Left Face
Join Adam Gillard and Dick Wilkinson while they talk politics and community engagement in Pikes Peak region.
Left Face
Syria's Path: Could History Have Been Altered?
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Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Left Face, the veterans and military-focused podcast from Colorado Springs. I am one of your co-hosts. My name is Dick Wilkinson and I'm joined today with your other co-host, adam Gillard. Good morning, adam. Morning Dick. How are you doing? I'm doing great. I'm ready for the break. You know, wrapping up work and getting ready to take a couple weeks off.
Speaker 2:So I'm ready for that. That's one thing I miss about being in the military is like just taking december off. Real deal downtime, yeah, like you get. You know, obviously you get all your shit done and you know get your reports in and make sure you're ahead of the schedule and things like that. But yeah, you get a solid two weeks to just kind of like be at home with your kids during the time off and just kind of kick up a little bit.
Speaker 1:I have found that the. It was funny because there was a survey we did I think it was when I was going through warrant officer school and it was about work life balance and how much that mattered to military people. This would have been the early two thousands and a lot of people said they stay in the military because it offers a better work life balance than other jobs. And of course, my only professional job was had been the military, and so I just thought that sounds kind of crazy. That can't be true. Right, I have to wake up earlier than anybody else and leave the house before anybody else.
Speaker 2:You're always on duty, yeah.
Speaker 1:But now I understand a little bit of what that means, in that when you're off work from the army and they say go home and don't come back for a week, Nobody's going to. You know, if you, for the most part nobody's going to call you, Nobody's going to be like, hey, what'd you do with X, Y and Z equipment or file or whatever Like that? Stuff's buttoned up before you leave and you know when you're off work. Now you know. So, um, I do miss that.
Speaker 2:So I felt like I was always on, you know, especially when I when I moved up, uh, in the air force there. So a little different for me, but yeah, it's always. It's always on the top of your mind, though, you know I didn't have.
Speaker 1:I never was a senior enlisted leader that had troops where the phone might ring and someone would say I'm in jail or I'm in trouble, or I don't know where I am and I need help.
Speaker 2:I'm drunk and I don't know where I am. Please come find me. Yeah, once you start thinking of like the first sergeant role, I never had that.
Speaker 1:I became a warrant officer right around five, six years in the army.
Speaker 2:And so I didn't have that later career experience of being the platoon daddy or the first sergeant that you know phone rang in the middle. Oh yeah, it feels like I've wiped many asses of 20, 30 year old people.
Speaker 1:But you know, uh, I didn't have that experience. Well, um, we, I'm going to start this week's episode with a little bit of a new segment and, uh, everybody, if we get the chance to do this again, then it'll actually become a series, but if not, that it's a one-off. But I want to call it name and shame. We have no shortage of media input, where sometimes elected politicians say some really stupid things, whether and I say stupid in the terms of they may completely believe it, but it just doesn't pass the sniff test. Or sometimes it's a gaffe, Sometimes it's a misunderstanding.
Speaker 1:But in the name and shame segment we're going to go for the folks that absolutely know what they're talking about. It makes zero amount of sense, but they're saying it with confidence. Is what I'm saying, Right, yeah? And if they are a member of Congress, Senate or house and they go out into the rotunda there and start spouting off just insanity, I'd like to name and shame those folks. So this week we're going to have a congressman. It was Congressman Van Drew and he is from New Jersey, I believe. Yep, New Jersey Congressman, Jeff Van Drew. He says there is an Iranian mothership off the east coast of the United States that is launching drones into New Jersey. The problem I have with the statement is that what is a mothership? What?
Speaker 2:is that? Yeah, that's exactly where my head went to. Is you know? Are we talking aircraft, ship, submarine, like what exactly?
Speaker 1:is a ship. What medium is this thing persisting in?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so just throwing out you know kind of big terms like that just doesn't help anybody. And I get it. He's in New Jersey and they're seeing a lot of weird stuff right now and probably you know 90% are easily explainable because I watch on Reddit and like I'll see a lot of pictures of planes flying overhead and be like, clearly, that's a plane, dude Right, Clearly, Clearly that's a plane dude Right, Clearly, Extremely linear movement that doesn't stop Right.
Speaker 1:Nothing special, nothing special.
Speaker 2:And then, every once in a while, you'll see one that's like ooh what is that. Yeah, so there's something weird going on, definitely. So I understand being worried, but being a sitting representative and just stirring the pot and saying shit like that, like we can't control Iranian drones, like we can shit like that.
Speaker 1:Like like we can't control iranian drones, like we can, or we have no idea that, that you know how they're getting to and from new jersey, uh, they're just transiting across from the water to here and we don't really know where. And and I had the same thought is it a water-based ship? Is it a? Are we talking a dirigible? You know, we got a blimp up here dropping out drones. And then the second part of that is why would we not? Why is it invisible?
Speaker 1:congressman right, yeah, we have really good uh coastal defense, uh radars, we have people, we have ships, we have a coast guard that does nothing but patrol that area of a high traffic, water and air travel. There's no way that everything within a hundred off the coast of New York and New Jersey isn't completely identified, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and when you talk about drones, they have to be given off RF somewhere in order to be controlled, either SATCOM or line of sight like terrestrial here, and we can see those pretty easily. Anybody with a spectrum analyzer can go see it and anybody with an advanced spectrum analyzer can. Can you know? Look at it, yeah identify it, you know you can really start pulling out how much power they have where they're coming from.
Speaker 2:It's not as difficult as you know it. You know people think it is and we haven't done that from what I can tell, we have not.
Speaker 1:you know, it took days and days and days before anyone even said, oh, the equipment is here now, right, like the right team with the right equipment has finally showed up. The first news story was easily 10 days before that. So the level of scrutiny I think this gives us some exposure to, you've got the intelligence community inside the federal government tucked away behind classified doors. They knew what it was the very first day, you know. Is this, yes, it is or no? It's not? Yeah, uh, some type of, like you said, radio controlled or some other craft that we can identify and see moving in and out of this space? Yeah, so they knew right away. Now the rest of the federal government doesn't know what the intelligence community knows Right, and so they. There's, you know, the FAA they might not get a classified briefing right away, right, fcc, same, they might not get a classified briefing right away. Then you get state level involved, where you've got police departments, you've got a state trooper force of some sort.
Speaker 2:You've got a governor probably extremely poorly resourced intelligence cell that has like five people and no money and they're like well, I have a walkie talkie. I don't know if that's going to get me to figure out what this drone is. They actually use their iPhone for their.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's their Intel cell at the state level in most places. So these folks can't. You know, they want to help with the problem but they don't have that complete solution. They want to help with the problem, but they don't have that complete solution. So the fact that it took 10 days for somebody to really roll out the complete solution I think is a artifact of the people who know what it is are genuine.
Speaker 1:This isn't dangerous you don't need to send the vans and the troops and the people Don't worry about it, right, but nobody else can buy that, don't?
Speaker 2:worry about it. Yeah, so now the conspiracy ensues, the curiosity ensues um that idiocracy ensues because people start shooting at them ah, that's true like because they've been popping up kind of other places too and yeah, people have been shooting at these things and like I'm not mad at, I mean I'm not encouraging anyone to shoot at a drone that your bullet almost certainly won't reach.
Speaker 1:But, um, you know what man I to shoot at a drone that your bullet almost certainly won't reach. But you know what man, I'll shoot at a drone. You know what I'm saying. If I was out on a farm in New Jersey, I would shoot at a drone.
Speaker 2:There's no farm in New Jersey, that's right. I guess you're right. They are so packed.
Speaker 1:I grew up in Texas where you can also shoot full auto in Texas. Right, we can have whatever kind of machine gun. I could buy a .50 cal that's tank-mounted and shoot it at drones in Texas.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there was a place down in Arizona where a girl went to there and accidentally shot her instructor because they didn't really control her and she just rented a machine gun and like blah, blah, blah blah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, anyway, like a machine gun and like yeah, yeah, anyway. So back back to the name and shame. What was the guy's name? So the guy's name is uh van drew. He's congressman, van drew. He went into the capital and he said there's a mothership. Uh, there's, iran is watching us and uh, we should be doing more. Uh, and, and that was it, just the vague. Yeah, the belief.
Speaker 2:And this is why.
Speaker 1:I want to name and shame. He spoke with pure confidence and belief that there is an extremely stealth and technical platform hovering or floating off the east coast of the United States and we can't see it. Yeah, that requires a belief in magic and that's why I want to name and shame this guy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, you start throwing out things like this early on and you start building a narrative to go after iran.
Speaker 1:yes, you know, and that scares me because front-loading, because iran is doing some bad things for you know too, but sure like this is not one of them. Loop back around to iran's bad behavior in the last segment of the episode today where we're going to talk about syria and we can't talk about Syria without talking about Iran's influence.
Speaker 2:You're right.
Speaker 1:How strange could it be that drones over New Jersey somehow have a political slant towards political upheaval in the Middle East. How's?
Speaker 2:that possible? It's all tied together, man, here we are, here we are.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, well, thanks for bearing with me on the name and shame segment. Oh, don't forget, Crank his position oh yeah Well, we're going to talk about Crank now. So I want to move from the name and shame parts over Van Drew. Do better Read a book I don't know what university you got your degree from. Reconsider how they credentialed their veterans. So we're going to move on now to someone who doesn't need to be named and shamed yet, but we hope he doesn't ever have to.
Speaker 2:But we'll see.
Speaker 1:So we got a new inbound Congress representative here in Colorado Springs. His name is Jeff Crank. If you're from the area, you know, you at least know the name, because he had big signs up. His name recognition campaign was strong.
Speaker 2:Well, he's got a radio show that he does too.
Speaker 1:I haven't paid attention to that, but all I know is it's called the Jeff Crank Show.
Speaker 2:It's a pretty original name, nice. I like it.
Speaker 1:I like it. We should change the name of our show, yeah. Super long yeah the Adam Gillard and Dick Wilkinson show Do we hyphenate, it rolls right off the tongue. All four names together. Yeah, there you go. So well. Good on you on the airwaves there Crank. I know you from your gigantic billboard-sized signs that maybe we're pushing the limit of what's legal for.
Speaker 1:I don't know what, but they were everywhere and everyone seemed to like you, so you won. So congratulations, and really the news story for our listeners is congratulations that you are going to be on the House Armed Services Committee and for us in Colorado Springs that's actually pretty important for our representative to have some voice in that part of the government.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and not just for the Space Force battle that's constantly going to be going on or where that's going to land, but we have a lot of Air Force folks still here with USAPA and then Army down there, so we have a ton of military still in this community and we need good representations, a strong representation. So it's going to be interesting to see what he does on this committee.
Speaker 1:I completely agree that the strong piece is important, because your congressperson has to be a generalist right. They can't be a specialist in any one piece of government or industry. The military footprint here in Colorado Springs is very broad as far as the type of missions that are here, because you have the officer cadet corps, you have army with artillery and aircraft and you know like very much assault type military force. But then you have the other end of that, which is the space force and very strategic missions that are not really, you know, putting troops in harm's way type stuff. It's infrastructure that has to be built inside the united states to do the work right. So the the mission set here is very broad and for the representative to do a good job at that, they have to take um an all of the military type approach right. They can't be just beholden to one branch one base, you know, relationship right yeah.
Speaker 1:Which is what most representatives have. They have one or two military bases, if any, in their region and that's just. They make a relationship with that base, learn what the mission is and then go and promote that, Right. There's a lot harder to do here. You know, if you're focused on the cadet corps, you're going to be totally. You have no clue what's going on down at Fort Carson, Right, yeah, and vice versa. If you're over here, you know, just living in ops watching Space Force do their stuff, that's completely removed from the fourth generation that happens over at the cadet corps.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:So it's all over the map, Right, and so I wish him luck For our listeners. You know it's a chance to start tuning in and paying attention to the news stories. He's got two years to audition, I guess, you know. He won the first round. Now he's in the live shows, right If we're talking about it like it's Donald Trump's TV programs right, you got through the selection, you know, and now you're in the live shows and you got to impress everybody or they're going to, you know, smack the buzzer and you're going to have to go home in two years.
Speaker 1:So for us, uh, and for Adam and I specifically, uh, you know we we aren't. We're always looking for the opportunity, for a chance to turn that seat Right, and so I want crank to do a good job, because I want the military community here to succeed and do well with that support. But if there's a thousand other things that we have Crank has to do, we need to watch. We need to watch and see how he does, how he presents himself as far as supporting the military. What wins does he really get? Does he chicken out when the rubber meets the road? And it's time to spend some money on benefits.
Speaker 2:And.
Speaker 1:Elon says I will primary you out of your seat if you vote against this bill that I like. And he takes that step and votes for Elon instead of votes for veterans. We're going to talk about it on this show. We're not going to shut up about it.
Speaker 2:I mean even this most recent vote where Elon said nothing should be passed until Trump takes office.
Speaker 2:He came out with that is now we're moving to where the continuing resolution could expire and the government could shut down right, and you know we had a deal that it wasn't great for the democrats that there were some things missing for, like va benefits and stuff like that. Uh, it would have hurt us, um, but elon said no and so now everybody else said no. So you know our is crank going to be somebody that can actually we'll stand up to somebody like that, or you know, because he doesn't have the social power to do it.
Speaker 1:No, right, I mean being a freshman congressman, you don't? You just don't right. If the voice of the president is coming your way, uh, you can't do anything about it you just say yes and get out of the way.
Speaker 2:But you're always at your most vulnerable in that first term. So he needs to do something that stands up and says, yeah, I'm not going to do this, I'm not going to be a yes man. But here's the sad part Adam.
Speaker 1:We got to remember and I mean I hate that I'm saying this, but in this area, in this location, this district that he's in being loyal to Trump is more important than being loyal to veterans. Even though we're like 50% veteran around here, there's a lot of veterans that would put their veteran hat down and pick their Trump hat up at this point in time, and so I think Crank is rewarded just as much for being lockstep with Elon and Trump and never rocking the boat. Yeah, that's his key to success. Yeah, Standing up for veterans is not going to work Right and that sucks, but it will not keep him in office and he will not win.
Speaker 2:Well, and that's what frustrates me so much is, the Republican party is about staying in office, not about helping their constituents and like and the Dems are too that you and like and the dems are too that you know, like, nancy pelosi is 84 years old.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's that one. Yeah, she should have been gone a long time, right, but a lot of people that I mean, not just her age, like she's done, she's expired her. Yeah, what's overstayed her. Welcome in the whole sphere of influence.
Speaker 2:Yeah, once you step down from speaker of the house.
Speaker 1:You shouldn't hang around, don't, don't run another term. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree with that. I agree with that.
Speaker 2:But I still feel that a lot of the policies of the Democratic Party and like when I decided which where I wanted to land, like you know, it's not just about the policies but how they actually like, because Republicans say a lot of good things, like on websites, about, you know, small government and all this stuff but then when you look at the practice it's not there. They're about taking rights away from people that aren't them.
Speaker 1:Well, even in the situation that we're talking about right now, the fiscal responsibility is supposed to drive the train, but in the way to get past this continuing resolution situation, they have to raise the debt ceiling, and the Republicans are in charge of everything.
Speaker 2:Right, you know, as we're entering, and it was a huge deal a couple of years ago, yeah.
Speaker 1:Core value as a party is to reduce government and reduce government spending, and then you specifically hijack successful legislation to increase government spending. I'm sorry, but we got a problem here right your messaging and your reality don't match Exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So when I look at what the Dems say and what they're pushing, at least they're pushing things for more general population.
Speaker 2:And we can say the word socialist, you know, and everybody can get their skirts up or whatever. Yeah, I say it all the time that's how we get through like pandemics and natural disasters is by having a social network. That where people, you know they lose their job, they don't lose their health care, you know, things like that is gonna help us get through every all because like nothing slows down, like we're always gonna have another big fucking event like wars and pandemics, like nothing's gonna slow down. That's true, um, that's. We need these safety nets to just help people get by and like be able to get back into giving to the economy again. You know, that's how you recover faster well, I, I understand that that.
Speaker 1:yeah, if you and I mean we're still seeing, um, I've been thinking about this one, the homelessness aspect of why you know, and it was wrapped into the whole. There's the misunderstanding or the lie that the conservative movement here in colorado springs and el paso county says homeless people are here because weed exists, right, and I was thinking about that.
Speaker 1:And then I thought to myself you know, no, no one would be willing to admit because they want to, they. I don't know the folks that believe these things, believe this bubble of Colorado Springs is like one of the only civilized populations on earth. Um, you know, they think there's a microcosm here that they can somehow use that lens to understand everything else on earth. And that's not true, um. But the idea of homelessness and the safety net that you're talking about, the pandemic pushed people that were on the margin but that were probably never going to cross that line. It pushed them across that line and the the comeback from going from stability and housing, or stability in your work or in your mental health to that instability in any one of those areas, man, the comeback is couple of years.
Speaker 1:It's still a knock-on effect of all the economic churn that happened from the pandemic and when those subsistence programs that were helping people get by they stopped when they should have stopped. But there were people that were already on that margin and had just lost their ability to come back, had just lost their ability to come back right. And that's really the reason why we see populations of homelessness going up all over America, not just in one area. But people want to isolate one little narrative and say we equals homeless people equals crime right.
Speaker 2:And it's like no. Yeah, statisticians love doing that. Where they can correlate, they can connect whatever dots you want.
Speaker 1:Yeah, just dump out a box of dots and connect them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but, yeah. But now that hopefully we can get legalized rec sold here and we can actually start reaping the benefits and actually start having some solutions from it, yeah, having some funding to overcome the issues that are not a consequence of cannabis but yeah, so when I hear those, those things, though that's, it's that ignorance, and again we go back to.
Speaker 1:you know, the loyalty to, for our representative, Jeff crank, to need to be loyal to Trump would be more important than to be loyal to any of the other uh, real issues that exist in our, in the county, you know yeah. And so I think the next couple of years will basically be an audition or a stay out of the gunfire from Elon. So I don't get primaried or I don't piss anybody off so tiptoe around and stay out of the way. I think that's what we'll see.
Speaker 2:That's my crystal ball vision on our so he has a pretty comfortable seat because when you look at the numbers from this last election, Republicans greatly outnumber us and they hit the ballots pretty hard. Independence really didn't show up, Like only 60% of independents voted so they didn't show up. So both sides like focused on independence so much and like they don't give a shit. So like right now there are so many Republicans here and how many Republicans here? And it's about over 80% for both sides.
Speaker 1:It's a safe seat, for sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's safe for them.
Speaker 1:And Lamborn man. He had primaries in his 16-year run, yeah. I think Crank did one time he had primaries like five times and whooped all of them handily hard and these are retired general officers, former state officials, and he whooped them, just beat them down the block.
Speaker 2:But he had that war chest. He shows up with millions of dollars in his chest.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so when he had a primary challenger he could just outspend them and did nothing for us, See I wasn't here for any of that. I just get to look at it retroactively from the totally technical campaign perspective of, like what was he doing to keep that juice running?
Speaker 1:You know, but cranks in the exact same position is all it really comes down to it just maybe doesn't have as much of the handshake you know friendly relationship stuff that Lamborn was able to build up over time, right, but if he makes it through the first two years and doesn't piss off Elon, then by the next time around, you know, he'll be in a better position. Yeah, we'll see. All right, well, now we're going to get into the final topic of the episode today A little bit disjointed, but that's fine because there's always a lot going on. So we're going to wrap up with our real meat of the subject here today, which is Syria. And for anybody that's listening, if you haven't paid attention to the news, some really big events happened in Syria over the last couple of weeks. But really this story starts much further back in time to capture the current conflict and the tide that finally shifted over the last couple of weeks. So, adam, what's your take on what's going on in Syria right now and do you remember any of the old Arab Spring activity?
Speaker 2:Yeah, arab Spring was happening at a pretty busy time in my life, so I was really kind of focused on what I was doing in the military at the time. But even the fall of the Assad regime here, it kind of happened really fast. It kind of surprised me how quickly it happened. But one thing that I really kind of worries me about is he took $137 billion or something like that. Like he pretty much took Syria's entire net worth and moved it to Russia, yeah, you know. So Syria is going to struggle and they're going to have a hard time for a while now, and the folks that are in charge aren't necessarily the good guys. No, they're not, you know, for a while now.
Speaker 1:And the folks that are in charge aren't necessarily the good guys. No, you know, and that's you know. I think if somebody went and planted a flag like we do, you know, I think of the old time the flag they would have planted is that black isis flag, right with the arab script on it that we all know and recognize right, and that's flying over the top of the syrian capital yeah so and now we and now we have a terrorist organization running in this country and we talked a little bit earlier that it didn't have to be this way.
Speaker 2:We had the Arab Spring and you were somewhere where you had some good information. But, like I said, I didn't really follow Arab Spring a lot. We talked with Kat a few weeks ago or months ago now about it a little bit, but with Arab Spring, how big was the Arab Spring? Countries involved, type of thing, and let's start there how big was the Arab Spring?
Speaker 1:So I will share with you, adam, and our listeners, the little bit of history lesson From my perspective.
Speaker 1:I got stationed at Africa Command right at the time that the Arab Spring was taking place. So I shifted, you know, I changed PCS from, I believe I was here in Buckley Air Force Base and then I went over to England. When I got to England I hit the ground running in the intelligence department there and the Arab Spring was taking place. So what was going on there was that multiple countries across northern africa and through the levant, the political regime of basically every country along that that ocean path of the southern mediterranean, there social media was contributing to the social unrest, and the same type of message kind of caught fire across about a dozen countries in the Middle East and North Africa at that time and that message was basically all of these regimes that are in charge are strongman dictatorships or some version of that, and if the people really do rise up, the military won't back them and they won't have a leg to stand on. So all we know revolution, just a cry for revolution, and it worked.
Speaker 1:The millions of people flooded the streets in capital cities and other major cities all over the area and countries just started to fall right Like governments just started to topple, yeah, and so once the first couple lost their foothold I think Algeria was maybe one of the first ones that just kind of like waved their flag and was like we're leaving, like don't kill us, please. You know, um, you can have the mansion like just don't shoot us on the way out the back door.
Speaker 2:Yeah and yeah, and there was a few countries that did that right.
Speaker 1:Libya was the longtime kind of black eye for US foreign policy, where Muammar Gaddafi had been allowed to be a strong man, be a dictator, in the face of every kind of policy we ever had for that part of the world. He was there as an aberration.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and extravagantly Extravagant. Yeah, it was just purely about his own sultanship, if you will.
Speaker 1:Part of the world he was there as an aberration, yeah, and like extravagantly, yeah he was. It was just purely about his own sultanship, if you will, and he was kind of a lot like um uh, saddam hussein, right, uh, but with a less capable military. Saddam had a real, like actual military, and kaddafi barely did so. Kaddafi here's the story about the Arab Spring that I want our listeners to understand. In my perspective on it, gaddafi was a public enemy number one for a lot of different kind of government officials in the United States because he had there'd been bad blood over time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, More for like embarrassments and ego.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, he'd make some kind of deal with some you know with him, or the Muslim Brotherhood or something, and then Qaddafi would just do whatever he wanted to do.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:And he knew that he could, because of where he was Like nobody's going to go out of their way to come over here to live here and bother me right.
Speaker 2:Well, he was wrong.
Speaker 1:When 10 or 12 countries, including all of your neighbors, all have the same kind like regime in charge and they start to fall, you get real nervous and you start shaking in your boots. And so that's what happened is qaddafi went on the run, libya fell as far as the government goes and and qaddafi's turned, turned into um, you know, like whack-a-mole right, he was hiding from his own population and when the armed groups there they're just militant, you know militias, and got barely regulated warlord type militias when they took over the capital, he fled. Well, they eventually found him and um, he was executed by his own people. Yeah, did not end well. The united states was not just complicit in Gaddafi's downfall, we were almost supportive in some ways of running him to the edge where it was easy for his people to kill him.
Speaker 1:Like that's basically what we did.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we helped pressure him.
Speaker 1:We just put our foot on the scale, yeah through military might and through intelligence we were able to kind of create that outcome that he was not going to escape alive.
Speaker 2:Did we do any air support over there? Oh, we blasted the heck out of Libya, I thought. So that sounds familiar yeah.
Speaker 1:I have a NATO medal with a Libya campaign.
Speaker 2:Oh, really that's pretty cool.
Speaker 1:Um, because we were bombing stuff when I showed up there. Uh, and my Intel department was part of the damage assessment and where we're going to shoot at tomorrow, that kind of stuff. Right, isr management, but Assad Syria. Exact same thing happened. Exact same thing. His people raised up against him. They said you are a dictator, your leadership is purely down to.
Speaker 2:You're saying during the Arab Spring.
Speaker 1:During the Arab Spring? Yes, they went after him, or?
Speaker 2:they came up and tried to revolt.
Speaker 1:The same method of revolution was taking place in. Syria as it did in Libya. And in Libya we put munitions on target right, and in syria we went to the un and complained, you know yeah, we said oh, chlorine bombs, this is dangerous. Uh, chemical weapons and biological weapons, this is dangerous.
Speaker 2:Red lines don't kill civilians. I remember the red lines dangerous nothing happened.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was the exact same situation in liby, syria, from a US foreign policy perspective of if you want to topple a kingdom that has not got its human rights of its people in mind. These two examples are identical, but we toppled one and basically just gave the other one room to breathe right why?
Speaker 2:Why do you think that was?
Speaker 1:breathe right, why? Why do you think that was Well?
Speaker 2:Russia and.
Speaker 1:Turkey. Both are part of the Syria conversation in a totally different way than they were for Libya, but with Arab Spring and with the revolutionary things that were happening at that time, there was never a time where the scales would have been more tilted in our favor, for our interest, to get that regime out of office yeah to interact and with the least amount of effort, pressure, danger, risk, we could have made it happen.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, and we waited. It was a time it was purely down to seize the initiative because the Arab Spring was short. It was about two months long from the beginning to the very end and in that course of time, like five different governments completely fell and recreated. But we waited too long is really in my mind. Right, as soon as Gaddafi left Libya's Capitol, we started bombing stuff and we're like he's not going to get any of his military back, he's not going to get his resources back. If he does return, there's not going to be anything to return to.
Speaker 1:Right, when Assad started to bolt down and said Damascus is the safe place and everybody else is just going to be a civil war, we just let him draw the lines of the conflict and we stood back. Then Russia brought in actual ground troops to back up Damascus, and now we're in a whatever 12, 13 year civil war where the leadership regime was backed by one supporter, really, which was Russia, and that was enough to protect Damascus. And we this we've been frozen in that stalemate ever since. Yeah, so the problem with that is is that all the rebel groups have always been associated with Iran or ISIS or Al Qaeda, iran or ISIS or al-Qaeda. There's not a militia group out there that is not associated with violence and terrorism.
Speaker 2:Right and to make sure we keep it clear, the Syrian civil war, that wasn't ISIS's big push or anything like that a few years where ISIS made their caliphate and took over.
Speaker 1:That's been part of it right Part of it yeah. It's been going on for so long. Yes, that is part of it.
Speaker 2:In.
Speaker 1:Iraq and Syria. There was that third kind of bubble.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that is a part of since Arab Spring happened and the rest of Syria became destabilized and Damascus, basically, was all that Assad cared about. Then that, yes, exactly what you're talking about is an effect of the civil war that's been going on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, so you know we spent you know a lot of munitions trying to destroy ISIS too, but we didn't completely eradicate them. You know, over the last few years you could you could always see a little bubble you know a couple little bubbles of you know ISIS controlled territories and stuff like that. When this push started happening, you know we had the ISIS guys, because there's so many different factions now and I hate how people name themselves and like all their names sound kick-ass.
Speaker 2:They're like oh, liberation Army, hell yeah, oh, you guys are just slaughtering people.
Speaker 1:Never mind, we're liberating them from being alive. Yeah right.
Speaker 2:So you have all these different factions fighting there. Who is taking over right now? We say ISIS, is it just them?
Speaker 1:Are they getting help from other entities? I'm sure, as you just mentioned, that there is an actual name for the freedom fighters that just recently ran this campaign and took over Aleppo and then made it into Damascus. I'm sure that there's some official name for them, but they are basically just a political front for the ISIS militants that have been fighting the civil war all along, and so what we see now is at which it was as required. Right. There is now a well-groomed, well-spoken guy that is the leader of everything, and he's wearing his olive drab military shirt all the time. Right, which is very uh.
Speaker 1:Castro. Yeah, you know, uh, you know, it's just got that Yasser Arafat.
Speaker 2:Yeah, oh, yeah, yeah, there you go.
Speaker 1:And so, um, we basically have, you know, a terrorist who's just in charge of his own private military that has taken over the country, and they were born out of ISIS. So that's where we're at now. Is they want to have, they want to be seen as having some legitimacy, but at the same time, I don't think they're mincing any words over things like, hey, we're going to, we're going to be a lot, you know, sharia law type stuff. You know women's women don't have rights, you know we're basically the Taliban in Syria at this point.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and they're trying to.
Speaker 1:They're not lying about that.
Speaker 2:No, and they're going to redraw the map lines and Israel has already moved into them too. They're trying to take more Golem Heights area and moving into that area.
Speaker 1:They pushed beyond what their DMZ was and have been holding land and that absolutely that Syria would be. It's sort of one of those things where know your enemy and and know the devil that you know versus the devil that you don't know. Assad was not really doing anything to mess with Israel or any of the fight that's been going on there for the last year and a half. This regime would not have that. They would be interested in getting involved.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, and this comes right on the heels of Israel and Hezbollah getting their peace deals on.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this is just north Lebanon's only like 70 miles wide. You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 2:Syria is so much bigger that whole little spot where Israel touches Syria is a small little. It's a small connection. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But I'm saying the buffer that is Lebanon, between Syria and Israel is nothing.
Speaker 2:There's not very much land there.
Speaker 1:So, again, this is one of those situations where if Hezbollah, for whatever reason, felt like they were totally defeated or something, this is basically their reinforcements, right, you got some people that are fresh from the fight, they've got places to stockpile, they've got places to stockpile, they got places to regroup and you maybe have a whole new kind of fresh breath of troops and Hezbollah gets a whole new you know basically another country backing them. Now We'll see, but you know the takeaway for me. I was jumping up and down on foreign policy back in when the Arab Spring was going on and being, you know, eyes on the, the intel problem. I said only time will tell how our two totally different approaches to basically the exact same situation, yeah, how's this going to work out, right?
Speaker 1:Well here we are.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Today's the day where I feel like I can say that time has told.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right and America. I believe America's interests would have been best served if we treated Assad and Syria the same way that we treated Libya and. Gaddafi and we tipped the scale. Yeah, yeah, I think we should have done that.
Speaker 2:I think this is one of the knocks that President Obama got a lot is that he wasn't really bold when it came to like military leadership, especially not in the Middle East. Yeah, gaddafi was an easy kill. Yeah, you know, because it was there, it was. Everybody hated him. It was an easy, easy decision.
Speaker 1:Nobody was going to come to his defense.
Speaker 2:Right, the whole deal in Syria, the red line that he drew and let him walk over, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:These are definitely some of the black guys on the ground down here. Everybody was concerned about it turning into a proxy conflict situation where we would have some, you know, crossfire with.
Speaker 2:Russia and end up in a fight Right Um I don't care.
Speaker 1:That was a stupid mentality. And now again, time will tell Russia can't invade and win in Ukraine. They can't. They can't take kiev and they are stuck in the mud. They're bringing in conscripts from other countries. Yeah, and if there was one other battlefront, not even another theater, if just poland got hot, moscow would fall in a couple months.
Speaker 2:Man, russia cannot hold their ground at all uh, one thing with syria falling, I think will be interesting too is Syria was kind of used by Russia and Iran as like a point for them both to go to without talking to each other. So you know, without having that, that point, now what's going to happen with that relationship between Russia and Iran? It's going to. Are they going to be more blatant? Interests are a lot different, for sure. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And the equation has changed a lot, oh, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So yeah, Russia has.
Speaker 1:They have very little interest or benefit in being buddies with Iran right now.
Speaker 2:Right now? Yeah, especially with Iran's mothership out there. Yeah, exactly, why are you guys messing around? Do Jersey man? They get mad when you poke around in Jersey. Yeah, like Russia cares I do.
Speaker 1:I will say Saturday Night Live is known for bagging on new jersey right, because it's just a new york, new jersey thing, and man, that the jokes that they tell about you know, just new jersey is so funny. Um, so I can see. I just hear those same jokes, like russia telling iran like guess what, we're flying over New Jersey? Like all you're going to see is a pile of trash. Some joke like that I went to New Jersey once.
Speaker 2:It's a lot like Siberia.
Speaker 1:The women are toothless and everything smells like horses, something like that, you know, oh that's great yeah. Well, that's a great note to end on. Yeah, you know, syria has fallen to the criminals.
Speaker 1:But new jersey, it's not new jersey, oh shit uh well, I guess next week is christmas, so I'm sure we won't be recording an episode next week. So for all of our listeners that just don't know what to do with themselves when we don't publish an episode next week, so for all of our listeners that just don't know what to do with themselves when we don't publish an episode next week, we will not be publishing an episode.
Speaker 2:We will still be doing the Vets Lunch up at Panera Bread at. North Academy.
Speaker 1:So anybody listening want to go out to that, and that is the day after.
Speaker 2:Christmas, yeah, on the 26th, yeah, yeah, I figure people might want to have the connection. So, yeah, we'll be up there for that still, okay, yeah.
Speaker 1:I like it Cool.
Speaker 2:Well, we'll see you there then All right, all right, man. Well, thanks everybody for tuning in. This is Left Face. We'll catch you in a couple weeks.
