Angry Planet - UNLOCKED: Syria, Chemical Weapons, and Crossing the Red Line

Episode Date: March 22, 2021

Syria’s Bashar Al Assad had no such hesitancy. Thousands of people died. The U.S. threatened to strike Syria, but Russia suggested striking a deal instead.It was weird.To talk us through the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons throughout the country’s civil war is Joby Warrick of the Washington Post. Warrick is the winner of an improbable two Pulitzer Prizes, including one for his book on ISIS, Black Flags. His new book, Red Line: The Unraveling of Syria and America's Race to Destroy the Most Dangerous Arsenal in the World, is just out.Recorded 3/19/21Support 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. Hello, Angry Planet listeners. This is Matthew Galt. I'm here with a special dispatch from us. This is one of the bonus episodes that we've been putting out on our substack,

which you can sign up for at angryplanet.substack.com or Angryplanetpod.com. We wanted to give you all a sense of what those episodes are like and what the kind of work we're doing over there. This is a discussion with the Washington Post's Jobi Warwick about Syria's chemical weapons. There are also unknown unknowns. The ones we don't know, we don't know.

One day, all of the facts in about 30 years' time will be published. When genocide has been parod out in this country, almost with impunity, and the room is near to bring a minute. because of the people don't get freedom of people. Freedom has never safe-guided people. Anyone who is deciding you of freedom isn't deserving of a people approach.

Welcome to Angry Planet. I'm Jason Powell. And I'm Matthew Galt. Think about this. The Nazis invented sarin gas, and even they thought, no, that's just too much. Sirius Bashar al-Assad had no such hesitancy. thousands of people have died. The U.S. threatened to strike Syria, but Russia suggested striking a deal instead.

It was weird. To talk us through the Assad regime's use of chemical weapons throughout the country's civil war is Joby Warwick of the Washington Post. Warwick is the winner of an improbable two Pulitzer Prizes, including one for his book on ISIS, Black Flags. His new book, Red Line, The Unravelling of Syria and America's Raiders' Rates. to destroy the most dangerous arsenal in the world is just out. Thank you so much for joining us. It's a pleasure to be with you guys. Starting at the very beginning, which is what we usually do, can you tell us a bit about the modern history of chemical weapons? I love the way you frame this, this thing that the Nazis came up with. And the backstory is the Nazis or the Germans didn't

set out to create serent per se. They were working with trying to create the most kick-ass pesticides they can possibly make. And out of that process comes this really lethal chemical, which turns out to have this ability to kill humans very easily as well as people. And so they worked on it. They refined it. They developed it. They had this weapon. And then they decided, yeah, this is probably too dangerous for us to mess with. Because if we do this, then the British and others will do the same. And so they created a stockpile, which was never used, at least in a significant way. They used other things in concentration camps, as we know, but this one they kept aside. Fast forward, years later, the Russians and the Soviets both embraced this thing,

the sarin, and improved on it. They created a variation called VX, which is a great battlefield weapon because you can make things essentially area denial weapon. If it splashes on a tank, you can't touch the tank or it could be killed. Seren kind of disperses like a fog, so it spreads easily. But these are incredibly dangerous weapons. And Syria embraced them. This was their weapon of mass destruction. This was their counterbalance to what Israel had next door, the nuclear arsenal. This is going to be their strategic arsenal.

And so he spent a lot of money on it and developed it over decades. And it became one of the biggest and most sophisticated in the world. If you look around in 2011, who had a bigger one, maybe North Korea, we don't know. The leftover stuff in the Soviet Union and the United States was pretty much gone. So this was probably the biggest chemical stockpile in the world at the time. And they actually used it. That's probably, that's a defining feature. You did say just that the United States and the Soviet Union both had massive stockpiles.

Why do we not have a massive stockpile anymore? So in the 80s and even going back beyond that, there was this sort of sensitivity in this terrible arms race that the United States and Soviet Union are doing, that even these weapons were not ones that we wanted to use, that these being chemical but also biological. And we had a bio program too, and we spent a lot of money on that, and the Russian certainly did. But we started taking these off the table. Nixon, you know, latterly said, we're not going to do bio-warfare. So we took that off the table. And then in the 80s, this momentum develops for a new chemical weapons treaty that would make sure that you can't just use it to use chemical weapons at warfare, which existing treaties already said, but you can't develop them at all.

You have to eliminate your stockpiles if you have them. And so a lot of effort went into doing just that in the 80s and 90s. And just to explain how difficult a problem this is to eliminate a stockpile once you have it, it has taken the United States more than 20 years, tens of billions of dollars, and we're still not done with it. We still have it finished destroying all our stuff from the Cold War. What does serene gas do to a person? Like what effect does it have on the body?

What happens when you get hit by it? The insidious thing about these things called, nerve agents and sarin and vx are both part of that family is that first of all they're extremely lethal think of cyanide being one of the deadly substances we commonly think about sarin is 26 times deadlier in terms of the tiny dose you need to kill someone and what it essentially does it it stops your nerves from being able to communicate one other it nerve impulses can't jump across the synapses into your brain and so all the involuntary systems in your body shut down including your ability to breathe your heart rate everything so essentially it's a shixtaping

huge shock to your nervous system that renders you incapable of functioning as an organism. And it happens very quickly. That's what's so bad about it. Once you have a good dose of it, unless you get an antidote right away and they're a couple around, you're pretty much toast. So it's extremely lethal and you can't. Some of the other variations that have been developed since then, like Novichok and VX, just a little dab on the skin is enough to kill it. You don't even have to inhale it necessarily. It's that deadly. Why do you think taboos, these have held while North Korea pursues nukes, America and Russia continues to modernize nukes, like that we still, we seem to be okay with, I say okay with loosely, more okay with that weapon of mass destruction.

It is kind of peculiar because you can argue that it's also really horrible to die of shrapnel wounds or concussion injuries from IED or something like that. So they're all horrible. There's something about the idea of being exterminated by a poison gas that essentially turned the world's stomach back in World War I when it happened on an industrial scale. These first big chemical weapons were developed for that for trench warfare in World War I. And after the war was over, everybody looked at this and said, no, we're going to set some rules for warfare and one of them is going to be no more this. It's just the prospect of this indiscriminate, uncontrollable, because it really it's dependent on wind and local conditions.

This kind of weapon is just too much for humanity. And so we banned it as an international community. And today, only two or three countries. There's the North Koreans. A handful of others have not signed up for it. Syria was one of the last holdouts, and now they're officially part of the chemical weapons convention. We see how much good that's done. So where did Assad?

Okay, so Bashar is the son of Hafez. And who started the program? And, yeah, how did Bashar end up with so much? So it starts, yeah, with Hafas, the father. And his intent in the beginning, and this is important as the story develops, was to have an answer to Israel. And that's really what it's all about. They don't really envision ever using it against their own people, certainly.

They don't think about using it as a terrorist weapon. They want to put this stuff inside the cones of. scud missiles. So if there's a war with Israel, they've got this deterrent weapon, they can lob some missiles at Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. And so they developed this program, and they did it with some help. They had some technical advice from various players, notably some former Soviet scientist who came over and offered some advice. They bought a lot of equipment from Europeans, but ultimately they used their own expertise and their own brain power to develop a pretty good arsenal. So by the time Bashar al-Assad comes in, the sun, the one that

still president today, there is a kind of, it's in the bunker. It's something they've already built. They modernize it. They update things. But it's essentially it is a, it's something that's locked in. And the size of it, it's impressive. They got about 1,300 tons of liquid stuff. And they have munitions and shells and things they can use. And one of the little innovations was they created something called binary sarin, which we also had. But it means you take kind of peanut butter and jelly, two ingredients, combine them at the last minute, so it remains very stable until you use it. And then at the last minute, you put the two together, you've got really powerful sarin, and off your shells go. And so that's the system they developed beginning in the 80s and really

completing by about 2000. So they never used the weapons against Israel. So how has he ended up using them? So here's the thing that gets really interesting about. Syria's civil war. And it explains really why the United States and our allies and the neighbors in the region really got upset about this. If you think about all the little and bigger uprisings going on because of Arab Spring, you've got revolutions everywhere. The one that is in Syria is quickly more dangerous than the rest, first because Assad is just a brutal thug. And he is willing to sacrifice his own country, essentially burn the country in order to save himself. The other thing is, they have a weapons of mass destruction. They've got this stockpile, unlike any other country in the

Middle East that's having uprisings, and it's vulnerable and it's dangerous. The country's being torn apart. The government's losing control. So you have that vulnerability aspect, which is really scary. But the other thing that occurs to Assad and as generals is we've got this weapon. We can use it to stop the insurgency. We can use it to demoralize, to terrorize, to terrorize the opposition. And so they started to do that in very small ways in 2012, just a small attack here, a single artillery shell, some small canisters, the size of a tear gas canister, dropped on towns to see what would happen. And they realized they were onto something. They had something that could truly frighten local populations. And if you have a siege underway or you've got a tough neighborhood you're trying to break, pull out your chemical weapons and you can do a lot in a hurry.

And that's what they began to do. So the world reacted and among those that reacted, the United States, the world's policemen, and Barack Obama said, he used the phrase red line, didn't really define it. And in the end, it actually didn't really get defined. What did he mean by it? And what happened from there? Yeah. And this is a really good part of the narrative. And in the book, I try to explain a little bit about that. how that term was used and why it was used and then what the consequences were. But just cut the story short, in the middle of 2012, the Obama administration was receiving some really scary hair-on-fire intelligence from the Middle East. And one of those threads of intelligence was this observed feature of the Syrians getting ready to do something with their stockpile.

The Israelis are watching this very closely. They've already handed out gas masks to their citizens because I think something bad it's going to happen. And their fear is that Assad is getting ready to hand over the jewels to Hezbollah, this militia next door of Lebanon that has 10,000 artillery rockets or missiles pointed at Israel. And essentially, either for safekeeping or for whatever reason, they were in a process of handing those over. And so the Obama administration goes nuts. They send out the emissaries. They talk to the Russians, the Iranians. They send messages to the Syrians, say, don't do this.

But they also stand up publicly several times. is Hillary Clinton and Obama both getting up in public forums and saying, Syria, we're warning you, don't do this. Don't give your weapons away. Don't use them. And in one instance, it was actually at a news conference at the White House to talk about health care, something completely different. And at the very end, Chuck Todd asked the question, what about these chemical weapons in Syria

and what do you mean? And Obama's reply is, essentially repeating what he's been saying, it's that we're telling Syria, don't do this. If you do, it's a red line for us. If you cross this line, it changes our calculus. It's a vague promise. It doesn't say we're going to strike or we're going to do this, we're going to invade, but he's putting Syria on notice that there's going to be severe consequences if you cross this line.

And that becomes a bit of an arbitros or kind of boxes Obama in a corner because the read on that, what people see in those words, is a threat of military force. The opposition in Syria certainly believes it means a military attack is coming if this line is crossed. The Russians think so. And so it's all kind of setting up the stage for what is this testing moment that when the weapons are used, when the line is crossed, what is America going to do? And America didn't know. So we really made a threat before we had, yeah, well, I guess that's not the first time. Then what was the follow-up question that got us all that got us into weird or true?

Yeah. So the follow-up question is, and it doesn't happen that day, but it happens in the months that, follow. A couple of things happen. One is the scary activity that we saw that got everybody spun up stops. Assad stops this activity. The Israelis are calming down. But what Assad starts to do is use these little attacks. And this group presents a dilemma because the bomb administration is declared the use of chemical weapons a red line. They can see that Assad is starting to use. But in such tiny ways that it's it's hard to justify a military strike if you have in one case a single person killed. And what do you do about that? And so there's all these debates in the White House, you know,

do we even acknowledge these attacks? Are they serious enough to just say something about? And ultimately, it's interesting that one of the biggest and most consequential decisions about Syria from the United States was in response to these little pinprick attacks because Obama authorizes a covert military program, a train and equip program, something to give the rebels arms and training that we had been reluctant to give them in the past. So that starts because of these small attacks. But it wasn't until August or 2013 when Syria drops the big one and kills 1,400 people in a single day with Sarin. That is this huge breach of the red line that everybody in the world feels like we've got to do something now.

When they did that, what did Assad think was going to happen when he decided to do such a large attack? This was a big puzzle for me when I started working on this book because it really made no sense. First of all, it happened at a time when actually there was a team of UN inspectors on the ground who were there to collect evidence about chemical weapons use. And you have this attack that's going on five miles outside Damascus and close enough that the inspectors can see the plumes from their hotel rooms. That's how close it is. So, A, that makes no sense. B, you've got this warning from Obama that he's going to do something. So why would Assad do something crazy?

And because it is so counterintuitive, it led to all. kinds of conspiracy theories and maybe there's a false flag attack and it was somebody else who's trying to get the United States to get into the war. But it turns out, as best we can reconstruct it, is that it was a local decision made by field commanders because aside, it turns out, had delegated responsibility for the use of chemical weapons to his commander. He said, you can use this stuff if you need to in battle. You don't have to come to me for a sign-off. and that was used in this was essentially a fairly routine skirmish in the outskirts of Damascus to try to push back on an opposition army there. And they miscalculated.

They sent it a handful of artillery shells. It was the middle of night. Sarin is heavier than air, so it sinks down into basements. And in this area of the Damascus suburbs, you've got hundreds of people who seek shelter in these basement apartments overnight, children and women particularly. And so it becomes massively lethal in a way that took even the Syrians by surprise. And we know this because of intercepted communications where the next day the Syrians were saying, whoops, that went a little further than we wanted it to. And oh, boy, we're going to get in trouble now.

All those intercepted communications helped us to be convinced. This really was a Syrian attack. But they completely bungled it. They meant to drive out some rebel fighters from their strongholds. And instead, they had a mass slaughter that was on TV. And so now there's this international spectacle that's getting Assad. I have a tangent question here. Is our chemical weapons even really an effective battlefield weapon?

Yeah, they kill people. Right. Like, they're great at that particular job. But I'm thinking, like, as a strategic or a tactical weapon, is this even worth it? And I keep thinking about air strikes in air campaigns, which we have all of this data from, both from World War II and from the conflict in Yugoslavia. that you have to follow this up with some sort of ground invasion, right? If you just are doing air strikes, all you tend to do is to entrench people, you give them a bonding experience, and make them want to fight more.

Think about Britain during the blitz, right? It feels like chemical weapons just make everyone really mad and just redact. Like, it's a weapon of fear, sure, but the Syrian Civil War is still going on. This is not a conflict that is in any way been resolved. That's a very good question. And I think one of the reasons that the world's powers were happy to give up chemical weapons is because they're really not effective as military weapons. And the trenches of World War I, yes, to some extent, until people got really good gas masks

and countermeasures and then they weren't so effective anymore. The famous ones like mustard gas, it maimed a lot of people. It didn't really kill that many people. And the same is true in warfare, especially modern warfare, where armies are moving around quickly, You can have an aerial denial because you used VX, but people just go around it. So it's really, it's a pretty crappy military weapon. And so that's why the Syrians innovated and decided we'll take it out of the warheads of these scud missiles, and we'll put them in tear gas canisters and artillery shells and these big kind of barrel bombs they created.

So their perfect delivery systems, but only to terrorize. So the whole effect really was to terrorize civilian populations because they knew it couldn't crush the rebellion on its own, but could sure upset and frighten people. But it has a downside, which is it also angers other countries. And it has even the Russians and the Iranians, Assad's best friends, saying to Assad, you've gone too far. When the Iranians come to you and say, this is a bit brutal, you have to stop this nonsense. That kind of is a message. Maybe you've ever done it with your chemical weapons. Well, the Iranians have a memory of what it's like to be on the receiving end of chemical weapons. Exactly do, because if people remember back to the Iran, Iraq,

war in the 1980s. This was a war that involved chemical warfare. And the people in that region to this day, the memory of those attacks is burned to their brains. And it's a scary thing to think about a chemical weapons bomb landing on your village. It's devastating. Okay. So we have the attack in the Damascus suburbs. We actually have inspectors. We have all, there's very little doubt as to what happened, right? There can be official doubt. No one at the UN gets to pronounce that Bashar al-Assad has actually done this. But clearly, anybody who has a reasonable red line would say it's been crossed. So what happens? When we don't attack, the United States does not attack. What happens instead? This is another thing that I think is brought out in the book that is overlooked when people think about this period of time.

And it is absolutely convincing to me, based on my interviews and the material I gathered, that Obama initially really wanted to strike. because like everybody else who's watching these images on TV, he's thinking, this is terrible. We have to do something about this. And I've set this red line and have to strike. And so you see in the first days after this strike in Damascus, there is this flurry of activity to get ready to do something. So all the missiles are in their tubes, the ships are off the coast.

Everybody, the military plans are dusted off, so they're ready to do something. But there are a couple of things that hold Obama back. One is the whole problem of weapons of mass destruction and bad intelligence and, you know, leading us into war. So we had the whole memory of Iraq. So he wants to make sure that we have, our intelligence is not just 100% ironclad, but he wants to be able to bring it to the American people. So people can't accuse them of going to war over false pretenses over WMD again.

So it takes a couple days to do that. The second problem is you have this team of inspectors on the ground inside Syria. And the problem with that is they are there to gather facts. And so do you send missiles into a country? before the fact finders that finished the job. This is very inconvenient. So Obama is pushing the UN to get them out. We already know what happened here.

There's no point in this investigation. Just pull them out. But they do it and refused to do it. It says they have to finish their mission. So that slows them down too. As all this is happening, then the real hesitancy comes in because the British were part of a coalition with us. They were going to strike along with us.

The parliament and Britain turns that idea down. Says, no, we're not going to participate. The Germans start to war. Orrin Obama that this is going to be bad. You should wait for the UN to do its work. And so Obama has his moment where he thinks, if I'm going to do this, what I should do is get my, make this a little bit politically palatable by getting Congress to back me up. So he decides, I'm going to go to Congress. I've always said as a candidate that the president shouldn't start wars on there without congressional consent. So we'll have congressional consent. We'll get all of Congress to devote to do this together. And the folks in the cabinet really thought this was going to work, that the Democrats would line up behind the president.

Republicans would not turn down the possibility of striking Assad who they disliked. And everyone was upset about the weapons attack. And when they went to Congress, they got crickets. Nobody wanted to have any part of this. Nobody wanted to have anything to do with another conflict of the Middle East. And so Obama is left, he's naked and essentially has no options. Congress won't go along. He's not going to do this on his own. And so he's at this point where he can't do anything except just look helpless and weak. And that is the moment where. this deal pops out of the ether. And here's this opportunity to save face by doing something else,

which is to strike a deal with Syria to get rid of the weapons stockpies. And I also just want to, I want to throw this wrench in there, too. I think this is an important point. And something we've been talking about a little bit on the show recently is that one of the ways that this is also different than the lead up to the second Iraq war is that you have a bunch of open source investigators on the internet that are using data to basically prove that there are chemical weapons here. You've got people like Brown Moses who would go on to found Bellingcat who are saying like, hey, here's the evidence. Here's an evidence for me an independent source ostensibly about these things happening, right? It wasn't, this stuff was pretty well documented at the time. Yeah, exactly right.

So there was no real question about, A, the fact that Assad had these weapons. And one little great nugget from the book is one reason we knew is because we had a mole inside Syria's program. We had a scientist who was feeding information to the CIA for more than a decade. So we had them dead to rights on what they were doing. But the other thing is, once the attack was used, it was not just the Americans and the Turks and other governments saying that Syria had launched the attack. But independent investigators who can do all this great sleuthing online, just triangulating using imagery, using GPS gear. And they reconstructed the crime and showed where the rockets had come from. And it was pretty clear within days that this was an Assad operation.

And the evidence only got better as the weeks went ahead. So now Russia steps in. Russia has been involved in the war from the beginning. They're Assad's allies. They actually have their only base outside of Russia inside of Syria. We've got a nice warm weather port. There are a lot of reasons why Russia's involved. It's a historical relationship with the Soviet Union.

Now Russia steps in with, I don't know, it seems like an odd offer. They're saying, okay, oh, you don't like their chemical weapons? We'll take care of that for you. So what happens? I think we've got to go back to the. carry press conference first, right? Because he opens the door for them. Yeah. It turns out that this idea of trying to coax Syria to get rid of the weapons had been dangling in various places. Someone had raised it almost as a hypothetical at a cabinet meeting as early as August,

2013, so weeks ahead of time. Interestingly, and I report this in my book, the Israelis start to float the idea too. They start to pitch it to the Russians. So you know what, Russia, we can get rid of this problem here. And of course, for Israel, there's nothing better that they would like to see this stockpile go away because there's a threat to them. So other people are dropping the head. But yeah, Kerry is having a press conference in London after a meeting and a reporter asks him this hypothetical, what would it take to stop the United States from going after Syria and retaliation for the strike? And Gary says, the only thing that would change our mind at this point would be if Assad would agree to give up his entire stockpile and let us come and inspect it and destroy them.

whole thing. That's never going to happen, but that's the only thing that could possibly dissuade us. So Kerry gets in the plane, heads back to Washington. As he's in the plane, phone rings, and it's Lavrov, the foreign minister from Russia saying, oh, heard your press conference, interesting comments, we think this might work. And so they've been working behind the scenes with Assad and very quickly, powerfully twisted his arm and got him to go along with this. Why would they do that? For one, Russia really took the red line talk. seriously. They understood our political process and how difficult it was, but they were really sure, or seemed to be sure, that Obama was going to do something and that could get their guy in trouble.

So they wanted to head that off. The other thing is, Russia didn't like these optics. They didn't like the idea of their boy committing atrocities on international cable television networks. And so they were ready to sit down on him. They thought they've never been particularly happy with Assad. They would love to trade in for somebody else, but he's the best they've got. And so this was a chance to rain in a problem, to get rid of this terrible embarrassment, but also maybe save Assad's bacon. If they can prevent an attack, they can keep their boy in power longer. And that's so it will win-win from the Russia's point.

Why does Russia care about Syria at all? And this is important because you see as the story goes on how much they care. And in the beginning, it's, okay, Russia has this nice warm water port at Tartus, which is on the Syrian coast. happens to be the only foreign warm water port in the world outside of Russia that they have. So it's important. But it's not just because of shipping. This has become over the decades an important listening outposts.

They've got a lot of intelligence apparatus there. And it's also their best foothold in the Middle East, a place where they want to exert more influence because of oil and because of geopolitics and lots of other things. It's been kind of America's turf. We call the shots the Middle East. So here's a chance. This is a place where Russia, has influence, they don't want to give it up. And it becomes clear just how important that is to them, because in the beginning, they're very willing to back Assad at the UN and to give him

resources and to sell them helicopters. But as the war progresses, they become more and more vested in making sure that Assad and his regime survive, even to the extent that by 2015, they've started their own military intervention. They've sent airplanes and troops into Syria for the first time in a Middle Eastern country since the Afghan invasion, which is not the Middle East, but in that part of the world. So this is really, it just shows the extent to which Russia was committed to making Assad stay in power, much more than we ever were committed to trying to make him go. How were the weapons taken out of Syria? What kind of operation did it take to do it? If you can imagine the problem set here, this is mind-boggling, because first of all, it's never happened that you've had a country wanting to be.

give up an entire weapons program unilaterally with oversight, international oversight, and in the middle of a war. So all those complicated pieces are at play here. There is no inspection force or no elite team that's going to parachute into a place like Syria and dismantle weapons program. So all that had to be cobbled together. You had to create this international body made up of OPCW inspectors, this obscure office in the Hague that does chemical weapons enforcement, the UN, various contributions. from the Americans and European allies. And so they built a program from scratch to oversee the elimination of the program.

They were on the ground in three weeks. So this was happening lightning speed for the UN's point of view. But that was just part of the problem to get people into the country to make sure that Assyria was complying with its obligation. The other part is what do you do with the weapons when you get them out? What country is going to say, okay, we'll take those. We'll let you bring 1,300 tons of sarin into our harbor or to a Navy base. And nobody in the world, including the Russians and the Americans, were willing to do that.

So we had to invent something there, too. When you say invent, what did we invent? So two things. There are two parts of this. And it's all kind of great stories of American ingenuity. One was a machine, a portable machine that could be put on a inside a tractor-trailer van, basically, and sent anywhere in the world flown in an airplane to physically destroy the sarin stuff once you got it out. So we made that.

There was like a small army. outfit down in Edgewood, Maryland that on their own with a few million dollars, created this contraption. And they started calling it the margarita machine. It's his crazy looking thing with lots of colorful pumps and valves. And they put it all together. And it sat in a warehouse and nobody thought it would ever get used. But when the opportunity came and when Syria decided, okay, we'll bring all our weapons to the port of Latakia and let you take them away, there was no country to take them. So they put those machines on a boat. An old cargo ship from the ready reserve fleet, they turned it into a kid.

chemical weapons destruction factory, put those machines there on the deck, and then sent it out to the Mediterranean. And for 40 days, these guys just kind of went in circles around the Mediterranean and destroyed one barrel after another until they got through the whole thing. And it almost didn't work. They had all kinds of problems, but they managed to get it done and didn't spill anything, which is quite remarkable. So how effective was this? Okay, the weapons were destroyed, or at least what we knew of the weapons. There was a happy ending. Asaad never used. use them again, and everything's great, right? Yeah, one wishes. So it's a very mixed picture. And I don't want to undersell the value of what we did because we did a couple of things.

We got out most of their stuff, probably 90, 95 percent, according to CIA estimates, was taken out of the country. What's left? We know Assad kept some back, but it's relatively small quantities and probably much more protected now that Assad is in control of the country to a greater extent that it was. But the other thing did was destroy production equipment. So these inspectors went into these places where the chemical weapons were manufactured and had the Syrians smash up everything. We literally blow up these. The bunkers were the places where the weapons were kept. So if they reconstitute their program, they pretty much have to do it from scratch. So that was a plus. And getting rid of those, the bulk of the stockpile is an advantage for Syrians and for the

rest of the world because it means a smaller chance of stuff getting out that could kill us. But at the same time, you're right. Assad learned nothing from this. He was completely unrepentant. He never admitted doing any of this. He never admitted using chemical weapons once. He's never been held accountable. And he continued to use chemical weapons.

He made this clever ship because he didn't use sarin anymore, at least in the beginning. He just took old chlorine barrels, chlorine like you used to purify drinking water or in your swimming pool, stuff that's not illegal to have. have. He had it sitting around. And so he just put that in helicopters and dropped it on villages anyway and to continue to use a poor man's chemical weapon. It's not very effective. It doesn't kill many people, but it terrorizes. And so he has learned nothing. And then later on, after 2017, he starts to use sarin again in very small quantities and a couple of incidents. And so the accountability has never been there. And certainly the war itself just ground on. There was

no pause in the killing. The brutality has continued today as much as ever. And so, So Assad and the Syrian people have not changed at all because of what happened getting the weapons out of the country. I've got one last question. What the hell is wrong with Bashar al-Assad? And I actually mean this. Do you think from all of your reporting was be a doctor? We had to pull him out. Is he a psychopath or what do you think?

Here's the crazy thing because Bashar al-Assad was never meant to be present of Syria. He had an older brother who was charismatic and was politically groomed to be the successor to the father. He gets killed in a car accident. And so Bashar al-Assad is the accidental president of Syria. His plan was to be an ophthalmologist. And the story of that is the reason he chose that profession is because he was afraid of the sight of blood. So go figure. This guy turns out to be the biggest mass murderer, you know, in Syria's ever had.

And he was squeamish as an iron man. And he also had been at one point considered reformer. We thought this guy had modern ideas. he was going to modernize economy. He briefly allowed some dissent and political reform. But he became a prisoner of his own security apparatus. This clique that had grown up around his father and that their allegiance was into the regime and to absolute brutality to stop any threats to the regime.

And in the end, that becomes him. He buys into the idea that everybody who's fighting him are terrorists and enemies of the state. and if I have to destroy Syria in order to save the regime, then I've done everybody a favor. It seems that he honestly believes that. He's going to go down in history as a Paul Pot is one of the great mass murderers of all time, but he really seems to feel like he's on in the right. And you can see him in his interviews and press conferences. Here's a guy that if he has any regrets, has a tension of remorse about what he's done to his own country.

It doesn't show up anywhere. So he really feels this is, if he was an evil guy, he has become an evil guy over the course of this conflict. I think that's the kind of depressing note, as we say, virtually every week that we like to go out on. It does make one angry, doesn't it? Yeah, it really does. So Joby Warwick, thank you so much for coming on to the show. Thanks for the great questions and conversation. I really love being with you guys.