Oct. 8, 2019 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
10:57
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Now, you can argue we shouldn't have been there in the first place, and if we want to get out, we can just get out. | ||
| I think those are perfectly legit arguments to have, but I think it's also a legit argument to have if you break it, do you have any responsibility to fix it? | ||
| Alright everybody, a little impromptu direct message today. | ||
| As you probably heard, Trump announced yesterday that he is pulling our troops out of Syria. | ||
| Now this basically seems like it should come off as a positive thing, but I don't know if you know about this, but we live in a very polarized political world these days and often people who would have said one thing three years ago are saying very different things these days. | ||
| And it's just such a freaking mess, especially online, where everyone pretends they're an expert in everything. | ||
| Everyone who got everything wrong five years ago, 10 years ago, knows exactly how to do everything now. | ||
| People that were the architects of the Iraq War, George W. Bush's Iraq War, Which most people would agree was a mistake, or at least a foreign policy blunder, are now saying exactly what we should do this time in Syria. | ||
| So I just wanted to back up, clean up a little bit of this. | ||
| I am obviously, me, myself, not an absolute foreign policy expert, but I wanna just lay out a little bit of the chronology of what happened, and just sort of what potentially our responsibilities are For the region if we have any and just see how this sort of fits in the larger context of political conversations that we've been having on this show. | ||
| So first off I just want to be very very clear that about five years ago when we went into Syria in the first place and you may remember this is when every day on YouTube there was another horrific ISIS video and beheadings and burning human beings alive and just beyond awful stuff. | ||
| I mean, I'm sure you saw the videos, I saw them. | ||
| Just horrific stuff that ISIS was doing. | ||
| That we decided that, well basically Obama was president at the time, and basically he laid out a red line that if Assad used gas on his own people, or chemical weapons on his own people, that we were gonna go into Syria. | ||
| That happened and then we didn't go in. | ||
| And then there was this constant question of who are actually the good guys. | ||
| Are the good guys the rebels who are fighting Assad? | ||
| Then there's ISIS. | ||
| Assad's attacking some of these people. | ||
| And then there are also the Kurds. | ||
| I'll get more into that in just a sec. | ||
| But I just want to be very clear that about five years ago when this was all happening and I was a big lefty, I was a progressive, I was on the Young Turks Network, you can find videos, multiple videos of me saying that I did not want America to be involved at all. | ||
| My feeling was that after several blunders that we've made in the region, That sometimes other countries have to step in and do things. | ||
| So if Syria is a big freaking mess and there's a humanitarian crisis there, well that some of the countries on their borders, like Saudi Arabia, like Turkey, are gonna have to step in and figure out how to help people and that we can't always do everything. | ||
| If anything, I would have been for some sort of minor, I think this is exactly what I said, I would have been for some sort of minor thing where it wouldn't have been a military intervention, but some sort of humanitarian corridor where we would have helped secure like a safe area for refugees within the country itself. | ||
| But that's it. | ||
| I didn't want to go in. | ||
| It's really weird now because now you're seeing plenty of people who did want to go in now saying, we can't leave. | ||
| And it's like, then what happened to all of the people who are anti-war? | ||
| There used to be this really strong anti-war left. | ||
| And one of the things that Trump has done is that whenever Trump says anything, the people that hate him automatically take the reverse position. | ||
| So Trump says, and he ran on this, I don't want war, we can't be the world's police, all of those things, most of which, especially from my libertarian side, I agree with. | ||
| Well, then we're pulling out and then people are saying, well, no, now it's going to go to hell in a handbasket and we can't pull out. | ||
| And all that other stuff, knowing full well that, for the people on the left, if this was Obama or a Democrat president, you'd be all about pulling out. | ||
| I'm trying not to make a pull-out joke there, but that's sort of where we're at with that. | ||
| Now there's some interesting things here, because the libertarians right now, are very, very for this move. | ||
| Not every libertarian, but generally speaking, libertarians are for this because they don't want us using our foreign power overseas, right? | ||
| They have more of an isolationist policy. | ||
| Now, I generally agree with that, but the question is, once we've done something, once we've gone into a country and done things. | ||
| Do we have any responsibility to stay there and make sure that there's a peaceful transition | ||
| to whatever comes next? | ||
| So you could look at this in a context of Iraq. | ||
| Now, most people would agree, not everybody, but most people would agree | ||
| that the Iraq war was a mistake, as I said before. | ||
| That being said, after a certain period of time, it actually started to work. | ||
| Iraq was having free and fair elections. | ||
| You may remember those videos of people with paint on their thumbs that had finally voted. | ||
| Then Obama came in. | ||
| He ran very against the Iraq war, right? | ||
| That was actually one of the things that separated him from Hillary. | ||
| The first time that Obama was running, he was saying, we've got to get out now. | ||
| Hillary was saying, we have to take a little more time. | ||
| Obama kept his promise. | ||
| We pulled out immediately. | ||
| They set a date, they pulled out. | ||
| And basically since then, Iraq has collapsed because we didn't have enough of the machinery on the ground to facilitate them furthering democracy. | ||
| Now you can argue we shouldn't have been there in the first place. | ||
| And if we want to get out, we can just get out. | ||
| I think those are perfectly legit arguments to have. | ||
| But I think that's also a legit argument to have. | ||
| If you break it, do you have any responsibility to fix it? | ||
| That's sort of what we're in, in Syria right now, because we went in, and I think it was, whether, we were supposed to be there for 30 days, so whether we were supposed to go in or not, or should have gone in or not, it was supposed to be this limited engagement, which by the way, is another reason that we need to start actually paying attention to the Constitution and separation of powers, When it comes to waging war and this is something that both administrations don't do at all both administrations both parties don't do it all regardless of the administration so for example Barack Obama went into Libya I mean that's another one and they didn't want to call it a war because he didn't want to get congressional authority so they called it a kinetic military action I had never heard that phrase before | ||
| And most people hadn't heard that phrase before. | ||
| We basically totally destabilized Libya, not that Gaddafi was any great person. | ||
| And now what's happening in Libya for these last couple of years, it's basically chaos. | ||
| And we don't even talk about it. | ||
| That's something Obama did. | ||
| Trump's now saying we've got to get out. | ||
| But now the question is this, okay, if you're saying America first, | ||
| or we want to have more of an isolationist policy, or we can't be the world's police, | ||
| again, I'm totally sympathetic to all of those views. | ||
| I actually think there's a lot of legitimacy to it. | ||
| It's well, what is going to happen to Syria when we leave? | ||
| And more specifically, it's not Syria, it's the Kurds. | ||
| So the Kurds are a true ethnic minority that live in Syria, they live in Iraq, | ||
| they live in Turkey. | ||
| These are people who should have a state, whether it has to be carved out | ||
| of all three of those countries, and that's been the negotiation for years. | ||
| Believe it or not, there's a video of Joe Biden, when he was running back against Barack Obama | ||
| the first time in the Democratic primary, where Biden talks about having to carve up | ||
| some of those countries to give the Kurds a state. | ||
| Anyway, the Kurds have been a major ally of ours. | ||
| They're the ones that were on the ground fighting ISIS. | ||
| They, generally speaking, believe in Western values and in freedom. | ||
| There are wonderful videos of women that were enslaved by ISIS that get rescued by the Kurds, and you can see them ripping off the veils and all of those things. | ||
| The question now is, are we abandoning the Kurds, who we've armed, by the way, and all sorts of stuff? | ||
| Are we now abandoning them and now just going to let Turkey slaughter them? | ||
| And Erdogan in Turkey is an Islamist. | ||
| He will have no problem killing as many Kurds as he wants to, as he's done in the past. | ||
| And is Turkey really our ally? | ||
| We're both in NATO, but what actual common values do we share with Turkey | ||
| in its current incarnation, I'm not really sure. | ||
| So while I see the left basically saying, we can't leave just because they hate Trump. | ||
| So that doesn't seem to make any sense to me, right? | ||
| Because if it was a democratic president, you'd all be about getting out | ||
| and the left is supposed to be anti-war. | ||
| Now I see the libertarians going, we've got to get the hell out of there. | ||
| But just doing that without having any sort of responsibility | ||
| for what you've created. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I couldn't hear what you said. | |
| Siri just turned on in the middle of this by herself. | ||
| My apologies, I couldn't hear what you said. | ||
| Did I say Syria and she thought it was Siri? | ||
| Okay, that's weird. | ||
| Anyway, so you've got the anti-war left that has sort of disappeared because they just wanna go against Trump and Trump wants out. | ||
| You've got the libertarians basically saying we shouldn't have been there in the first place, we gotta go regardless of the consequences. | ||
| And then you've got, say, maybe the more neocons or conservatives saying, We should have went, or even if we shouldn't have went in the first place, or shouldn't have gone in the first place, we do have some responsibility to make sure that basically the Kurds don't get slaughtered. | ||
| I think these are all interesting arguments to have. | ||
| I fall more on the side that we have got To we have to leave, right? | ||
| We can't just be there forever. | ||
| I like sort of what I think Trump actually tweeted this. | ||
| I'm going to pull it up for just a sec. | ||
| There was something that actually did did make sense there. | ||
| So a couple of things that Trump said. | ||
| He said we were supposed to be there for for 30 days and with no aim in sight. | ||
| I said I was going to end these things. | ||
| That seems legit. | ||
| This is quite a tweet by Trump. | ||
| As I have stated strongly before, and just to reiterate, if Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the economy of Turkey. | ||
| I've done before. | ||
| Aye, in my great and unmatched wisdom. | ||
| All right, so putting aside Trump's premier trolling there, it's obviously a nutty statement, but what he's saying is, Turkey, we're gonna leave. | ||
| If you start killing the Kurds and invading Syria to kill more of them or take land or something like that, we will do something. | ||
| So that basically seems right. | ||
| Again, it's giving too much power to the executive branch, right? | ||
| It's giving too much power to the presidential branch. | ||
| This should be done by Congress. | ||
| All right, so that's sort of where we're at. | ||
| If you want more on this, check out, I did an interview a couple years ago with Bayan Sami Abdulrahman. | ||
| She is the KRG, the Kurdish Regional Government rep to the United States. | ||
| She talks really about the history of the Kurds and all that. | ||
| This is just a brief, very quick overview, but I wanted to clean up a little bit of this and just talk a little bit more about sort of the philosophical, pieces behind why everyone's arguing all the time about this. | ||
| Thank you for watching. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of non-stop yelling, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here. |
Export Selection