington, as Donald Trump called it, then nothing ever gets done.
They end up protected and shielded in our political system.
And I think one of the reasons why RFK Jr.'s candidacy and his frontal attack on the health care system in general resonated so much is because people's personal experiences we all eventually have Health care emergencies in our family,
even if it's not of the unexpected catastrophic kind, we have parents who go through that, we have ourselves who eventually have to go through that, or good friends of ours, or other people in our family.
Most people end up dealing with health insurance companies and the health care system, and when it's constructed, In a way that sacrifices your health and that exploits you at the most vulnerable time simply for corporate profit, of course people are going to have a level of hatred for this industry unlike anything else because unlike other types of industry that you might hate,
the airlines or other types of insurance company, when you're dealing with matters of life and death, people health, and then at the same time you have this company that's jerking you around or doing much worse, I don't really think it's surprising,
even if it may not be noble or commendable, that when people hear of the killing of the CEO of one of the largest and one of the worst and most abusive healthcare giants, health insurance giants,
I think it shows a great deal of insight as well as to why these kinds of radical critiques of Washington institutions, of the regulatory scheme that RFK frequently talks about, has been captured by health insurance companies, why that has resonated so much.
And obviously, Nobody should support or cheer for or be happy about the murder of this particular executive, but given that it happened, perhaps it can bring some attention to why the reaction has been what it has been, been and that reaction hopefully can lead to some light being shined on these abuses and the reason these companies have been protected for so long.
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Dr. Eamon Al-Tamimi is an Associate Fellow at the International Center for the Study of Radicalization and Political Violence.
He has extensive experience analyzing both Syria as well as Middle East politics, jihadist movements, and the Islamic State.
His work spans We're good to go.
Primarily the seemingly unexpected outbreak and continuously escalating violence that is taking place in Syria that is consuming large parts of Syrian territory and is now drawing in quite predictably the role of some of the regional powers as well as the United States.
And it's a complex situation.
It's a changing situation.
And we are happy to Have him here to help us sort through what is a complicated situation.
It's great to see you.
Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us tonight.
Well, thank you, Glenn.
It's a pleasure to be speaking to you.
And I remember actually many years ago you shared a detailed study I did of Israel's relations with insurgents in southern Syria.
So it's nice to revisit Syria after so many years with you.
Absolutely.
As I said, you are a scholar, somebody who has been cited a long time, including by myself in some of the writing that I've done as well, and I remember that as well.
So it's great to have you on the show.
All right.
Let's talk about what has happened, because it seems like it certainly took...
The Syrian government and its principal allies in Iran and Russia, by surprise, just based on how ill-prepared they seemed to be for the advancement of these troops.
I'm wondering whether you agree with that assessment that it sort of came out of the blue in an unexpected way, and if so, what was the proximate cause?
So, I was initially thinking that, yes, they'd just somehow been completely taken by surprise.
A fighter who had worked with the Iranians in Syria and stationed on the Aleppo Front, he told me the attack was expected, but not of this size.
Are you just saying that to make me to somehow cover for your failure?
But actually, if you look at Arabic language reporting that was local Arabic language reporting that was going through from October through to early November, there were actually multiple reports that talked about the possibility of the insurgents launching the offensive.
And on the Syrian government side and its allies, They must have, of course, read these reports, they must have heard about this, and they did, to be fair, send some reinforcements and try to prepare in some way for this possibility.
But I don't think, I think they very, if so, then they very severely underestimated the scale of the insurgent attack, and I think probably didn't take seriously the possibility, could just really go right through all the way to Aleppo City.
And really, with the fall of Aleppo city itself, and that came as a surprise to its residents, by the way, if you ask them.
I mean, that, I think, induced a very big shock to morale, and it's almost a bit like what happened in Mosul in Iraq in 2014, when the Islamic State blitzed through to that city, and then very rapidly other areas started falling under their control in the northwest of Iraq.
So I guess there's a lot of questions that arise out of that.
And it's an important situation because it relates to so many of the ongoing conflicts there as well as the role of the United States.
But I guess perhaps the most important question is if The Syrians are able to get their act together, the Syrian army, and both Russia and Iran, obviously already consumed by and a little bit weakened by their own ongoing conflicts, are able to give the Syrians the kind of aid they've been able to give them in the past.
Do you expect the Syrian government to be able to contain and even roll back these advancements, or is there a real chance that this insurgency is now sufficiently fortified, that they're sufficiently organized, that they could pose a real threat to the Assad regime?
Well, I think the issue is that the insurgency now, I mean, it took advantage of what was a frozen conflict since 2020 to regroup, reorganize its capabilities, graduate new contingents of fighters, develop new technology, particularly with the use of drones.
So it is a much more difficult fighting force to take on than before.
In contrast, in 2020, it really was on the verge of collapse had Turkey not intervened in northwest Syria by bringing in thousands of troops.
I think if they could get their act together and organize a regroup and the Russians and Iranians could step up their support, It is possible.
I think they could stall the advances, at least in the Hama province further south, because right now the city of Hama is itself under threat from being taken by the insurgents.
The insurgents never took it during the war.
But being able to really roll back at this rate, I'm a bit skeptical, but...
At the very same time, I also want to emphasize that even with the loss of Hama, this isn't outright the end of the Syrian government.
Just as it was a big exaggeration, I think, to say that Baghdad was on the verge of the fall of the Islamic State in 2014, it's not as though the insurgents are on the verge of rolling right through it to Damascus, the capital.
So it's been some very big losses, but it's not over yet.
The Syrian government's allies are very determined not to give up on this fight.
So the word you've been choosing to describe the forces that are advancing against the Syrian government is our insurgents.
And it's kind of a neutral term, I think, because the narrative in the West, in the United States, when it comes to Syria, from the beginning, And even to this day continues to be that, oh, what's actually happening is that the Syrian people are facing this brutal dictator whom they've hated for a long time,
both his father and himself, and a major part of the quote-unquote insurgency is driven by Syrians who just want to overthrow their brutal dictator.
Now, even people who cling to that Nice fairy tale will acknowledge that a lot of the most effective fighting forces in Syria, the anti-Assad fighting forces, are clearly not just citizens uprighting, but they're very well organized, they're very well armed, they're very well financed, and a lot of them are foreign fighters.
So can you give us your best description of when you are referring to the insurgency?
Who exactly are we talking about here?
Yeah, so it's a variety of groups, but if we're talking about this particular push in northwest Syria, then it is led by this group called Heya Tahrir al-Sham, which ultimately in its origin goes back to Islamic State of Iraq, which helped form this Jebhat al-Nusra in Syria.
But then in 2013 goes and declares itself an Al-Qaeda affiliate, clearly to avoid being subsumed by Islamic State of Iraq under its ISIS expansion maneuver.
And then in 2017 it forms this Heya Tahir al-Sham, which to be fair does mark the breaking of links with Al-Qaeda, but at the same time The brand of Islam that this group espouses is broadly Salafi.
But more problematic, I think, particularly from the international community's perspective, our presence is the presence of foreign fighter contingents within this Tahrir HaSham.
I'm not saying they're the majority, but they are very notable within the organization.
So you have a contingent of Uzbeks in the group, you have a contingent of Maldivians, you have a contingent of Albanians.
We have a contingent of Tajiks and other Central Asians.
And of course, one of the Tahir al-Sham's important allies in this offensive is a group called the Turkestan Islamic Party, which is led by Uyghurs who have come to Syria, who were most of them originally, they were refugees in Turkey, and then they crossed over the border.
You do have a variety of other groups as well.
I mean, you do have ones that are more closely bound with Turkey than Tahrir al-Shamis, particularly these groups of what is called the Syrian National Army, some of whom have served as mercenaries for Turkey in conflicts abroad, like in Azerbaijan and in Libya.
And also, actually, more recently in Niger, in the Sahel region.
So, yeah, it's talking more...
I use the term insurgents just as a neutral term and also to reflect, to be fair, that there is some diversity within these and they aren't all just...
They're not all just Islamic State or Al-Qaeda necessarily.
But at the same time, also, I do think that what people often miss, say, who support the insurgency, is that there are communities of Syrians who don't want these insurgents coming into their towns or their localities.
So in the Hama province right now, where the insurgency is pushing towards the city, there are a couple of Christian towns, for example, that have stood by the government throughout the war.
There's a local Sunni town called Kamhana, which is just north of Hama city.
They have firmly stood by the government and they are refusing to surrender to the insurgents.
So people appreciate these nuances a bit more and recognize that, yeah, there are also Syrians who oppose these groups.
And also there are genuinely Syrians who support them as well.
It would actually just make the discussion a lot more mature on social media and elsewhere.
Right.
We can always hope for nuance and complexity on social media, and that's probably a futile aspiration.
But shows like this and discussions like this, I think, are the places that I'm hoping we can have that.
So I want to recognize, and I did in the introduction both when we introduced the actual segment but also at the start of the show, When we talked about how we were going to be having this discussion, that there is complexity in terms of who composes these anti-Assad groups and who's behind them.
At the same time, what has always struck me the most about the American perspective on Syria and the attempt to remove Bashar al-Assad, which of course the United States actively participated in and tried to accomplish under the Obama administration when it unleashed the CIA to do exactly that,
is that if you go back 25 years ago after 9-11, we basically, the United States, radically restructured our entire political life, our sense of basic civil liberties and even conceptions our sense of basic civil liberties and even conceptions of human rights in terms of what we were willing to accept and what had previously been taboo.
And all of this was done in the name of fighting what we were told was the supreme evil, which was Al-Qaeda, which ultimately had, according to our government, been primarily or exclusively responsible for the attack on September 11th. been primarily or exclusively responsible for the attack on September
And then starting about a decade later, we were told that, oh, there's a similar but even a worse group to Al-Qaeda, which is ISIS. And even though we thought we were kind of getting away from Al-Qaeda, we were bored by it, we weren't quite as threatened by it, the emergence of ISIS kind of changed everything.
And yet in Syria...
We found ourselves, essentially, the United States did fighting on the same side, broadly speaking, as those two groups because they had the same goal of removing Bashar al-Assad that the United States had.
And though we weren't exactly fighting arm in arm with them or on their side, a lot of the weapons that we sent into Syria ended up in their hands.
Why is it from the United States perspective or from the Western perspective, and if you look at the prevailing narrative of establishment sectors, there's clearly a kind of celebration, not about Bashar al-Assad trying to vanquish these forces, but on the side not about Bashar al-Assad trying to vanquish these forces, but on the side of these insurgents, many of whom are composed, at least in part, by the groups who were told were the most threatening to
Why does the West seem to be more threatened by the ongoing governance of Bashar al-Assad than by the empowerment and advancement of the terrorist groups that we've been told were by far the most threatening to United States security?
Right.
This is one of the issues with U.S. policy, is that it designates Hayat Ham as a terrorist organization, but yet it actually has actively stopped targeting it, because they felt that, actually, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham did some useful things.
So there were some jihadists in Syria, for example, who did not go with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham's idea of breaking ties of al-Qaeda, and they formed this harasser deen.
And then Heidah Risham cracked down on Horace Dean, not because they thought these guys are too radical.
They thought they were a threat to their hegemonic approach to governing northwest Syria.
And of course, from the U.S. perspective, that was useful.
I mean, the U.S. didn't remove the terrorist designation there.
There are also allegations that Heidah Risham gave some...
One of their leaders gave info to the United States to help them drone al-Qaeda leaders in northwest Syria.
But...
When Heya Tahrir al-Sham was Jabhat al-Nusra and was Al-Qaeda affiliate, essentially the CIA-backed groups, they played second fiddle to Jabhat al-Nusra in helping it take over pretty much all of Idlib province in northwest Syria.
And it was all done in the belief that somehow these gains would force the Syrian government to reconsider and come to the table and agree to a political transition.
What it actually did was it led to the request for direct Russian military intervention in the country.
That has been the case since 2015. And even today, I think, yeah, it is somewhat strange that they keep this terrorist designation on Heya Tahrir Sham, but they don't actually try to do anything against it.
And also, yeah, it does have to be said that in the...
With these insurgent gains in the northwest of Syria, it has to be said that there is also a security risk that arises further east in the country, in the Syrian desert area, where you still have an active Islamic State insurgency.
And they could take advantage to try to, because they've been fighting the Syrian government there for multiple years now.
They could be trying to take advantage of that to make gains against the Syrian government and even to seize territory, perhaps like, for example, the ancient city of Palmyra again.
So that sort of nuance also does need to be acknowledged.
And I think, yeah, sometimes it can be missed within...
It does seem to be missed within some Western advocates for the insurgency more broadly.
But in general, I think also there was a sense of...
There was a lot of sense of, you know, just shifting, opportunistic shifting, right?
In that the insurgency for the support for these CIA-backed groups was justified as a form of pressure against the Syrian government.
And then in a lot of Western policy circles, you saw this talk about we also need to empower these groups to be the counter to Jabhat al-Nusrah within the northwest of Syria.
But they weren't a counter to Jabhat al-Nusrah at all.
What actually ended up happening is that Jebhat Nusra basically completely subsumed these groups under its hegemony and that they accept it as the ruling authority in Northwest Syria today.
And then once the CIA program really came to an end, it all turned to let's now go support the SDF within the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces within the Northeast of the country and work with these guys.
And rather than the insurgency, So there have been a lot of these different contradictions within what Western analysts and policymakers and policy advocates have stated about what should be their policy towards Syria.
And, yeah, now you also have in more recent years this imposition of sanctions against the Syrian government, which have really helped to contribute to deterioration in living standards.
I think with the deterioration of the Syrian currency, the Syrian pound, and you could even see that arguably as a contributing factor to the collapse in that it's induced more corruption and made livelihood harder and I think perhaps made soldiers for the Syrian government less willing to serve on the front lines and incentivize desertion and lack of morale and lack of proper coordination and chain of command.
Yeah, I mean, you know, it's striking how willing and flexible this discourse is about United States enemies for 10 years.
Anything that you read about Ukraine in the Western press before the Russian invasion warned that the greatest danger in Ukraine was this neo-Nazi battalion called the Azov Battalion and that we had to do everything possible to keep weapons out of their hands.
And the minute there's the Russian invasion, And we need to rely upon them to fight and even fund them.
We hear, oh no, they've reformed.
They are no longer neo-Nazis.
They've integrated into the central command of the Ukrainian government.
They hide their Nazi tattoos because it's a little bit, to use your word, opportunistic.
And it seems like there's a little bit of a narrative like that as well.
Like, yeah, these groups used to be offshoots of al-Qaeda.
But they've sort of reformed now, and so we can look upon them more favorably.
And I realize there is some extent to which that may be true.
As you said, some of it may be opportunistic based on who, what these groups need.
But ultimately, the overarching question that I have is this one, which is, and again, I want to just look at it from, for the moment, a United States perspective.
Even though President Obama did authorize the CIA program that proved unsuccessful to remove Assad, he was widely criticized by both parties in Washington, even by Hillary Clinton, who was the Secretary of State, for kind of restraining the CIA, for not letting them really for kind of restraining the CIA, for not letting them really do the sorts of things they felt like they could have done to remove
And ultimately, Obama came to view the Assad government and the Russian government as potential partners in the region when it came to, as I said, jointly targeting al-Qaeda and ISIS organizations jointly targeting al-Qaeda and ISIS organizations that were in Syria, that instead of looking at al-Qaeda and ISIS as our common allies against Assad.
it made more sense, I think Obama concluded, to look at Russia and Syria as our allies against the common enemies with these terrorist organizations.
And then Donald Trump came along and sort of made that more explicit by saying, why is it in the United States' interest to remove the government of Bashar al-Assad?
I'd rather work with Assad and the Assad government in bombing our common enemies, which is ISIS and these terrorist organizations.
And you have Donald Trump and Barack Obama more or less coming to the same conclusion about why the United States maybe not only can live with the Assad regime, but why it would be better and more in the US interest to have the Assad regime there than the alternative.
So why is it that despite that rationale, despite that recognition that came from Obama through Trump, There continues to be this lingering view, apparently, in not just the West but the United States, that it is an important strategic goal to destroy the government of Bashar al-Assad, even though we may not know who might replace it.
What is the strategic interest there for the people who still want that?
I mean, it does ultimately go back to the late 2011, 2012, when the US took this stance and said that Assad must go.
And then they committed to that.
And then initially, I think there was this expectation that perhaps really the insurgency could do that by itself.
There was, after all, a widespread expectation that the government could collapse by the end of 2012. And I heard that from a lot of people at the time, including Actually, Iraq's national security adviser to Prime Minister Nouriel Maliki, former adviser, that is, at the time.
But that didn't happen.
And you did, of course, see the Iranians and Hezbollah initially leading the intervention to prop up and support the Syrian government.
And I think that there was a recognition, really, that really a military intervention, I mean, the ones who were more hardline on it, I think they had some, I think a supposition that was correct that to actually really You would have to go all the way in and overthrow the government militarily.
And then, of course, that obviously raises the question of what would you do after that?
And an issue of, well, you broke it, so you own it, right?
So this is actually why I think then Obama settled on this calibrated pressure strategy, which was Give support to these CIA-vetted groups, put pressure on the government, and hopefully at some point the government will feel the pressure enough to come to the table and negotiate this political transition.
I think, by the way, that was also partly based out of the Libya experience, where you had the overthrow of Qadhafi and you had this anarchy, and today, even today, the splitting of Libya into two rival governments, right?
And Iraq as well, where removing the Saudi Hussein regime was not that difficult, but what came afterwards was.
Oh, no, no.
I fully agree with that.
Yeah, the Iraq experience, I think, also informed Obama's calculations.
That's fair, and thank you for raising that.
So, yeah, the calibrated pressure strategy, though, I think was mistaken because, as I say, when the insurgency made major gains in 2015 by taking over at the province, it did not prompt the government to say, okay, let's go to the table.
That you get the Russians to intervene.
And at the same time, of course, with U.S. policy, you had this issue that Islamic State had taken over much of the east of the country, much of the north of it as well.
And that meant that, you know, there was this counter-IS focus.
Counter-IS became a very big focus of US policy.
And hence this relationship they established with the Kurdish-led People's Protection Units linked to the BKK and then the US helped rebrand as the Syrian Democratic Forces, even though its approach to governance is actually very much a one-faction, hegemonic, authoritarian rule.
It's actually not very different from Heidah Risham's approach of one-faction, hegemonic, authoritarian rule, albeit with a more Salafi twist to it.
So, yeah, U.S. policy is still very much based on this idea that we keep the consensus blob view, as you might call it, has been very much based on we keep up this partnership with the Syrian Democratic Forces, we continue to put pressure on the Syrian government to Yeah, very much helped isolate the country and damage the value of its currency.
And hopefully we can use that as leverage to either to make them agree outright to a political transition or has actually came out quite recently in meteor leaks that apparently the US and the United Arab Emirates have been discussing to lift some of the US sanctions on Syria in the hope that Assad would perhaps turn, would distance himself from Iran.
This, by the way, these talks, they were going on allegedly before this insurgent offensive took place, just for context.
Right.
So, I just want to return, though, to that question, which I guess was most vividly and explicitly articulated by Donald Trump.
Certainly during the 2016 campaign, which was, why is it in the interest of the United States to change the government of Iraq?
If you go and look back at those early parts of the Bush-Cheney War on Terror, they partnered with Assad in a lot of different ways in what they were calling the prosecution of the war on terror, including sending all sorts of terrorist suspects to Syria to including sending all sorts of terrorist suspects to Syria to be interrogated with torture.
That was one of the places we love to send people that we were rendering and picking up and kidnapping to Syria.
The United States government had a relationship with Syria, didn't really like the fact that the Syrians were, quote unquote, interfering in Iraq, even though the United States was sort of interfering in Iraq as well.
But that was the language.
So I understand that there was some tension.
But when you look at the Syrian government, which obviously is not a government of Islamic extremism, quite the contrary, is hostile to Islamic extremism, which is why you see these Islam extremist groups fighting to dislodge Assad, what is it about which is why you see these Islam extremist groups fighting to dislodge Assad, what is it about the Assad regime that makes so many people in the United States perceive it to
Is it just the fact That they're an ally of Iran and removing Assad would weaken Iran despite what might come after that?
Or are there other reasons why so many people in the West seem to think that removing Assad is an important goal?
I mean, when I see people complain morally about the government, I can understand that if you're actually consistent in your moral beliefs.
I mean, if you certainly oppose, say, repressive security apparatuses of other governments in the region, you're actually consistent about that.
Right, but let's just quickly dispense with that, given how happy the United States is with governments as bad, like Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
So, you know, I think you and Russia understand that that's not the reason.
So, what is the reason?
I agree that fundamentally the reason why there's a policy consensus against the There tend to be policy consensus against government.
It's precisely because it is seen as this important ally, when it is, to be fair, an important ally of Iran and the broader, what you might call the resistance axis, principally in acting as a conduit and logistics artery for supply of weapons to Hezbollah.
And, you know, of course, ultimately, a lot of the issue about designation of terrorist groups is groups we don't like.
So that's why Hezbollah gets designated as a terrorist group, because the United States doesn't like what it does in fighting against Israel in the past and now.
So, yeah, it's fundamentally a geopolitical thing rather than actually consistent moral principle.
Yeah.
So Jeffrey Sachs, who's a longtime leading economist for the United States and has participated in economic rescues in many parts of the world and has now become integrated as well into a lot of the foreign policy apparatus, has become a very, very, very vocal critic of U.S. policy in the Middle East.
He regards the U.S.-supported war by Israel in Gaza to be a genocide.
As a result, he's been removed very, very quickly from a lot of the mainstream media platforms to which he used to have access.
But he was on Piers Morgan's show for the second time.
I think Piers Morgan put him on for the first time a couple months ago.
And Piers Morgan, as long as it produces enough controversy that people pay attention, will keep putting you on.
And he was on, I think, yesterday, maybe today, to talk about what exactly was happening in Syria.
And Jeffrey Sachs' theory about why it's become so important to remove Assad is that if you go back to the mid-1990s with Netanyahu's book and the emergence of neoconservatism and its modern expression in the United States with Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan and the Project for New American Century,
they have this list of countries Where regime change was crucial both for the Israeli perspective and I guess as a secondary thought for the American perspective and you go down that list and as we know every single one of those countries has been the subject of regime change operations including Libya and Lebanon and obviously Iraq and Syria and the one We're good to
into, which is Iran.
And so his theory was that this is essentially nothing more than the United States acting in servitude to Israeli interests who have an interest in, for example, as you said, weakening Iran, undermining the provision of weapons from Iran to Hezbollah that takes undermining the provision of weapons from Iran to Hezbollah that takes place through Syria and with the consent and cooperation of Hezbollah is a force in the Middle East that targets Israel, that does not really target the United States.
is it an overstatement or is it In essence, is there some truth to it that this is really about Israeli interests wanting to remove Assad more so than making sense from the perspective of American interests to the extent those can be separated?
I do actually think that's overstated.
Why?
Because if you look at Israel and its approach to Syria and the war, it's actually been a bit more complicated than just one regime change.
Actually, look at the Israeli discourse.
I mean, there were certain voices who were quite prominent within policy and security circles within Israel, like Ehud Yari.
They were critical of Israel's approach because they felt it wasn't supportive enough of the insurgency and wasn't anti-Assad enough to actually try to overthrow the government.
And to be fair, Israel's approach on the broad question of a central government Yeah, Assad sucks from their perspective because he has served as his conduit to support Hezbollah.
But they felt that in the decades before the war broke out, the Golan Front, the border of the occupied Golan Heights was fairly quiet.
And they liked the idea, they thought in general that the Israel policy consensus was that if it's a choice between having a central government or just complete anarchy, we'll rather have a central government, so therefore Assad can stay barring any viable so therefore Assad can stay barring any viable alternative to him.
But at the same time, we want this country to be kept weak and divided.
They had this policy of what they call a buffer zone along their borders, supposedly to prevent Iran and Hezbollah from getting to the border of the Golan Heights.
They at the same time made a commitment to the Druze minority in Israel that there was a certain village over on the other side of the Golan border that they wouldn't let it fall to the insurgents out of some kind of commitment because of Druze being served in the IDF, for example.
So Israel's policy also was this melange of different inclinations and it didn't actually go all the way to, yeah, let's go and support an army, rebel army to go march on Damascus and give it air support.
On the contrary, in 2018, when the Syrian government and Russians took over the battle of the South again, They weren't invested enough in the insurgents to actually make some forceful stand for them.
So I agree that fundamentally the U.S. opposition to Syria is a matter of geopolitics because of the resistance axis and the Iran angle.
But it's not quite, though, that Israel wants to remove Assad because Israel wants that, because, in fact, Israel's approach is a lot more complicated than that.
So I hope that's an interesting nuance to the debate.
Yeah, no, I mean, I'm a big fan of Professor Sachs.
I was surprised, though, at how almost single-minded was his perspective about what was taking place in Syria, particularly with his insistence that at the core of everything was Netanyahu and almost nothing else and everything kind of flew from that.
I just have a couple more questions.
You know, I mentioned earlier in response to, you know, the possible claim that, oh, the reason we're so interested in removing the Assad government is because it's just so immoral and repressive.
And, of course, here the United States' closest allies in the region are regimes like the one in Saudi Arabia and Egypt and throughout the Persian Gulf, making, I think, that...
That hypothesis that we're really interested in is making the Middle East more moral, kind of laughable, which is always a laughable view even though so many people accept it.
At the same time, at least when it comes to...
Support for Syria and Egypt.
The realist, non-moralistic argument is the reason we do that is because we know the alternative will be worse.
The alternative to the repressive Syrian government...
Well, we don't even have to guess what it would be in Egypt.
There was an election that happened, and the winner was a member of the...
Yeah, of the Muslim Brotherhood, and we realized it lasted about 10 months because we realized that democracy is something that could never happen in the Middle East because if it did, we'd get an expression of popular will that would be very bad for the United States.
But in the case of Syria, what has always, I guess, confounded me is not necessarily the reasons why some people in the region, even some people in the United States, would prefer to see Assad go.
But the gamble is that it would create such a vacuum that you don't know who would end up governing Syria.
You don't know which factions, those competing factions, or how extreme they might be or who they might end up allied with.
Would end up prevailing, and it seems to me like that should be a greater impediment to rooting for the removal of Assad than it ends up being.
Why isn't that more of a concern, just the sheer unpredictability of who would fill that vacuum if Assad actually left?
I think that's a question that actually really does need to be central to any discussion about what the future would be in the event of his departure, particularly because it's not really going to be the case that he's going to say, you know what, I resign after all these years and all this fighting that's gone on.
And when you look actually at the insurgent-held areas, you actually see one of the primary problems about alternatives, because the insurgent-held areas in northwest Syria are actually split into two rival governments.
On the one hand, you have this Heya Tahrir Shambag Salvation government, and on the other hand, you have this Syrian interim government that governs parts various just north of Aleppo city.
And other parts of the northern borders between Syria and Turkey.
And that is tied to the opposition in exile in Turkey.
The two sides, actually, the two governments have not come to some kind of united understanding of what their political system or structure would look like.
And then also you have the SDF, which is, you know, Controlling a substantial portion of the country and has implemented its own autonomous administration system.
On the other hand, a lot of the insurgents say this is a separatist PKK project and it has no place in Syria.
So you can't really just go in route for the overthrow of the government, which is that if it's going to happen at all, it's going to have to be a military overthrow.
And then not actually deal with this question of what actually would replace it, given that you actually have these divisions among the areas outside of Syrian government control.
There are other issues, too.
What would you do with the Syrian desert area?
Right now, that area is largely being manned by the Syrian government forces and their allies.
There's an Islamic State insurgency operating there.
What would you do about that?
How would you fill the gap?
These are important questions that people need to address in any discussion of Syria's future and not just single-mindedly focus on Absolutely.
All right, let me ask the last question.
We look at the Middle East, we often think about the influence of the United States, of Israel, of Iran, Saudi Arabia.
Obviously, in this case, and when anything happening in Syria, but especially the conflict now, Turkey is playing a pretty significant role.
What is the role that you think Turkey is playing in having helped catalyze or support The advancement of this insurgency and what is the ultimate goal of Turkey, do you think, when it comes to Syria?
I mean, with Turkey, Turkish officials have been putting out mixed kind of messages, one saying to one outlet, oh, we oppose this insurgent offensive.
But the fact is, actually, if you go back and look at the Arabic language reporting, say in October, there's evidence that Turkey was having discussions with these insurgent factions about this offensive towards Aleppo city.
And I would say, yeah, it's true that Turkey has not actively intervened in that fight.
They haven't gone and helped the insurgents by launching artillery strikes or airstrikes on the Syrian government and its allies during this offensive.
But they did not actively try to stop it, which actually suggests to me that they really actually green-lighted it, essentially, because they think it's a repeat of 2015 in a way, because they hope that the Syrian government will come to the table with it and engage more in the dialogue with political because they hope that the Syrian government will come to the But I think that's a very mistaken calculation on Turkey's part, because the government's response, as you can see, it's a military one.
The government believes it's fighting terrorism, and so does its allies.
So it's...
It was a mistake.
It's been clearly a wrong assumption on Turkey's part.
Ultimately, I think they were hoping that they could get some kind of deal with Assad where, in more recent years, they've been hoping to get some kind of deal with Assad where it helped to facilitate return of refugees from Turkey to Syria and normalize ties,
but on condition of having real dialogue with the Syrian opposition and On the other hand, the Syrian government's position was that, you know, if Turkey's serious about any normalization with us, then they should agree to withdraw their troops from northwest Syria, which actually helped save the insurgent enclave there in the first place that allowed them to regroup and rebuild their strength.
So, yeah, that's definitely not conducive to a real dialogue between the Syrian government and Turkey.
When we invited you on, I was hoping but also expecting that you would really help kind of clarify some of these more obscure issues that always, for me at least, govern these conflicts in Syria because of how multi-party they are and how difficult the interests are to discern.
And I think you definitely did at least as good of a job as can be done, given the newness and complexity of the situation.
Yeah, yeah.
I don't think there's anyone who could with perfect clarity explain what's happening, but I'm glad that you resisted these more simplistic narratives and helped us understand the nuance, and I have a feeling that this conflict is not going to be going away anytime soon.
It's something that we hope to continue to cover, and we would love to have you back on to help us do that.
We really appreciate your taking the time to come on.
