Part Two: Bashar al Assad: The Eye Doctor Who Murdered a Nation

In Part Two on Bashar al Assad, Robert is joined again by Anna Hossnieh to continue discussing how he murdered his nation.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hmm, what's bomb in my neighborhoods filled with women in?
This is not an intro. I should I should continue?
I don't know, I don't How do you? How do
you open part two of the episode on Bashar al
Assad the greatest mass murder of the century? Not that way?

(00:21):
That was clearly wrong, Uh, wildly wildly wrong. Never should
have been attempted. Sophie is shaking her head at me,
and oh damn, no, I thought you were going to
be ashamed too, but you just doubled down. I appreciate that.
You know, it's a true friend who sees you digging
your own grave and grabs a shovel and it's like, yeah,

(00:42):
let's fucking make this whole bigger. It's a mark of friendship. Now.
And you know, we had a lot of fun. No
we didn't. Uh you're the co host of the Ethnically
Ambiguous podcast, I am, and uh we're talking about Bashar

(01:03):
al Assad. So my favorite um probably micro penis holder.
Oh my god, if you added six inches to his dick,
you'd still need tweezers to find it. It's probably non existent,
which is why he's so angry. Yeah, I mean, you know,
that's why he wanted to get his eyes. You know,
he wanted to fix everyone's eyes so they could see
his penis because he's being like to see it. So
maybe I'll become an optometrist. Maybe someone will fucking see

(01:25):
my penis everybody. I was going to go on this
thing about how we shouldn't like demonize micro penis is,
but then you made a really fucking good joke, and uh,
we should have seized micro penis is because if you
have one, it doesn't matter. Nothing matters the fact that
you can still you can still come, and that's all
that matters. You can still have child. And if you

(01:47):
can't come, that that's fine too. Uh, we're getting way
off the subject of Bashar al Assad here. Well, I
feel like I'll only demonize it if you are someone
like Bachar la saw who who takes it out on
other people by murdering yeah yeah, children, Like I would

(02:08):
never make fun of anyone for having a squeaky voice.
But if you're like a little fascist media personality who
argues about how all Muslims are monsters and you have
a voice that sounds like you've been in haling helium
for the last thirty years and your name is Ben Shapiro.
I might make fun of that, like, hey, I'm popular,

(02:30):
so anna. Uh do you know the name Mohammed Boiseiz No. Well,
he was a twenty five year old man in the
year two thousand ten. He worked as a street vendor
in Tunisia. His father had died when he was young,
and Mohammed wound up supporting his family through a very

(02:50):
rough economy, even managing to pay for one of his
sisters to attend university. He seems to have been a
real stand up guy, dropped out of school, you know,
put his own dreams on hold in order to take
care of like several brothers and sisters and like a
couple of elderly relatives. Uh. Now, for some reason, local
police officers took a dislike to Mohammed. Uh. They regularly

(03:10):
confiscated his wares, likely because he could not afford to
bribe them not to do so. One day in mid
December two thousand ten, this happened again, and Mohammed tried
to seek redress through the organs of his local government.
But Tunisia was a state ruled by an autocratic dictator
and an ossified bureaucracy. That existed primarily to let people

(03:31):
with family connections make money by fucking over poor folks
like Mohammed Boisiz. His quest ended at the governor, who
refused to talk to him, even after Mohammed said, if
you don't see me, I'll burn myself. Mohammed immediately left
to do just that. He acquired a can of gasoline
from a nearby station and lit himself on fire in
front of the governor's office. He died on January fourth,

(03:54):
two thousand eleven, after days of unspeakable agony. But in death,
the governor and the dictator, a real president of Tunisia,
could not ignore Mohammed Boisiz. His death is generally seen
as having ignited the Arab Spring, which overthrew the president
of Tunisia as well as the dictators of Egypt and Libya.
For a time, Bashar al Assad thought he would be

(04:15):
safe from the fires of revolution sweeping through the Arab world.
David lash is the writer who spent a lot of
time with Bashar. We heard about him in the last
episode UH. He wrote a book called The Fall of
the House of Assad. It cites several articles that the
regime published during this time. Both in its own magazine
Forward and in a Wall Street Journal interview with Assad quote.

(04:35):
Both articles in the February issue reflected the presidents and
the regime sense of immunity from the virus of protests
spreading elsewhere in the Arab world. The editor in chief
of the magazine, Dr Samim will bay It, is a
professor of international relations in the country and one of
its foremost commentators. He has access to high places in Syria,
and therefore his essays often reflect regime sentiments. For this issue,

(04:57):
he wrote a piece entitled Lessened from Egypt West is
not best. In it, Mbaiad repeatedly hammers home the point
that the dictators in the Arab world who had either
fallen by then President Bin Ali and Tunisia or were
on their way out President Hostnu Mobarik of Egypt and
President of Doula, Sala and Yemen were being run out
of office by widespread popular protest, primarily because over the

(05:18):
years they had been the lackeys of the West, particularly
of the United States. So Assad and his cronies at
first thought they would be safe from the Arab spring, because,
of course, Assad hadn't been an American lackey Mbaiad's article
ends ironically by accurately describing the forces then sweeping the
Arab world, which they just didn't think We're gonna come
for them. Quote. What is so beautiful about the Tunisian

(05:41):
and Egyptian stories is that this time it wasn't flamboyant
and inexperienced young officers toppling the young king norma. Was
it turbent clerics toppling an autocratic and aging royal like
Iran nineteen seventy nine. It was also not US tanks
rubbling into Tunisia, as was the case with Baghdad in
two thousand three. It was the people of Tunisia, the
young and the old, the innale actual and the unemployed.
It was the glorious people of Egypt who said enough

(06:03):
is enough. What mubay It and other Assadus did not
see is that the exact same forces that had made
Tunisia right for revolution and demi crushing corruption that robbed
young people have paths towards a decent life and left
them hopeless, underemployed, and enraged. That was present in Syria
as well. While assad had opened up the economy somewhat,
every reform was calculated in one way or another to

(06:25):
benefit his core supporters or gain him new supporters, because
every dictatorship in every country is just a gigantic gangster
enterprise when you get right down to it. Wait, so
they he thought that his people hadn't noticed what he
was up to. Basically, he thought his people loved him
and that they would not revolt because he hadn't been
a lackey of the US. He thought the Arab spring

(06:46):
was people being angry at dictators in their region, uh
doing what the US wanted. And he was like, well,
I'm I don't like the US, so people will back me,
Like obviously they're going to keep loving bashar God. These dudes.
That's what's crazy, is like they have no sense of
what's going on around them, Like not at all. No,

(07:06):
that's what happens when you have the bat like arresting
and torturing everybody who is like, maybe things could be
less corrupt. I guess you don't pay people to tell
you anything negative. You pay people to tell you we
have arrested X number of dissidents and they are in
a dark hole instead of being like just f y,

(07:28):
I like, so we took a survey and it looks like, um,
people like think you're shady. Yeah, people don't like that
we throw so many people in the dark holes that
actually the dark hole approval rating is like eight percent.
No no one in this yeah, no one almost no

(07:48):
one's we like the dark holes. That's the eight percent
is the is the Macabat vote. They vote for dark holes,
but everyone else really against the dark holes that we
throw dissidents into. It looks like we're not We're not
getting the numbers we were hoping for dark holes. We're
thinking of rebranding the dark hole that we throw dissidents into.
What about this rainbow circle? I love it? I love it.

(08:13):
That's the I forget which one of us now is
the brand name? Yeah. In February two th eleven, Maria Siasna,
a fourteen year old kid, was hanging out with his
friends in the Syrian town of Dara. Tunisia's dictator had
just been forced out of power, and these kids were ornery,
so they scared up some red paint and daubed your

(08:34):
Turn Doctor on the walls of their school. Now Dara
is a fairly small rural town near the border with
Jordan's At that point, Syria was in the grip of
an intense drought, which had reduced crop yields and crippled
the already stumbling economy. Youth unemployment was particularly bad, and
Maria and his friends had little hope of growing up
in a world with many options for them if things

(08:55):
continued on the way they were going. So they painted
a threat against their dictator on the wall of their school,
and soon after that all hell broke loose. Assad's men
quickly arrested the tenth graders and sent them back to
Damascus to be brutally tortured by a bunch of Nazi
trained torture experts. This was a pretty normal move from Mikabarat,
but unknown to Bashar the in those secret policemen, the

(09:16):
winds of the world had just changed. The people of
Dara were quite suddenly unwilling to accept this kind of bullshit.
On March of two thousand eleven, they took to the streets.
Hundreds of people, many of them relatives of the arrested boys,
protested the regime. The crowd grew to thousands. B Shar's
police opened fire, killing four and dispersing the crowd, But
the next day, twenty thousand furious Syrians took to the streets,

(09:38):
and the days that followed things grew more violent, and
Mukabarat offices were vandalized, more protesters were murdered in larger numbers.
Funerals of the dead became protests, and so the regime
banned funerals. Yeah, when you're banning funerals, you might be
uh monstrous statalitarian dictating. Yeah, I mean it's crazy that

(09:59):
these kids had no I do what they were about
to literally like domino effect into but like how could
they have possibly known? So, I mean you're banning funerals,
it's like, then stop fucking killing everybody. Maybe like taking
as a goddamn hint. If people are this upset, maybe
you shouldn't be easy to reduce the funerals. Stop killing people.

(10:21):
I guess common sense isn't a thing within regime, So
I don't know what I'm even saying. Yeah, I mean
it's a type of common sense within the logic of
murdering people, within regime logic where you're like, well, yeah,
says that we, you know, have to murder everyone who
stands up to us. Yeah, if you're a regime, it

(10:42):
makes sense. Yeah, none of this work to stop the
growing unrest. A single act of childish graffiti and Dara
wound up being the spark that started the Syrian Civil War,
which is so far at the deadliest civil war of
the twenty first century. According to David lesh Quote, it
is almost certain that Bashar al Assad absolutely shocked when
the uprisings in the Arab world started to seep into

(11:03):
his country in March two thousand eleven. I believe he
truly thought he was safe and secure and popular in
the country and was beyond condemnation. But this was not
the case in the Middle East of two thousand eleven,
where the stream of information via the Internet, Facebook, Twitter,
YouTube and mobile phones could not be controlled as it
once had been. On March two thousand eleven, but Shar
al Assad addressed his nation over the continuing unrest. He

(11:26):
promised vague reforms, which of course he could not actually
deliver upon. Any reforms to reduce corruption would be taking
money out of the pockets of his supporters, which of
course he could not afford to do at the moment.
Any actual political openness would be seized upon his weakness
and lead to his fall from power. So he promised nothing,
and ended his speech with quote, I shall remain the

(11:47):
faithful brother and comrade who will walk with his people
and lead them to build the Syria. We love the Syria.
We are proud of the Syria, which is invincible to
its enemies. You know, I do wonder if he like
he just was in over his head and started I
mean not that I'm in any way defending LA, but
I wonder if he was over his head and then

(12:07):
just started to panic, like just being like yeah, yeah, yeah,
kill it, kill kill mall yeah. And then now he's like, ship, Well,
now that I've like in my panic have started acting
like a full psycho, I guess I just have to
keep it going. Yeah. You know there's a version of
this where that is what goes on, where he's kind
of like a Czar Nicholas figure, and like the initial

(12:28):
bloodletting is more accidental because of how the regimes set up,
that's how the security forces respond. You the leader are
left grappling with it. But then things hit a certain
point and it's like, well they're gonna kill me or
I can kill all of them. Yeah. There is kind
of like a vibe, like a really dumb vibe where
he's like, I guess I'm a dictator now, Like it's like,

(12:48):
you fucking idiot, But he had been before, like you
operated Nazi torture dungeons, then let the CIA use them
like Bashar wasn't. Yeah, it's he's there's definitely an aspect
of this that is a guy like obviously he didn't
want this. Nobody, no, none of these people want there

(13:08):
to be a civil war because there's a chance that
like you get thrown out of power. Um, I don't know,
you know, we'll we'll talk about that more by the end.
We'll see what conclusion you come to about how how
his journey on this. For most of the world, Friday
April one was April Fool's Day. In Syria. In two

(13:29):
thousand eleven, it was the Friday of Martyrs. This was
the name given to a day of furious protests across
the country, conducted in the name of the dozens who
had been shot dead by security forces and the hundreds
who were currently being tortured. This time, but char al
Assad ordered snipers up on the roofs of cities around
the country. They fired randomly into crowds of activists and
shot anyone who broke curfew. Next, according to Lesha's book

(13:52):
quote in New May and June two thousand eleven, the
regime continued to engage in a schizophrenic response to the protests.
While can hinduing to make some concessions and announce reform measures,
the military and security forces intensified their crackdown in cities
across Syria that were hit by demonstrations. To the outside observer,
this approach may seem contradictory and indicative of fissures within

(14:13):
the ruling elite on how to respond to the crisis.
On the other hand, from the perspective of the shar
in his inner circle, it could be seen as two
sides of the same coin in a way that came
to be expected of the Assad regimes old and new.
It was something of an axiom of power politics that
one offers concessions only from a position of strength, never
from a position of weakness. Therefore, while there was also

(14:33):
a practical side to the Assad approach in terms of
repressing the unrest, it also clearly indicated that the regime
wanted to portray itself is only making concessions and offering
reform measures from a position of strength. Mhm, so he
just okay, sorry and yeah, no, I mean he he
wants to He's willing to give people concessions, but only

(14:54):
if he stays in control. And the only way to
stay in control is to kill people, right, But he
didn't really like what were the concession Like, did any
did anything come of that? Yeah? No, not really, Like
it was the same as the concessions he offered at
the start of his reign, where it's like, I'll open
things up, but like you already did that and then
closed them down again because it was bad for you.
Like why would you trust Bashar al Assad at this point? Uh? Yeah.

(15:18):
One of the people who died so but schar could
offer reform from a position of strength was Hamza al Katib.
He was thirteen years old when he went missing on
the twenty ninth of April. His battered and abused corpse
was returned to his family a month later. His family
shared pictures of their boys torn up body on social media,
and raged at his murder, spread viral. E Asad's government,

(15:39):
of course, denied torturing the child. They had a doctor
who worked for the government examined the body. He concluded
that all of the scars and holes and injuries were
not consistent with torture. Bashar al Assad made a big
show of visiting the family to share his uh sadness
that this tragic and inexplicable death that he and his
security apparatus had no role in the Like, Yeah, yeah,

(16:00):
it looks like no no torture here, So sorry about
your boy. What a mystery. Yeah, you know, based on
you know, my work as an optometrist, I can see
there is no torture. M hmm. Yeah, his eyes look great,
look good. Good piece of ship, yeah, real piece of ship.

(16:22):
This photo up with the grieving family of a murdered
boy did not shockingly reduce opposition to the Assad regime.
A Facebook page was created in his name, garnering sixty
thousand supporters. One commenter wrote, there is no place left
here for a regime after what they did to Hamsa.
On July eleven, seven Syrian Arab Army officers defected from

(16:45):
the military, forming the core of the Free Syrian Army.
By November, the f s A was strong enough to
launch armed attacks on the regime itself in this way
and stops and starts the protests and street activism and
violent state repression gradually escalated to full fledged warfare. In
January of two thousand twelve, Neustra Front and his Lamist
rebel group declared their opposition to the regime. Whole cities

(17:08):
wound up an open rebellion to the state in February
two thousand twelve, but Shar had his army assault Holmes,
the third largest city in Syria. Four hundred people, virtually
all of them civilians, were killed on the first day.
You see, Assad's army crumbled fairly quickly in the face
of the rebellion. It had never been a particularly potent force,
and many of its men had deserted for the other

(17:29):
side once the fighting started. At one point, he had
less than five thousand soldiers in the whole country, so
Assad relied heavily on random artillery strikes and equally random
bombings by his air force, which was the one thing
he had that the rebels did not. The Syrian air
force was from the beginning Assad's greatest weapon against his
own people. In August two thousand twelve, the regime was

(17:50):
filmed dropping its very first barrel bomb on the city
of Halms. Now, and you know what a barrel bomb
is Um, I'm gonna guess most people have heard the term. Yeah.
It's probably the iconic weapon of the Syrian Civil War,
and it's essentially a huge metal barrel packed full of
high explosives and shrapnel, nails, metal bits, whatever. It all
functions the same with a few dozen pounds of r

(18:12):
d X behind it. A barrel bomb is the kind
of weapon you deploy when you don't care who you kill.
And uh, yeah, it's there's a video on YouTube that
I would recommend listeners watch. If you just type in
a sod barrels, you will find it. Um it's horrific. Uh,
one of the worst things I've ever seen. Like the

(18:35):
wake of these bombings is um, almost indescribable. Uh. It's
it's worse than what I've seen in the wake of
US air strikes, which is pretty horrific in and of itself,
But an explosive like this, it's just like a particularly
awful way to wage war, like even worse than a

(18:56):
hell fire missile. It's like I don't understand, Like he's like, oh,
you know, that's what's crazy. Like he's he says, Okay,
I'm gonna I'm gonna give concessions I'm gonna work with
you guys, so you don't keep protesting me. And then
he just goes and like kills a town. What's what's
the issue with the regime, what's everybody's problem? I'm gonna

(19:19):
drop just barrels of death on you guys. Why is it?
Why is nobody like me? Yeah, it's like, dude, like
fucking read the room. Yeah, read the room. What are
we doing here anymore? I don't even this is it's
so crazy, Like it's so hard to wrap your mind
around someone who in a way, like when you first

(19:41):
think about it, like he didn't want to become the leader.
He had so much potential to just be a good
human being in an office running a country, like coming
from his point of view of being like I don't
really want to run a country, like I just want
to be this regular doctor like blah blah blah. It's
like I could just be an easy going guy who's
like one of the people. Um. I mean, honestly, it

(20:03):
goes back to bad parenting. Uh, but this is insane.
It's like so insane that he was like, all right,
let's just turn this around and kill everybody. Yep, Yes,
I'm murdering. Yeah, and uh, he got right to murdering. Um.
I'd like to quote from a Doctor's Without Borders article
about the use of barrel bombs primarily in the city
of Aleppo during the fighting there. Barrel bombings and Eastern

(20:27):
Aleppo were so unpredictable and widespread that they have sown
fear throughout the city. It is extremely difficult for someone
to take measures to protect their families and improve their safety.
What contributes to higher levels of psychological stress. You never
know when a bomb can happen. This is the problem.
You could be at home having dinner, you could be sleeping,
you could be walking to the shop. At any time
it might happen. Especially coming to Turkey. For those who
have to go to Turkey for work or two unite

(20:48):
family members, it is a very scary route as you
don't know who you might meet and what might happen.
You don't know if you will return home safe or
see your family again. That's a quote from a Tarik,
a health worker in Alsama, Aleppo. So but Charlasad punished
Aleppo and other cities for their disobedience by leveling the
vast majority of the buildings there with endless reigns of

(21:09):
barrel bombs during the four year battle for Aleppo, residents
would celebrate whenever the weather was cloudy, because it meant
that they would at least get a few hours break
before the next bombs fell. One staff member told Doctors
Without Borders quote, one day when we were working at
the hospital in eastern Aleppo was the day of a
high number of barrel bombings. It was like the city
was in chaos, and lots of people were being brought
to us, dead and alive. I remember when two bodies

(21:32):
were brought in, an old man and his small grandson.
They both had the same name. They must have been
together when the bomb hit. The family was searching for
them in all the hospitals of Aleppo, but couldn't find them.
Their neighbors had also been bombed, so there was no
one to ask about the whereabouts of these two. Finally
they came and the bodies were identified. It was all
just one instance, but still we all felt so sad. Yeah, yeah, no, one,

(21:56):
that's so sad. There's like just no, you just don't know.
You don't know what's going to happen at any point
at any time. You just live in fucking fear that
the man who runs your country just may like casual
decide to bomb your town or your home. Yeah, you're
just like, oh, well, you know, one of those days. Oh,
thank god for the clouds so we don't get barrel bombed.

(22:21):
The president can't murder us today unless the clouds go away. Yeah.
Chris kozak Assyria research analysts for the Institute of the
Study of War, explains that the regime's strategy with barrel
bombs is to quote, inflict mass punishment against opposition supported
populations or populations that were perceived to be supportive of

(22:41):
the opposition in order to prevent the formation of a
viable alternative to the regime. And it really seems to
have worked. Like the Free Syrian Army at the start
was a really secular force run by a lot of
really brave men, and it's sort of degraded into kind
of a lot of bandits and extremists at this point,
just because everybody at the start of the civil war

(23:02):
who was like providing a viable alternative to Bashar's government
and like was a hope of civil society. Like he
killed them all, um, Like that was a big part
of his strategy is like, oh, they want to run
Syria without me, Well I'll just murder everybody who can
run Syria without me. Yeah, everyone's gone, Yeah, everybody's everybody's gone,

(23:23):
and all the survivors are too shell shocked and terrified
to do anything but hide. That's a strategy. Do we
know how many people are left in his army? No?
I mean at this point, he's conscripted a lot more,
and it's it's it's up to a higher level. But
there was one point where they were essentially militias and
gangs that were allied with the regime were way larger

(23:45):
than the actual Syrian Erab army, you know, especially if
you're talking like two fourteen. Yeah, he's got like help
from Iran in other places, Yeah, yeah, a lot of yeah,
help from Iran, help from his blah, help from help
from Russia. Um B Shar's favorite target for his barrel

(24:06):
bombs outside of the crowdit apartment buildings as hospitals. On
one day, he struck a left post in tent hospital
with two barrel bombs, two cluster bombs in one rocket. Now,
striking hospitals is a war crime, but Assad figures what's
the harm in committing war crimes when you know nobody
is ever going to punish you. They're not really crimes,
then are they. He also loves bombing elementary schools, and

(24:27):
one two fourteen attack he killed twenty five small children
with a single bomb. When interviewed by the BBC, Bashar
al Assad denies his regime has ever deployed barrel bombs,
saying it's a childish story that keeps repeating in the West.
If someone who is against his people and against regional
powers and the great powers in the West, how did
they survive? If you kill the Syrian people, do they

(24:48):
support you or do they turn against you? As long
as you have the public support, it means you are
defending the people. If you kill the people, they turn
against you. It's commons sense. You can watch people drop
barrels out of Syrian Air Force planes on the buildings,
but you know there's no like he's bombing hospitals because

(25:11):
they're like treating people who aren't for him like that
because they're in rebel controlled chunks of the city and
kill them all. Yeah, a big part of it is
just completely destroying any kind of resistance to the regime.
That's the kind of war he's waging. Like, I was

(25:31):
not against when the US went and bombed what they
thought were his chemical weapon factories. Everyone was offended by it,
being like we're going to war. I was like, no,
we're fucking doing something. Fuck this guy. It's one of
those things. I mean, we didn't actually like I'm against
it because it was completely useless and accomplished nothing. I'm
not against attacking the Syrian regime and trying to destroy

(25:54):
their chemical weapon stock piles. But if you're talking about
the Trump administration's cruise missile attack, like it just didn't
fucking do anything, but it was I like that it
was something to be like, we fucking see you, bro. Yeah, yeah,
it's at least it's it's not nothing. Um So I'll
give it that, like it's better than nothing. But I
will say it didn't accomplish anything other than maybe scaring

(26:21):
him a little bit. But I don't even know how
much it scared him because the next day he fucking
released that photo of himself walking through with a briefcase,
which is like, motherfucker, were you even carrying a briefcase?
What are you keeping that briefcase? Like you fucking asshole.
Fucking b shoe you you baby, you've got nothing. You
know who's not an asshole walking with a briefcase through

(26:44):
the ruins of his destroyed airfield. Anna, the advertisers who
support this show nice. Yes, that's the behind the bastards guarantee.
None of our advertisers are bashar all assade. And watch
the fucking next ad that gets randomly. It's going to

(27:05):
Damascus Airport now open for business again, see the wonderful beaches.
I would love to see Damascus if there was a
way to do it without you know, putting, putting putting.
Well no, I mean it's pretty safe for travelers. It's
just you'd be putting money into the regime and I
don't want to do that. But Damascus is a city

(27:27):
I've always wanted to say anyway, Yeah, it's incredible. My
my Arabic teacher was a Syrian and he was from Aleppo,
and this was back in two thousand six. Um. I
just remember how much he would talk about how beautiful
his city was, proud he was of his country, about
how we created the alphabet, like that's a real thing
that the Syrians aim. Yeah, fucking made math. Yeah, horrible tragedy.

(27:53):
What's happened not a horrible tragedy? Are our products and services?
Was that a good ad break, Sophie? Do we do
it right? No? Well it's done. Products, we're back, We're

(28:14):
back after what I have to assume is the best
ad break anyone has ever done. Um, it's gonna be like,
do you like regimes? You're gonna love but charlads And
you're like, wait, what just literally an ad for places
on our side? He's like, hey, guys, I get a
lot of heat. But what you don't know is I'm
actually quite self deprecating in a real fun guy and

(28:37):
people love my giggle. He's actually he's hosting a new
podcast about Phil Collins. That would that would be so wild.
He's like, guys, I love Phil Collins and my first
guests are Brad and Angelina. Check it out on the
Sadcast podcast. I hate to say it, but that's a

(28:57):
it's a solid it's a solid name. So we make
that podcast. No, under no circumstances should we make that podcast? Cool?
You're not? Okay? Yeah, let's uh, let's not make that podcast. So. Yeah.
You can watch dozens of videos of Assad's regime dropping

(29:18):
barrel bombs if you want to see that yourself. For
some reason, at least a hundred and eighty one thousand,
five hundred and fifty seven civilians have been killed in
battle by the Syrian regime, which is ninety five point
seven percent of the total combat death toll in the
Syrian Civil War. These are just confirmed dead, with total
expected fatalities over half a million. The real number is

(29:39):
much likely higher. The regime has killed at least eighteen thousand,
four hundred and fifty six children, nine three point six
percent of the children who are known to have died
in the Syrians Civil War. Now, that number leaves out
a hundred and twenty eight thousand people who have been missing,
in many cases for years, inside the secret prisons run
by the Bashar al Assad government. According to the New

(30:01):
York Times quote, government memos smuggled out of the country
show that officials who reported directly to Mr. Alissad ordered
the crackdowns on civilians and new of atrocities. They ordered
a harsh treatment of specific detainees, and complained of increasing
detainee deaths as corpses piled up and decomposed. One government
memo urged personnel to complete paperwork and protect officials from

(30:22):
future prosecution. Detainees are regularly beaten, hung by their wrists,
beaten while crammed inside tires, shocked with electricity, and sexually assaulted.
More baroque forms of torture include forcing detainees to act
like animals, beat or kill one another, and dousing them
with fuel and burning them. It's possible that more than
a hundred thousand people have died that way, yeah, which

(30:47):
is for reference in Libya since two thousand eleven. If
you include all of the deaths in the fighting to
overthrow Kaddafi and all of the deaths in the violence
since Kaddafi's overthrow, two nineteen fifty people have died from
the violence in Libya. But char Alassa it has tortured
twice that many people to death, not counting the barrel bombs,

(31:10):
not counting the chemical weapons, not counting gunfire, not counting mortars,
not counting rockets, not counting Russian airplanes, just torturing people
to death twice as many people as have died in
Libya since two thousand eleven fighting God bless all them people,
because fighting for what you believe in in the Middle

(31:30):
East is suicides. Yeah, it's always for the most part,
not going to get the way you would like. Has
not in a while. Uh now, after all this horrifying brutality,
all these senseless deaths. I know what you're wondering, Anna,
how has this war been for Bashar and his lovely
wife Ozma. Well, your your face, you skin cancer. Yeah,

(32:00):
it's one of those things where it's like cancer, get
your boys like this. These are the people to to
happen to. But they'll probably both live to a hundred
and three. Um, but I know you're curious as to
what their daily life has been. The good news is

(32:20):
that thousands of their emails were leaked to The Guardian,
so we actually have a pretty good idea of what
they got up to in between all the barrel bombs
and such. First off, so how did their emails get leaked?
I don't know, It's just just something that happens. They
confirmed it. The Guardian confirmed it with a number of
different people, including recipients of the emails, that they were
legitimate and stuff. Um, you know, it's one of those things.

(32:41):
How did fucking you know, shiploads of people's emails get
leaked out these days? It's just the how what happens
got the hackers out there? Them hackers. Now, Uh, first off,
you're gonna guess what the assad's favorite TV show has
been during the Civil War? Oh know, like what like
Friends on Netflix? America's got talent? Oh my god, yea,

(33:07):
they are such trash. They are basic bitches. I feel
comfortable saying that. Uh. Also big fans of the Harry
Potter movies. There was some worry at one point that
they wouldn't be able to get their hands on Harry
Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part two because of the war,
but they did get a copy. So I'm actually not
surprised by that because I bet but chars he's a
lot of himself and like Baltimore, like, you know, this

(33:30):
guy makes a lot of good points. This guy is
making a lot of He's saying all the right things.
He was death eaters, Yeah, good luck. Yeah. Here's the
Guardian quote in one email, all a sad laughs at
democratic reforms. When his wife tells him she'll come home

(33:50):
early one day, he quips, this is the best reform
any country can have. That you told me where you
will be. We are going to adopt it instead of
the rubbish laws of parties, elections, media and that funny
how about you fuck you don't like his dictator women?
Am I right? It's like, get the fuck out of here,
you're killing people. Al Assad joked with how deal al Ali,

(34:14):
one of his media consultants, while Arab League monitors were
in serious seeking to bring it into the carnage. Al
Assad ridiculed the mission, sending al Ali a YouTube parody
of the violence that uses children's toys. Check out this video,
he wrote. She responded with ha ha ha ha ha
o MG exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point, what m

(34:35):
this bitch? And there was a sad fucking looking up
YouTube videos while his forces are murdering, bombing hospitals. Yeah.
The only vague suggestion one gets that Bashar might have
something that approaches a conscience comes from an email he's
sent on February five, two th twelve, on the day
after his artillery had killed four hundred civilians in the

(34:55):
city of Halms, pulping flesh and bone and concrete into
a powdered slurry. If broke and lives, Assad sent his
wife an iTunes download of a country song by Blake Shelton.
He wrote out some of the lyrics in the email.
I've been a walk in heart heartache. I've made a
mess of me. The person that I've been lately ain't
who I want to be. Are you? I am fucking

(35:19):
serious if that is not a reason to fucking blow
his brains out, Like what are you even talking about?
There's nothing relatable about you, fool, No fucking Blake Shelton,
Like I would say, listen to Chris Christofferson, but Chris
Christofferson's music would like destroy itself before it let it

(35:40):
self into a dictation. Honestly, I'm actually not surprised because
he probably agrees with like Blake Shelton's like skittles are
for gay people, tweets or something that Blake Shelton, he
makes it. Yeah, exactly, Fucking Blake Shelton. You should be
a shame too. Blake Shelton, You're a part of the problem.
You're a part of the problem. I would be so

(36:01):
bummed out if it turned out a dictator was a
fan of any of my work like that. Would that
would be such a fucking bummer. Oh god, yeah, I'd
be bummed out if I was JK rowling to know
that they were watching movies based off my books even
though like, you know, you didn't do anything wrong there,
but like still bummer. Like the producers of America's Got Talent, like,

(36:27):
oh no, they've been playing to the Assad demographic for years.
That's a critical part of America's Got Talent. Do you
think he's ever tried to make like a serious got talent?
I bet that's coming once the warrants and everyone's like
performing at gunpoint, or it's trying out his hobbies. Him
doing like a tight five. Yeah, it's guess who wins

(36:48):
bar every single time every year. It's you again. But
his wife is the judge, it's the talent, and it's
him versus the memory of his dead brother. Yeah, he's
just like, looks like he can in because he's dead. Oh,
looks who's better at computers now? Bessel, Like, oh boy,

(37:09):
what a sad, sad, sad experience. In July of two
thousand eleven, when tens of thousands of Syrians were taking
to the streets to protest the hopelessness of life under
the rule of the Assads and the brutality of the
state security apparatus, Ozma al Assad ordered through her cousin
bespoke jewelry from a small jeweler in Paris. She ordered
four necklaces quote, one turquoise with yellow gold diamonds and

(37:31):
a small puff on the side, one full black onyx
and amethyst and white gold diamonds. She stated that she
hoped it would be ready in September, but she said
that she understood if it took longer, telling her cousin,
I am absolutely clueless when it comes to find jewelry.
She ended the letter by saying, kisses to you both,
and don't worry. We're well. See, someone needs to like

(37:53):
take it upon themselves to um fill that jewelry with
like poison gag us that comes out when they put
them on. She would be nice. I assume they have
the jewelry by now, but if you can poison the
Assades jewelry, clearly she's gonna buy more. I would say,
do it, yeah, yeah, she's gonna buy If you're a

(38:13):
French jeweler, just poison all your jewelry that probably we
shouldn't be shouldn't be urging that. I assume other people
buy French jewelry, only jewelry that's going to the ASSAD regime.
Only jewelry that's going to the Assad regime. Another email,
sent in December of two eleven, as the protest campaign
broke out into a full fledged civil war, Ozma messaged
her husband quote, if we are strong together, we will

(38:36):
overcome this together. I love you. Shortly thereafter, she ordered
a three thousand dollar of oz from Herod's Cool. Yeah,
I don't like reading shops while this is all going around,
she shops a ton and reading all this, I'm reminded
of a quote I came across in a CNN article
from former Bush administration officer Flint Leverett. He said of

(38:57):
shar Al Assad, quote, I think whim and Mary says
a good deal about him. I think that he was
actually correct, like the fact that he's married to Marie
Antoinette here really really looking at photos of them together
right now, and they kind of look like their siblings.
They do a little bit, right. Yeah. They have like

(39:17):
the same face, yeah, yeah, the same little randy face. Now,
you'll notice that we've made it through nineteen or twenty
pages of b char lassade history without talking about chemical weapons.
There's a couple of good reasons for this. One of
them is that for the last couple of years, a
pernicious series of myths and lies has cropped up, helped
along by incompetent, senile, or outright ethically compromised journalists, claiming

(39:40):
that the chemical weapons attacks by Baschar Lassade on his
own people were false flags. These rumors have spread on
the far right because actual fascists love Bashar al Assad
since he is a fascist and he's doing what they'd
like to do to all of their political opponents. The
same rumors have spread on the far left because it
allows leftists to have an easy justification for why they
don't think any action should be taken to stop the
Shar from carrying out the greatest mass killing of the

(40:02):
twenty first century. There is no truth to this nonsense. However,
I wanted to make it super clear that even if
Bishar had never ordered a single chemical weapon strike, he
is still the single greatest monster of the twenty one century.
Even if he had never launched any Sarah, never dropped
any chlorine like that ship is fucking icing on the

(40:24):
piece of ship Dictator Cake, Sophie is h is putting
two fingers in front of the camera, which means that
this is clearly a great time for an ad break.
Nothing gets advertisers excited like talking about chemical weapons attacks.
Now she's flipping me off, and I don't understand why. Anna,
you look very uncomfortable. You know I will not get involved.

(40:46):
You don't want to. You don't want to get involved
with mommy and daddy fighting. No comment on what just happened,
No comment on what just happened. Well, what's about to
happen is products and services. I'm happier about the services
and the products. Are we on break? I mean no
we I haven't said products yet. And the voice that

(41:07):
I say, are you are you ready for us to
be on break? Anna? Are you bored? No? But I
was going to tell you something during our break. Oh okay,
well products, we're back. And uh. The thing that Anna
was going to tell me is that asthma al Assad
does have cancer. Now she has breast cancer, so sometimes

(41:31):
cancer gets it right. Yeah, that's it's fascinating. It's kind
of funny that we said that and then all of
a sudden she got cancer. I hope it spreads to
her husband. I'm sure it's aggressive karma because apparently I
was just looking that she was offered asylum to get
out of there, and she said no, and then she
like came out against the like air strikes, being like
so irresponsible for you guys to strike our chemical weapon factories.

(41:55):
It's like, what, dude, what bit funk off with your
fucking I have an idea, suck a dit dude. Yeah. No,
it's one of those things where I did look into
it to make sure she had so many opportunities to
get the funk out. And in fact, there's even suggestions
that at one point, when the war was going more
against the regime, they actually tried to flee the country,

(42:16):
but she still stood by her man, so to speak,
like she she was. There was at no point where
she was like, bar, maybe we shouldn't be mass murdering people.
Maybe we could just take our ill gotten money and
go live in France or something. They could have worked
that deal out right. Also, I just saw a thing
part of the emails that leak that she was saying
that she's the real dictator. Yeah, she's joked about that

(42:40):
a number of times. What the fuck, dude, you're such
a bit. She's a monster. Trust beautiful people in power. No, no, no, no, no,
it's always bad. It's always bad. Uh, Yeah, they're just
too damn sexy, which is why I did not support

(43:00):
Barack Obama's election now, but but it did worry me
how good looking he was. Um. Thankfully, now that we
have an ugly man as president, everything's on the up
and up. There's the same problem with George W. Bush.
Too much raw sexual power was just I know, I know,
we all did, we all did. Everyone at the press

(43:21):
pool was just tweaking their nipples during his briefings. It
was it was. It was a problem now. The deadliest
of Bhar's chemical weapons attacks occurred in two thousand thirteen,
when he launched a barrage of rockets containing seren nerve
gas on Gudha, a rebel controlled suburb of Damascus. Undred
people were killed. The un confirmed, overwhelming and indisputable evidence

(43:44):
of saren used at the massacre. Gary Quinlan, the Australian
UN Ambassador and President of the UN Security Council, is
set in the report on the attack. Quote confirms in
our view that there was no remaining doubt it was
the regime that used chemical weapons. A more recent two
thousand seventeen chemical weapon attack on kane Kun killed eighty
six people. Doctors without Borders independently confirmed the use of

(44:06):
chemical weapons in this attack. This attack prompted the Trump
administration to fire cruise muscles at a mostly empty air base. Uh, Like,
there's a lot. Like you can go in a rabbit
hole and read a bunch of people putting out like, oh,
look at this detail of this picture means that these
attacks were fake, or that there wasn't a chemical weapon,
or that it was the rebels that did it. It's

(44:26):
the same if you have spent a lot of time
looking at nine eleven conspiracies, it's the same bullshit. The
difference is that some respectable journalists like Seymour Hirsch have
gotten caught up in it because in his case, he's
fucking old and doesn't know anything about chemical weapons, and
uh is one of those people who is reflexively going
to be like whatever America says isn't the truth. Even

(44:48):
it's like fucking I've I've seen the US commit war
crimes there have reported on them like fuck everything, but
fuck pretending these chemical attacks aren't real. There's been like
three hundred and thirty documented chemical weapons attacks, like percent
of them have been the Syrian regime. There have been
a couple by like isis and whatnot who have like
made like chlorine gas bombs and ship But it is

(45:09):
very well documented. You can what you can do, like
go to the Bell and Cat articles documenting some of
the more recent attacks where they've dropped gas canisters through
roofs and like go through every picture of it and
look at the documentation and trace back the research for
yourself if you really fucking want to. But doctors without
Borders and the fucking you in observers who have tested

(45:30):
like the fucking soil and people's bodies and done thousands
of hours of research into this are all on the
same page. And it's that the Assad regime is repeatedly
deployed chemical weapons against its people. Fuck, I get angry
about this. It's very fucked up. Shows how we keep
they really are. Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's and this

(45:52):
is I think one of the reasons there's a conspiracy
around this is because a lot of people can't understand
why Bashar al Assad would deploy chemical weapons on his
own people in risk foreign intervention. There's this idea that like, oh,
it's just so risky, why would he do it? And
I think the answer is that he took the measure
of the United States during the Bush years, and for
eight years he balanced helping the US with hindering it,

(46:14):
and he watched our occupation of Iraq turned into a quagmire,
and he came to a very clear and very accurate
conclusion that the United States no longer had the guts
to intervene seriously in a situation where intervention might cost
American lives. And he gambled on that gut feeling and
he won it as simple as that. It's like Hitler

(46:34):
gambling on fucking annexing the Sudetan land, like it was
a gamble. It could have fucked up. He had, by
some accounts, more to lose than to win, but everybody
else was a fucking coward, so we won. That's how
it works with dictators, Like I know, it's it's that's
why I'm like, you know, I have no problem with us. Yeah,

(46:56):
I mean, I don't even know. Let's send it at
this point, at this point, there's Honey Potter's and yeah,
like at this point, I mean the Syrian regime in
the Russian air forces pounding a province called i Lib
which has like three million people in it. The vast,
vast majority of humor civilians. I support trying to enforce
some sort of no fly zone to stop those people

(47:16):
from being massacred because the same fucking bombings, saturation bombing
is happening there. But like there's no good in two
thousand eleven twelve, a good thing could have been worked out.
That's that there's no possibility. Now there's too many people
are dead, Like everything's fucked now, we didn't do a
world Yeah. So um. The other reason he deployed chemical

(47:39):
weapons is a little bit cannier. At the very start
of the uprising against his rule, Assad had claimed that
the forces behind the rebels were not Syrians but foreigners
trying to undermine his country. Lesh, who's probably the Westerner
who knows Bshar's mind best, says that once Assad was
able to convince himself of this, any kind of violence
was justified, especially since his forces didn't have the manpower
to fight street district to take back the country. Quote,

(48:02):
so they need to use the asymmetric methods like chemical
weapons to brutalize them. There's a good courts article tracking
out Asad's decision making on this. It quotes a couple
of Syrian dissidents, who suggests that Assad was quote invoking
something akin to medieval Western monarchs belief in the divine
right of kings. Like his father, he always believed that
he had the right to do whatever he wants to
his own people, to kill them, torture them, disappear them.

(48:24):
They are my own people, and that's the sovereignty I
have explained siata Asad, he says, sees himself as the
father punishing his errant sons. The father is allowed to
do whatever when the sons make mistakes. He doesn't understand
that there's a social contract between the Syrians and elected officials. Yeah,
don't kill innocent people. Don't massacred women and children and

(48:47):
old people with poison from the sky or fire from
the sky. Anyone could well, I mean it's a lot
of countries do that. It's not as obvious a lesson.
Not that I'm defending them, but like we could stand
to use that lesson too. Yeah. Whatever. The truth of

(49:09):
Assad's thinking, time has proven him right on the bet
that the US and the international community would never be
willing to take a stand against him. In two thousand eighteen,
Bin Rhodes, President Obama's Deputy National Security Advisor and host
of Pots Safe America Right, he's one of the hosts
of that. Wrote an article for The Atlantic titled Inside

(49:30):
the White House during the Syrian Red Line crisis. He
traces out how the Obama White House went from shock
and rage in an impulse to do something at the
Syrian chemical weapons attacks, to gradually conferring with other world
leaders and backing down. There are a number of reasons
for this. Fear of being drawn into a disaster like
a rack, fear of having the Republicans use intervention against
them as they had in Libya, concerns about Assad's chemical

(49:52):
weapons winding up in the hands of terrorists, and the
picture been paints. By the end of the decision making process,
the ideal logs and the administration had been beaten down
by real politique. They had all been inspired by writings
Obama had put out prior in his presidency arguing that
the US could have saved lives by intervening in Rwanda
during that genocide. But after weeks of debate over whether
or not to enforce the Red Line in Syria been

(50:14):
and the President had this conversation quote, maybe we never
would have done Rwanda, Obama said the comment was jarring.
Obama had written about how we should have intervened in Rwanda,
and people like me had been deeply influenced by that
in action. But he also frequently pointed out that the
people urging intervention in Syria had been silent when millions
of people were killed in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

(50:35):
There's no way there would have been any appetite for that.
In Congress, you could have done things short of war,
I said, like, what like jamming the radio signals they
were using to incite people. He waved his hand at
me dismissively. That's wishful thinking. You can't stop people from
killing each other like that, He let the thought hang
in the air. I'm just saying, maybe there's never a
time when the American people are going to support this

(50:55):
kind of thing. In Libya, everything went right. We saved
thousands of lives, we didn't have a single casualty, and
we took out a dictator who killed hundreds of Americans.
And at home it was a negative. I saw what
he had been doing, testing Congress, testing public opinion to
see what the real maneuvering room was for his office.
When it came to intervention in Syria. It was the
same thing he'd done in situation room meetings on Syria

(51:16):
and in his mind, testing whether anything we did could
make things better there or whether it would turn out
to be like Afghanistan and Iraq, if not worse. It
wasn't just politics he was wrestling with. It was something
more fundamental about America, our willingness to take on another war,
a war whose primary justification would be humanitarian, a war
likely to win badly. People always say never again, he said,

(51:38):
but they never want to do anything. You know. There's
a real darkness to all that, obviously because politics is
all dark. But the idea that we were so damaged
by what happened with the Iraq War and the Bush
administration and Cheney that now like any sort of step

(52:04):
of like we're going to another country, it doesn't matter
if we're helping or what we're doing, sending troops, no
matter what, there's such a negative reaction to it that
that we can't do anything to help these people because
the American public loses their minds, like we can't see
beyond what Dick, Cheney and Bush did. And so now

(52:24):
all these people are basically just gonna die and we can't.
We're just like literally like tiptoeing around being like should
we can we Like it's it's actually very insane, how
literally I mean. It all goes back to fucking piece
of shit asked the Bush dynasty and Dick Cheney and

(52:46):
the fucking devils they were have ruined anyone's chance of
wanting to go into Syria and being like, wait, let's
go stop this, And it's it's a lot of that
playing on a bit of racism too, even among people
on the left, to where this idea of like, well
but look at Iraq and it's like they're two different
countries and two completely different groups of people. They're not
the same country, they're not the same place. And it's

(53:08):
it's also not the same like why did Iraq go
so badly? Well, you can kind of trace it back
to the fact that the day after we conquered it,
we fired the entire army and put half a million
men out of work with their guns and they made
an insurgency. Like a lot of it you can tie
back to that, Like it's it's number one, the fact
that like nobody in America has a very nuanced understanding

(53:30):
of these places or these struggles. Um. And it's like
one of the things I tried to do in this
episode is really trace out how the civil war evolved
UM out of protests into fighting, because one of the
things I hear a lot when I argue with people
who are on the left is like, well, you know,
the US was funding the rebels the whole time, and
it's like, no, dude, Like we eventually started giving them

(53:52):
some aid and it was too little, too late, and
it was mostly shitty and small arms, and it was
like like, yeah, we funded some of the rebel groups, Like,
but the people started the civil war by wanting to
not have a dictator murdered them, and they were active
in the streets four months, fighting and building connections between

(54:16):
one another and building a revolution. Like and it's fucking
racist to say that the Civil War only happened because
the US came in and gave them money. No people
are able to rise up against their dictators without us.
They did it in Libya. We just helped them not
get massacred by Kaddafi's planes. They've done it everywhere. That's
what people to get upset and be like, no more

(54:36):
of this ship has nothing to do with us. It's
the thing where like you pould be like, you know,
the White Helmets are just like American plants because they've
received international funding. And it's like any given person who
has done that job is braver than anyone who has
made that complaint will ever be like you fucking cowards,
like accusing them of faking attacks when they are running

(54:59):
out every and pulling I've seen people do that job,
pulling corpses from rubble. It's the worst fucking thing I
can imagine. And fuck you for accusing them of being
anything but heroes. Like It's I get really heated when
I talk about this. I mean, what type of person
goes and does that? You know? It's like it's not
someone who's here is. It's incredibly frustrating to be like,

(55:23):
you don't know what these people do every day. You
can't know what they see for every day, especially since
most of them and I guess the only dead body
you've seen is maybe at a funeral. You can't imagine
what these people are going through, Like you just can't.
Uh And I I'm so angry at everyone all the
time because of Syria. It's uh so shout out to

(55:51):
my Syrian homies. Sorry, the real bastard at the end
of this episode is is everybody. And I guess that's
one of the things that that is really telling to me.
It's like, you look at Barack Obama is a man
who I have intense disagreements with, but I believe has
always wanted to do the right thing. But he's also

(56:13):
a really really smart guy and a fundamentally a scholar,
and he thinks through everything too much. And Bashar al
Assad did not. He gambled. He's willing to gamble. Dictators
usually are because it's the only way they can prosper,
and Barack Obama was not willing to gamble, and as

(56:35):
a result, half a million Serrians died. That's what it
comes down to. And you can say Obama was right
or wrong, that's your opinion. But this is the reason.
This is the same basic logic that let Hitler get
as far as he did. Dictators being willing to do
the reckless thing and gamble and brave conscience or not brave,

(56:55):
but conscientious, decent, smart men not being willing to gamble
and letting them get away with murder, right, yep, which
is nevill fucking Chamberlain. Yeah, how do you even like
reconcile any of that? It's like, Wow, he really didn't
step up because he was fucking thinking it out, like

(57:18):
thinking of all the ways it could go wrong and
what would happen, and it's like you can't do anything,
Like there's nothing, you know, there's nothing. It's it's it's
incredibly tough, and like it's one of those things where
I do like I would say his failure to respond
adequately in Syria is the single worst thing that Obama did.

(57:39):
But if I'm tracing it back, which American I blame
most for Syria, it's still going to be George W.
Bush and Dick Cheney, Like you know, they're a team there. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
I don't. I don't, you know, I don't. I am
one of those people that will push back a little
bit and giving too much credit to Cheney and not
enough to Bush because I think he was a more
active partner than he a lot of people give him
credit for. But both of them, I mean, he was

(57:59):
a fool, but he got to where he was somehow. Yeah,
And I ironically having a little bit more of that
shoot from the hip, gut attitude that Bushhead might have
been helpful in Syria if like their positions had been reversed.
But if we never invaded Iraq. Yeah, if only we'd

(58:21):
picked the right country to invade and not fucked it up.
I don't know, like that's even dumb to say, like
all of it's dumb. Everything's fucked up. I hope you
all enjoyed this episode of my Upbeat and Fun podcast.
You know, it's another reason why I say, uh, currently,
because we're in such high tensions with Iran. Guess who's
in bed with Iran? Syria a psycho path. So don't

(58:44):
go after Iran unless you want, you know, some ally
heat from like Syria and Russia. It's not great. We're
not a great place. Let's not funk with the evils.
You know. This is part of the thing where it's
like it makes it so hard with like picking a
press residents, like you want to say, pick not a
crazy person, but then we get the sanest man who's

(59:06):
ever been president. I think that's probably is Barack Obama,
and he's sometimes too careful and people pay the price
for it. And now we've got a funk. I mean,
it's certainly having a lunatic in charge is not the
right thing, because who knows what the funk Trump's gonna do. Um.
But maybe presidents are a bad idea. Should just have

(59:27):
like a parliament, like so classically European. Yeah, that'll work.
I don't know, maybe so European. They don't have dinner
to like eleven pm, like so European. That'll fix our problems.
Or we just make a dog president. It would be funny.
No war woof, couldn't be worse. Bud, buddy, you're so great,

(59:49):
you're to do a boy said, you go president, So
you go president. The dog still has not appointed a
Supreme Court. Or if the dog just makes everyone on
the Supreme Court be dogs. M and then you just
trained Supreme Court dogstice m. He peed on the lawyer.
I think that means the case is thrown out. Classic

(01:00:10):
move by spot m hmm. Chief Justice Spot spots court.
Really groundbreaking legal precedent, not in channel, you know what
I mean? Literally groundbreaking because he dug a lot of
holes in the yard of the of the court. Yeah. Well,

(01:00:32):
did you enjoy this very fun episode of Behind the Bastards? Anna?
Look honestly like you know me, I love me episodes
about Syria. Oh boy, oh no, it's you know, a
lot of this um starting from like how it started.
You know, we talked about on our show. UM, a
lot of the background I did not know, which, you know,
it's very interesting. Of course, the brand Jelina hanging out

(01:00:54):
with them is probably the most shocking thing I've ever
learned in my life. Um. And you know what a
second I felt bad saying I hope asma Alissa gets cancer,
but then it's like, now that she has it, it's like,
oh wait, no, that's just how karma works. Like, if
you're a horrible person, we might not be able to
get to you, but here's praying that some sort of

(01:01:14):
natural disease or cause comes for you. Because you don't
seem to care about human life, So why should we
care about your human life? You know, like you're not
you compared to the millions of innocence of like babies, children, mothers, fathers,
grandparents who have died. Who the fuck are you? You
don't deserve ship. Yeah, that cancer diagnosis is the most

(01:01:37):
uplifting thing about this episode. Yeah, good for you, honey,
good luck, good luck with that good stupid bitch, you know,
I'm the real dictator. It's like, honey, that's not funny.
Millions of people are dead, Like, fuck you, you're that's

(01:01:58):
not the joke to make when you're haspen is literally
a dictator. Yeah, but I don't like these pure trash
ass bitch anyway, you want to plug some plugables? Yeah,
dropped down zone. Um podcast dictator here Anna, UM. You
know I have a podcast Ethnically Ambiguous with Green Units.

(01:02:20):
Check it out if you like news in the Middle East.
We have an episode called we Are Syria. When We're
we talked, it was right after the air strikes happened
that we kind of break down our feelings and what happened.
If you want to go check that out, and then
you know, of course all the other episodes. You know,
currently we are talking about the year on US tensions situation.
If you want to listen to that. Um. Yeah, you
can follow me on Twitter at Anna host n A

(01:02:41):
N N A H O S S N I E H.
You know, I'm constantly constantly talking politics and other good
stuff and you know The Bachelor because that's where my
interests lie in Middle Eastern politics and the Bachelor. And
something interesting I noticed recently Robert does not follow me
on Twitter, so I burnt. All right, all right, I'll

(01:03:03):
I will correct that bad at social meds and I'm
mostly just ship post and argument. Yeah yeah, and I
am a podcast viceroy. I always wanted to be a
viceroy podcast general. No, I want to be a viceroy
that seems like more fun, less responsibility, and more than

(01:03:26):
Parliament will consider it. We'll let you know what we
have decided on. Thank you well, Uh podcast Viceroy Robert
Evans signing off. You can find me on Twitter and
Instagram at Bastards pod. You can find uh this podcast
on the web at bond the Bastards dot com. I
have another podcast called it Could Happen Here about everything

(01:03:47):
that happened to Syria if it happened in America, which
actually part of why I made the show was just
a backdoor way of trying to make people empathize with
the horrible things happen against Syria. Um. And also, you
can find to shirts ont public. Some of them are ours,
others or not. You can buy whichever ones you would like. Uh, Sophie,

(01:04:07):
do I have to say anything else? I do love
about of you, and I love a d percent of
the poison room that's sitting behind Anna right now. Oh
my god, I love poison. We all we're all big
poison stands, all right. Uh, listeners, chill out, enjoy some

(01:04:29):
poison of your own, and or don't because that might
be me inciting you to, uh to do horrible things.
Don't do horrible things. UH, do good things or at
least neutral things. Uh. But sometimes being neutral is you
know what the episode has done. It's over, Go do
something else.