Angry Planet - The Saddam Hussein of the Caucasus

Episode Date: September 25, 2023

Aram Shabanian stops by this week to talk to us about the strong men of the Caucasus.We start with a deep dive into what’s going on in Armenia and Azerbaijan right now with a focus on the 1990s. Shabanian calls Azerbaijan’s President, Ilham Aliyevl, the “Saddam Hussein of the Caucasus” and comes to grip with the realpolitik of the conflict.Then we turn our attention to Chechen dictator Ramzan Kadyrov and discuss rumors of his failing health, mixed martial arts, and how a brutal warlord became an internet meme.Angry Planet has a Substack! Join to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. So I don't even see. I don't even know how we would get into it. So we're doing two topics, or maybe only one topic. I think we'll see how it goes.

I was thinking if we do Azerbaijan, Armenia and Chechnya, we could call the segment Cockey Caucasians. Well, see, now we've got to do, now we do have to do both. Now we have to do. Can we, can we go with raucous caucuses? Ooh. Also good. You're on top of it today, Jason.

Thank you. This is a good brain space we got going today. It was a really incredible joke listeners that would that Jason threw at us right before we jumped on. You'll never get to hear it. I'm sorry. It was the best joke ever told. It was, you know. Thank you, thank you.

This is Incri Planet. We're on with Aram Shabhanian. It's been on the show many times. I got it right that time, right? You did, and I think you're like the only podcast host who has ever gotten it, right? It's been torture, like, my name, like doing the names already has been torturing me because I actually, I do a live show advice that's like two hours long. and I froze on a Portuguese last name last episode, like right as I was about to say it,

and I had practiced it. And then like, I'm just like standing. Then you have to acknowledge it. It's terrible. So I've been, If you're anything like me, I'll do this like,

okay, it's not pronounced this way. Right. It's not. And then I come to say it. I'm like, wait, was it pronounced that way or was it not pronounced that way?

And then I say it the wrong way almost every time. So. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Now that we've decided on all of our names. So what are we talking about this week? We're talking about Armenia and Azerbaijan in Chechnya, the Rockas Caucasus, as Jason said.

Before we get into that, I know that there was a little bit of, so we're going to start with Armenia, Azerbaijan. There's been a lot of news about it just in the past 24 hours. And this is one of those things where by the time you all hear this, we're recording. this Wednesday, it'll go live Friday for Substack subscribers Monday for everybody else. Things may be outdated, but we're going to dig a little bit

more into the past and kind of give some background, but also Aram, you wanted to do a little bit of throat clearing and kind of confirm your biases before we move forward, right? Just kind of give, let everyone know what your perspective was here. Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, I give this caveat anytime I talk about Armenia, Azerbaijan,

John, I am, you know, Armenian American, and my family is Armenian. From Adana, present-day Turkey, though. We're not from present-day Armenia, so we're not directly tied in with anything like that, but we are Armenian ethnically. Adana's on the Mediterranean coast quite far from present-day Armenia. And so I represent more of the diaspora community's opinion on a lot of these things, but I will do my best to be impartial here and give caveats when I think that I might be giving weighted information.

Thank you. I appreciate that. I think the audience appreciates that. So I woke up yesterday, I believe, with a message from you. And we had been talking about doing this episode. We were going to do it next week because things had been kind of, I don't know if heating up is the correct metaphor in this particular case. But news had been happening in the region.

And you said, like, yeah, you know, I'm busy this week. I can't do it. And then I knew something, I knew that I had to look into the news specifically when I woke up and you had a message, uh, set in the middle of the night. I think that was like, yeah, let's do it. Let's let's do Wednesday. And I was like, okay, so it's serious now. Uh, so can you tell me about, before we kind of get into history and, uh, uh, why this is all happening, can you kind of give me what happened that you saw that made you want to reach out and do the episode sooner, uh, and kind of like, what's been happening in the last 48 hours?

Yeah. So, I mean, it's been building for some time. The last maybe three or four weeks, there's been quite a significant buildup of Azerbaijani forces in the region. Akin to what we saw in 2020 before the war launched. So we saw like a lot of drones building up on runways. We saw a lot of soldiers being brought into the region. And then the rhetoric on Aziri TV also ramped up.

I monitor a bunch of different news channels all day, among them four channels from Azerbaijan. And they were all just. showing replays of drone footage from 2020 and talking about war rhetoric, despite the fact that there had been two major earthquakes within the Islamic world in the last week, which would normally dominate the news in a Muslim majority country, that there had been major losses of life, but they were barely a news item. It was more about Azerbaijan and Armenia and Armenia provoking Azerbaijan. And so that kind of alerted me that something was going on and something

could potentially flare up. And then it was similar to the lead-up to the war in Ukraine in that part of what I, part of the reason I was so in tune with what was happening here was that it wasn't just me, right? There's a whole community of other open source analysts on Twitter who are following this stuff. And so when we all start saying the same thing as likely, it kind of becomes alarming and, like, a red flag goes up. And so that's why I was more inclined to do this podcast.

sooner than later. And then, of course, two nights ago, we've all been there. It's 9 p.m. and you get into the work funk. And so you just start working, right? And so I'm working at 9 p.m. Next thing I know, it's 2 in the morning, about to go to bed. And the announcement comes out that Azerbaijan is attacking Armenia. So I didn't sleep. I messaged you. And so let's do this. Because I think the potential for this war, despite the fact that there's a ceasefire and agreement right now, I think the potential for this to continue every several weeks or several months is quite great. And depending on where it continues and the tone it takes, it could spiral into something more

regional. And so that's why I thought it was important to do this show sooner than later was because I think that in light of American troops withdrawing or leaving Armenia soon, there were about 80 American troops in Armenia doing a training exercise. They're leaving within the next 24 hours. So in light of that and in light of several other developments, I think it's important and timely to have this episode come out. And this, there is, as you said, there's a ceasefire right now.

Asur Baizan is, I believe, like, as a condition of that ceasefire, the Armenian troops that are, like, actually have to surrender their ammo. It's being brokered by the Russians, which is always great when the Russians are the peacekeeping operation. And it has a feeling of trying to neuter a military before the, before another. a big strike slash let's get the Americans out of here? Is it kind of, is that accurate or am I just It's definitely accurate. I just want to give the caveat here that the forces being disarmed are Nagorno-Karabakh Defense Forces and not the Armenian military proper. So there's the Armenian military within the Republic of Armenia that's internationally recognized. And then there's the Nagorno-Karabakh defense forces, which are within the Armenian enclave Nagorno-Karabakh. Those are the ones that are being

disarmed. Now, the other day when the fighting escalated, there were regular Armenian forces that it looked like were being struck because there were weapon systems being struck that I don't believe the Karbakh defense forces maintained, air defense units, things like that. And then again, in 2020, the war did involve the Republic of Armenia's armed forces directly. And that was an army and army battle between the two states, Armenia and Azerbaijan. So the disarming is notable because the Karabakh defense forces were pretty much armed with small arms and some heavy artillery already. They weren't a threat to Azerbaijan's safety. They weren't going to attack Azerbaijan anytime soon. They weren't an offensive force. The Armenian military itself is unlikely to get involved in this

conflict right now unless the Republic of Armenia itself is attacked, because one, that's what Azerbaijan wants. They want Armenia to be pulled into this war so they can clobber them again. And that's, I mean, that's not to condemn Azeres as bad people. That's just a classic strongman tactic. And I'll pause here and say that I have often referred to Aliyah as the Saddam Hussein of the Caucasus. I don't mean to say that he's going to do the same thing Saddam did. But what I mean is that when Saddam Hussein built up a massive military to take on his historical rival, the Iranians, once he had taken them on and fought the battle as far as he could fight it, there was nowhere else to go on that.

front, but he still had a million man army under arms, and they're going to start getting bored and agitated pretty quickly, so you have to do something with them. I think Aliyev is running into the same problem right now. They pushed the Armenians out of most of Karabakh in 2020. They accomplished what they wanted there. And now the army is agitating. The people are saying, I thought the whole of Karabakh was ours. Do you mean it or not? He's kind of forced himself into a corner here. So with that being said, as the comparison to Saddam, I think that the potential for the war to include Armenia directly is definitely there. I think Armenia is trying to avoid being pulled in directly because their military was eviscerated in the 2020 war. I mean,

they had, on paper they had, according to the IISS's military balance in 2020, they had about 190 tanks. We now know that was incorrect. They had probably about 400 main battle tanks and service, but about 200 of them, 250 of them were destroyed by Azerbaijan. So, half of their tank force. These are not modern tanks. These are mostly older T-72s and things of that nature. And that's just kind of par for the course. Armenia was operating on a defense budget of about $500 million a year in the lead

up to the war versus Azerbaijan's several billion dollars a year. And so there was just no comparison between the two militarily. And there's not really a comparison economically either, right? I mean, Azerbaijan has actually gotten relatively wealthy because of fossil fuels. Am I right? Yeah, they've got a lot of natural gas and oil in Azerbaijan, particularly in the Baku region. So that's part of it. The other part of it is Azerbaijan has access to the international market that Armenia does not. Because Armenia's border with Turkey is closed, their border with Azerbaijan is closed.

The only real way in and out of Armenia for trade is the Lusian corridor, which runs to the south, which we'll probably get into here in a little bit. Hey there, eagle-eared listeners. This is Matthew. Aram reached out after we'd recorded this, and he just wanted me to say that he'd misspoke, and what he meant was... Sunique province, or the Sunique corridor. And back to the show. That connects to Iran,

to what's known as Iranian, Azerbaijan. And so that is a vital strategic corridor for the Armenians. It's their lifeline to the world. Without getting super into the weeds, why is the border with Turkey closed? That's a legacy of the 1950s. Armenian genocide. Things were nearly normalized in the late 2000s between Armenia and Turkey, basically an agreement that Turkey would acknowledge that there had been a genocide. Armenia would

acknowledge that we're not going to pursue legal claims and the border reopens. And that's the divide between Armenians there. If you live in the diaspora community, so Glendale, if you live in Glendale, California, and you're Armenian, you probably see the genocide and the legacy of the genocide is the most important geopolitical issue that Armenia can take on and that Turkey needs to have some kind of apology for what they have done. If you're an Armenian who lives in Armenia, you'll say Karabakh is the most important issue and that Turkey is kind of backseat because Turkey is not the direct threat right now. Azerbaijan is.

And yeah, go ahead. Well, I wanted to zero in on why, what is it about this territory and this region that has made it so fought over? So the region itself, this is going to earn me some scorn from my fellow Armenians. And so I apologize, folks, but this is the reality. Going back, Karbach was populated by both Armenians and what are known today as Azerbaijanis. They weren't known as Azis necessarily prior to the Soviet Union creating the Republic of Azerbaijan. But they were there.

And to say that they weren't there is historical revisionism. They were our neighbors. They lived among us. We just called them Muslims or Turks. They didn't have a national identity because we really didn't either until – I mean, we had a national identity. Armenians had a national identity. But it wasn't a modern nation state until really 1991. It was a part of the Soviet Union.

We should do – as a tangent, we should do an episode at some point on how the conception of the national identity is way more recent than I think people like really understand. Right, and that's kind of what I'm getting at. It's like there were Armenians and there were people in the Azerbaijan region who identified as Muslims from Azerbaijan or the Azerbaijan region. But the idea of a nation state being cohesive within a border is relatively new. And this is historical revisionism that you see with the Israel-Palestine issue too, right? Where Israelis will say there was no such thing as Palestine and Palestinians will say Israel is a new state. Okay, well, most states are pretty new as of like 1945. So let's stop that argument. And so there were always There was always mixture in Karbuk, but it was predominantly Armenian, and the Armenians were the majority in Karbuk. Now, both Azerbaijan and Armenia were part of the Soviet Union. And so when the border was redrawn under the Soviet Union to make Nagorno-Karabakh part of Armenia, it didn't really matter as much because they were all within the same country. It would be kind of like dividing the border between two U.S. states. There'd be some legal issues between it, but it wouldn't necessarily cause a war between countries like it would now. like giving Crimea to Ukraine. Right. And luckily that hasn't proved that way. Right, right. That hasn't been an issue historically.

I mean, we got close, but we headed that one off at the past. But so there were Armenians in those areas living together in Karbach. It was really in the late 80s that things started to change. As it became clearer and clearer that the Soviet Union was going to change up and maybe not break up, but wouldn't stay the same as it was. Armenians started to coalesce around the Russian nationalists within the Soviet Union, within the late Soviet Union, so the Boris Yeltsin clan, whereas the Azeris coalesced around Mikhail Gorbachev and the Communist Party. This is because Armenians are not seen as air quotes here as good as white Russians within the Soviet Union, but Armenians were a close second, right? Like an Armenian could make an officer within the Red Army pretty easily, whereas an Azeri as a Muslim probably could not as easily have made officer within the Red Army. But it's to say there were a lot of Azeri soldiers and conscripts and a lot of Armenian officers.

So the Armenians had more of an elite seat at the table than the Azis. When the Soviet Union broke up, of course the Armenians benefited from that. Yeltsin had won that fight and Armenia won as a proxy. So there was not only the large Armenian officer contingent that served in the first Karabakh war that broke out in the 90s, there was also a lot of sympathy among Russian Soviet officers for the Armenians. So they donated a bunch of tanks. They just handed over a bunch of tanks to Armenia in this first war. And so this is where we get into more historical revisionism. And this is where I also catch flak from Armenians at times, is that Armenia won the first Karabakh war, not because we're elite warriors, not because we're better men, not because we're better at fighting. but because we had tanks, we had officers, we had training, and we had an army that was pretty much easy to create on day one. Azerbaijan, on the other hand, had a lot of conscripts, they had police forces, they had some light militia, but they didn't have an army.

And that's what really mattered in the 90s. What needed to happen after the war in the 90s was some kind of a ceasefire, peace treaty negotiation between two groups that had been neighbors before. That is to say, the Armenians should never have competed. compelled the Aziris to leave Karbakh and should never have essentially forced them out of their lands. There are cities in Karbuk that were Azeri, Azeri dominated, that were ghost towns until 2020. They were completely abandoned and shuddered and they were looted for everything they had. And as much as the Armenian genocide played a role in why Armenians felt justified in doing that,

it was a fundamentally unjustified act. and that's where I draw the line at 2020, because after 2020, things shifted. Armenians were no longer the oppressor or the stronger party that was holding Karabakh. Armenians were now on the back foot, and the Aziris were continuing to push into ethnically Armenian lands

and Armenian-dominated cities and the war crimes that were committed. There were war crimes on both sides, but the Azarias committed far more war crimes than the Armenians, not because of any nationalistic reasons, like in terms of Aziris being bad people. Again, it's the rhetoric within the country.

It's the rhetoric within the media in Azerbaijan. And it's the fact that they were the upper dog in the up dog, if you will, in this situation. We've talked about the up dog before. So he comes up again. What's up dog? He's terrible. Did I really say that? Yeah, the worst thing is we've done this joke before.

We've done this joke. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's never funny. We do it every time. So, yeah. How did Azerbaijan get to a place where they became top dog? It was mostly their natural gas and oil money.

They were making a ton of money in the 90s and 2000s, starting around 2008. Their trade with the U.S. skyrocketed. I'm not sure exactly why I was looking at statistics and they skyrocketed after 2008. So either something changed or they started keeping better track in 2008. but that is to say that Armenia wasn't necessarily always going to be on the back foot in the international political realm. Armenians thought we had a good thing. We thought we had won. We thought we had Russia on our side.

We had our protector. We didn't need to go to the West. Azerbaijan didn't have Russia on their side, so they had to stick with Turkey and stick with the West. The answer has been that long term, Azerbaijan made a better bet, which is unfortunately. because the result is ethnic cleansing. And I think that the solution from here on out is that Armenia needs to get realistic and understand that they have two very bad choices to make here. Choice A is to stand by and watch Azerbaijan push Armenians out of Karabakh, and retake the whole region,

and hope beyond hope, that someday, somehow we can come to some amicable agreement with the Azores and the Turks over Armenian. is returning to Karbach. The other option is to throw the Armenian army at Azerbaijan, lose thousands of conscripts, and have Azerbaijan push as far as they want into the Republic of Armenia without anybody in the international community doing more than being strongly concerned. And that's really the situation we have here. If Armenia wants to see lasting peace, they need to play on the fact that Riship Taip Erdogan and Turkey does not want a regional strong man in Aliyev who can dominate and push things around. They want. peace in the region to the advantage of the Azerbaijanis, but not with an Azeri strong man

with a massive military at his hands. You mentioned the UN. And I think this is a good tease because tomorrow morning we're going to be talking, recording another episode that is all about how the UN has kind of become ineffectual. Is that the right way to put it, Jason? Yeah, I mean, just, you know, basically with. the UN General Assembly going on this week, half of the world's leaders of import basically couldn't be asked to show up to the General Assembly. So, I mean, it's just, yeah, I mean,

this guy's just been talking about how the UN just doesn't have its mojo anymore. Yeah, does this, does this institution still matter at all? Right, right. And I think it does in certain ways, But then you have these big issues like this where what is the UN doing? And like I think the what the kind of the beginning of this part of the conflict started the same days the UN General Assembly, right? It was like the first day of the UN General Assembly. It was, yeah. So does this, what do you think, like what do you think institutional bodies should be doing? What should their response be here?

What aren't they doing? We aren't doing anything, which is unfortunate. I think that there are a number of international bodies that could be doing something here. Unfortunately, the most we've gotten, we didn't get ceasefire guarantors in Karbach in 2020. There were no peacekeepers deployed other than the Russian peacekeepers, which have not been very helpful. But there were ceasefire, like, observers from the EU and the OSCE that were sent in. And in recent weeks, Azerbaijan shot at them. They shot at the observers cars.

Now, in my mind, in a perfect world on planet Aram, if you shoot at peacekeeping observers or observers for a ceasefire, the next step up would be armed peacekeepers deployed to the region to make sure you don't shoot at them. Unfortunately, the answer was just, okay, don't observe the ceasefire anymore, which is not really the solution here. international bodies, I mean, this is an example where the United Nations could and should deploy a peacekeeping force to Karbach. I mean, the only real factor here that would play would be if Turkey didn't want it to happen and ask the U.S. to veto, which the U.S. probably wouldn't listen to necessarily, or if Russia thought it would be convenient to veto it, which is entirely likely because they are playing the role of a global spoiler at this point. So beyond the UN, if the UN were incapable of acting, I think that it would behoove Western powers to stop this fighting. The U.S. and France alone could do it. Azerbaijan is not going to shoot at American soldiers or French soldiers.

They're not EU observers. They're fully armed combat troops. And if France and the U.S. wanted to make good on their rhetorical promises to guarantee the Republic of Armenia's territory, that's a good way to do it. The reason they haven't previously deployed peacekeepers is because Karbok is not internationally recognized as Armenian territory. Despite the fact that a lot of Armenians live there, it's not legally Armenia. So it would be against the law to defend it for other countries. Now, if Azerbaijan attacks into the Republic of Armenia, that's completely a different

story. But as it stands, that's the reason there hasn't been a lot of action is because the UN already decided who's in the right on Karbach, and they said it was Azerbaijan. Yeah, I think the rhetoric here is pretty important, right? Azerbaijan is essentially saying that it's deploying, this is a police operation where they are suppressing terrorists, is their version of events, right? Yeah, I mean, they even said that it was PKK working with Armenia, which is, I think they forgot that there were also Gulenists in there, too,

and Greeks, so let's throw them all in. you're listening to Angry Planet. We'll be right back. Angry Planet says hi. Welcome back. There's more than just like that story. There's also from what I've been reading and I've been getting op-eds in to me at Newsweek about Armenia, Azerbaijan for weeks now. It's like almost like snow.

But there's been a lot of rhetoric on the Azeri part, right? I mean, talking about Armenians as being subhuman and, you know, all just sort of crazy genocidal type language. And does that play into things on the ground? Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And again, I'm going to caveat here that it's not because Azeris are worse people than the rest of us. If you look at the war on terror, you look at the Iraq War, the rhetoric coming out of Dick Cheney's office and George Bush's office, we're going to take the gloves off and do things behind. the scenes that are unsavory and unseemly, translated to American soldiers as torture people

at Abu Ghraib. And so those are Americans. Those are our fellow Americans who also committed atrocities because they got the understanding in the rhetoric from their leaders that it was okay to commit those atrocities, that this was an okay unleashing of that inner beast that they thought they had. And so, yeah, I mean, it's not surprising that when the rhetoric is inherently genocidal coming from on high, that soldiers will behave in a genocidal way. And I think this is partially because Azerbaijan is not a democracy. It's an authoritarian dictatorship. Aliyev has been president since 2003, and they don't have fundamental freedoms of speech and freedoms of expression that are common in the rest of the world in a lot of the developed world. Armenia is not

exactly a bastion of freedom and democracy either, but it is a functional democracy, not always perfectly functional, but a functional democracy that does have more freedom of speech. You'll see the media in Armenia condemning the president regularly, or the leadership, regularly. You don't really see that in Azerbaijan. And so I think that that has played a role in why there were not as many atrocities perpetrated by the Armenian side, because it wasn't as uniform of rhetoric coming out. It was more of defend our people and defend our historical homeland than avenge our homeland. I don't know if that will remain true in the next flare-up in 20 to 40 years. Something else that you'd said, as is going through your Twitter feed, as I want to do before we jump on,

and it's just an entertaining follow. You should jump on there while Twitter lasts. This buildup to war was patently obvious to anybody who wasn't willfully diluting themselves. What were you seeing, I mean, not just in the media, but also with your magnificent OSEN skills, what did you observe? Like I said, there were a lot of buildups of like drone deployments to runways, like tactical, more tactical. tactical deployments, right? Like, you can have drones at the airport in Baku. That's one thing. But when you start deploying them near the front line, that's entirely different and means something entirely different. There were also a large number of cargo flights between Israel and Azerbaijan and then some even from the U.S. to Azerbaijan. And these were 747s and Antenov or IL 76s, these very large jet transport planes carrying lots of likely weapons, which is something that we saw again in the lead up to the 2020 war. was Azerbaijan suddenly buying a whole bunch of Israeli suicide drones, loitering munitions, and deploying those to the battlefield.

Unfortunately for us, Matthew and Jason, they did not preface this war with a music video like they did last time, so we can't go over that. I did check. I did check. I checked too, actually. I checked. No, I legit check because every time there's been a flare-up, they've released the music. video, so I was kind of surprised.

But yeah. Yeah, we can, all we can do is go back and look at the old music videos from 2020. What's the woman's name? She's incredible in a grim way. I can't remember, but yeah. I'd have to pull it up. She's like the Azerbaijani answer to Cher, but like nationalistic and genocidal. It's Cher of Shear's career was just her on the aircraft carrier forever.

Right. Right, right, exactly. You know, I ask the question that we always have to ask in a situation like this. Why do we care? I mean, we've got so many bigger fish to fry. I mean, you know, Taiwan, China, you might have heard of this little war going on in Europe called Ukraine. Well, Russia, Ukraine. Seriously.

the small countries, small populations, not really near anything that we give a shit about, why do I care? There's two reasons, really. I mean, there's the direct reason, which is that legally we have all pledged to uphold international law. And there's also the direct reason in terms of if this war spirals, if Azerbaijan gets everything they want in Karibok and they invade the Lashin corridor in southern Armenia, Iran has spoken to the effect of they will get involved. Now, whether or not they actually will is an entirely

different topic, but they wouldn't be happy because there's an Azerbaijan region in Iran that Aliyev has made comments about wanting to make part of a greater Azerbaijan, which is not something Iran wants. Now, on the other side, if Iran were to get involved in the fight, Turkey, a NATO ally, would also get involved in the fight because they have a defense treaty with Azerbaijan. Extensively a NATO ally. Ostensibly a NATO ally, right, a NATO frenemy. Now, there's also the more macro reason, which is a lot of people ask themselves, why do we care about the genocide in Rwanda?

But what we've seen from history is that the genocide in Rwanda didn't stop in Rwanda. It spiraled into the Congo. It collapsed the Democratic Republic of the Congo and kicked off a 20-year refugee flow. Now, in 2016, there were more refugees coming from the Congo than there were from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq combined. those were the refugees that were showing up in Europe. Those were the refugees that were showing up in the U.S. That kicked off this nationalistic fervor across Europe and across the U.S.

That resulted in the election of Donald Trump, that resulted in Brexit, that resulted in all these other terrible things that have happened to us. So the effects are there. They're just not always one, one, two, three, you know, you can't really always follow it directly, but they definitely have an impact on us all. No one ethnicity or nation on this planet lives alone or lives within a vacuum. and it impacts all of us. Going back to even Israel-Palestine again,

Henry Kissinger thought the Palestinians were irrelevant to the greatest peace treaties in the Middle East. Henry Kissinger thought it was more important to secure peace between the Arab states and Israel than it was between all Arabs and Israel. And look how that's done for us. Okay, that was really well said. Thank you. Just take a second to say that, I mean, you really connected the dots brilliantly. So I appreciate that. I mean, it's an issue I've struggled with my whole life, you know, because I got that question a lot growing up about, about, not about, because I understand where you're coming from with Armenia, Azerbaijan. I would get that question about like, why do we care about Iraq? And it's like, well, we have like 80,000 soldiers there. So that's why we should care. But I'm just saying, like, can you tell me a little bit more about as a segue perhaps between leaders?

Can you tell me a little bit more about the president of Azerbaijan. Who he is, what he wants. How long has he been there? Is he going to be there forever? So, I mean, forever is a long time. But, so he's been president with air quotes since 2003. The previous president was his daddy, who was a Communist Party official in the Soviet Union and Soviet Azerbaijan. So there's a continuity there, right?

And this is something I was talking about with him. another friend last night, that if you look at the 15 constituent republics, republics within the Soviet Union, the three that have done the best are the Baltic states, which completely threw off their Communist Party leadership after 1991. All the other Soviet states in some way had former Communist Party bosses and Soviet party bosses stay in power. That is to say, there wasn't a true revolution in the former Soviet Union in the sense that the old bosses were gone. They just put on new hats. I'm not a. communist anymore. Now I'm just a

Aziri nationalist who still believes in a very strong central state and blah, blah, blah, right? And so that's part of the issue. Armenia, of course, developed a democracy, which has helped and hurt it. The problem we're seeing right now is that Nicole Pachinian, the

current leader of Armenia, he is taking a more realistic stance in that he doesn't want to directly fight Azerbaijan right now because he knows he can't. This has led to a lot of people calling for his resignation. which just kind of shows that the street is not always the most intelligent place to develop your political opinions. And this is why populism is bad, I guess, is my team. My end of the sentence here.

Can you elaborate on that? I didn't mean to go there to go here, but I've been thinking about populism a lot as a constant and recurrent force, especially in like American democracy. so I'm reading I'm reading the Colin Dickey book about conspiracy theories Under the Eye of Power, have you heard of this? It's really great. He does a really great job. Kind of his central argument is that

and I agree with him that we look at things like Q&ON and these other kind of like paranoid populist movements in the United States specifically and believe that they are an aberration when in fact it's just it's part of who we are. So I've been thinking about populism in that kind of context. Can you kind of put that, can you kind of elaborate on why populism is bad and how you deal with it? Because it does seem like it's a constant recurrent historical force, right?

Yeah. And I think, I mean, I'll tamp this down to the Karbach issue too within the populism topic. I think that if you look at the last 30 years of development since Azerbaijan and Armenia became independent, both states have focused on one key issue, and that issue is Karbach. Now, Azerbaijan focused on it a lot more heavily because they were on the back foot. That is to say, though, a large part of their national development has been this raw, rah, rally around the flag, someday we'll stick it to our enemies kind of stuff. So when that's what the street knows, and that's what the people know, you have to sometimes

not give them what they want. It's like raising a child. of course your child wants ice cream and candy every day. Sometimes for their best, you need to tell them to eat their vegetables, right? And so sometimes when a political leader can do something that's very popular among their people, take Crimea from Ukraine or retake more of Karibok, they shouldn't necessarily do it. Because, of course, the loudest voices in the room are always going to cheer for something like that. And then there's the rally around the flag effect, right, where you see, and this is not unique to any national group,

that in times of national crisis or national emergency, we all tend to put aside our differences for a little bit. The opposition parties silence for a bit, rally around the flag, and then we see our differences again. The problem is, when we're rallying around the flag, that's when it's the responsibility of decent leaders to channel that in a proper place, right? that's when it's the responsibility of good leadership to not not listen to the seediest elements of that nationalistic voice that's cheering for whatever has happened. And so that is to say, if Donald Trump had gotten elected on the platform that he got elected on and then turned around and told his constituents, hey, we're going to restructure the immigration system, not completely shut down immigration. Sure, some of his supporters would have been pissed, but most of them would have said, yeah, that's what our man said. Hell yeah! And so, I mean, you don't always listen to the loudest voices in the room. You don't always listen to the most extreme voices in the room because if you keep doing that, you're going to keep edging further and further into the extremities. And that's not helpful for anybody. Speaking of edging further into the extremities, uh, the nice, nice segue. Thank you. Well done. Well done. Thank you very much. I was quite proud of myself. I'm proud of you.

Let's look at the other strong man in the caucuses. I'm going to screw up his name because I can't. This is one I definitely can't pronounce. I've got it written down here. Don't cut this out. Don't cut out my flailing. Ramzan Kedrov. Yes?

Kind of? Never heard of him. Never heard of. Okay. Chechen leader, Rumson Kedrov. Why did I decide to do like a show that focuses on so much foreign policy and so much of the rest of the world and I can't pronounce anything. Just speaking to the other half of the audience who may need a translation, it's Ramzan

Heidirov. Thank you. But it's, you sure were close. No, I wasn't. But I appreciate, but I appreciate you lying to me. It's very polite of you. Absolutely. We're all friends here.

So, I was struck this week. It's one of these things. It's like, sorry, I've been thinking about this a lot for some reason. You read a lot of like science fiction and fantasy books too growing up. And there's all these nonsense proper nouns. And I don't know, like, then they start making TV shows out of all of them. And you learn like, oh, I've been saying the wrong thing in my head for 20 years. Anyway, so I was struck this week also by news that the leader of Chechnya is sick.

he is of course denying this. And it occurred to me that we have never done like a big deep dive on this gentleman. I think we still might. It's not exactly what we're here today. I kind of wanted to focus on his shit posting legacy and his legacy as like kind of a cult political figure in the West. And like why? Like this is a guy that is committed to horrifying crimes against. his own population in people.

Yet, is big in the MMA world, is a meme online, I would say is a based world leader to use the extremely online terminology. And as he, you know, perhaps fades into the extremities

depending on which news reports you believe, what do we make of this now in 2023? I will open the floor. Well, I think it's indicative of a couple things at play. I mean, one, let's talk realistically. He's a strong man and strong man has a hyphen after it that continues child. He's a strong man child in the sense that he's tough.

He's ruthless. He can have people killed. But he also indulges in some really stupid things. And by stupid, I mean, fast cars are fun, but if you're a leader, you probably shouldn't be tooling around in fast cars. Like, he shouldn't be doing a lot of things that he does. What I'm trying to say is I think he does a lot of drugs, too. I think he does a lot of drugs. And I think that that's taking an impact on his health.

He has a definite cocaine energy about him, for sure. He has, like, big cocaine energy, like big, big, yeah, big cocaine energy in everything that he does, really. And so I think. that's probably playing a role in it, but I also think that he's probably similar mentally right now to Dmitry Medvedev, the chair of the Russian Security Council, former Russian president and prime minister, who is, I mean, very clearly on Twitter drinking himself to death. Like, the guy is like giving Yelts in a run for his money. He picked a fight with Jeffrey Lewis the other week, didn't he?

Oh, he picks fights with everybody. But yeah, he picked a fight with Jeffrey Lewis, and it was like, dude, you're not sling. in mud with the right parts. This guy is going to put you in your place. Like, Jeffrey Lewis is a blue ribbon championship talker and like, I would not take him on any day. But, but Medvedev did, and he lost quite plainly in the online debate there. But he's regularly, I mean, Medvedev is a little more clear and blatant to the English-speaking world because he posts in English more than Kadyrop does. But he is just blatantly calling for gentlemen. genocide and saying pretty unhinged stuff on Twitter at odd hours of the night, which is not unlike our Chechen warlord friend here, who will post random videos at what are very odd hours of the night in Chechnya of him running on a treadmill to prove that he's not dead.

Or taking a walk in a lovely forest. Taking a walk in a lovely forest. Or always like trying to prove that he's healthy, but like in the same way. that Trump tried to prove to us that he was a picture of health, where it's like, yeah, I see you, though. Like, I'm looking at you very clearly out of breath and sweaty on that treadmill. And I don't think you've been running for that long. So you're not convincing me. But I think that's part of what makes him a meme, right? I mean, he's like a lot of these strong men who became memes online just because the stuff they say is so ridiculous that it's funny. It's funny to us outside Chechnya. In Chechnya,

it's terrible. But it's similar to like my friend in Turkey asked me to send him a Trump hat several years ago. Because to him, Trump is hilarious. He understands that he's not a good thing. But he's funnier because he's distant, right? He's a mean because he's distant. And so I think that's part of the role that Katirav has played. And then, of course, there's just the whole, the fact that he's like a figurehead for

Chechen men, militant Chechchchchern men, militant Chechchchchch. men. I mean, they, they cut their hair and shave their beards to look like him. They, you know, they, they, they, they emulate him. They, they hang on his every word. And it's, it's weird. He's created this cult of personality around him. But it's not just him. It's the Russian state that helped create this cult of personality in order to install him as the leader of Chechnya, in order to stabilize Chechnya, much in the same way that the Russians had had a plan to stabilize, in air quotes, Ukraine by bringing in Viktor Yonakov, had they taken over in 2022. too. What happens if he dies? You mean like internationally or what am I going to do? I mean, I would love to get a preview of whatever memes you've got cooked for what happens if he dies, but I was going to say internationally. That was my question. Okay. Well, I mean, I don't really have a lot of memes pre-cooked. I normally just let it flow through me. So I have to, you know, in the moment. Internationally, it depends on how he dies, right? And it depends on when he dies. Like if he died tomorrow, there might be some instability in the caucuses, but I have a feeling that Putin would be able to suppress temporarily any stirrings there.

If, however, the Russians are dealt a tremendous defeat in Ukraine and then Qadirav dies, that could be different. That could see Chechnya exploding into conflict once more. And it's important to remember that Islamic State does have a presence in. in Chechnya and they have conducted a large number of attacks within Russia, not major attacks. I mean, there have been some major bombings and things of that nature, but little attacks, a policeman being gunned down in his car or a police station being blown up or something like that. Those have happened. And so it's important to remember that there's also the potential for Islamic State to benefit

from any instability in the Caucasus, especially in Chechnya. have you seen the the video where he pretends to arrest Zelensky for cocaine possession? Yeah, and yeah. Incredible projection, I think, is the sense I got from that video. That's kind of what I saw with it too.

And yeah, he's posted, I think it was either him or Medvedev that posted about how Zelensky is going to legalize weed and throw cocaine parties in Ukraine or something. and like, I mean, as long as he's not Bogarting, I mean, that's a populist move. Kadirov should understand it, right? So, I think that's a nice place to end.

It's maybe one of the most upbeat endings we've had for an angry planet episode. I'm proud of us. No, let's go with it. Let's go with it. Absolutely. Don't bogart the Coke at the Coke party is how we're going out. I've learned so much this episode. Aram, where can people find your work?

I also know we didn't flag your institution at the beginning, did we? No, that's probably for the best. Our last interview, they weren't thrilled with my wording, our text interview about Musk, that's the guy I was thinking of. they didn't like my quote. So I will say that if you'd like to know who I work for, you can follow me on Twitter. I'm not going to call it by its new name. It's Twitter.

My handle is at Aram. At Shabayan Aram at S-H-A-B-A-N-I-A-R-A-M. My old handle at Aram-S-A-M-Sabinian has been deleted because I kept posting Saddam dancing to Hey, Yah. And I guess that's against the rules on Twitter. Well, that's not quite, okay. Okay, that's not quite the video that you were posting. that was that's the one I got banned for I thought it was the the one where it's like the POV you're stuck in a it's you know whatever date in the mid 90s and you're stuck in the uh and you're stuck in the well like you're stuck in a fuck a stairwell and it's hey yaw but played in the stairwell no that one of c over like 90s footage from CNN that one actually didn't get me in as much trouble it was definitely hey yeah they uh can I post it like eight times. And so I got knocked eight times. And they said that I was depriving the artists of

their revenue because everybody watches a 30 second video of Saddam dancing to Hayah and goes, I never need to hear that song now. So. Thank you so much for coming on to Angry Planet and talking to us, doing the caucus episode with us. I appreciate it. Glad to be here, man. Cacusacusing about the raucous caucuses. God damn it, Jason. of Angry Planet. The show is produced with love by Matthew Galt and Jason Fields with the assistants of Kevin Medell. This is the place where we ask you for money.

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