Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - The art of the deal

Episode Date: August 4, 2016

The secret history of ISIS from ToE’s special corespondent Chris. PLUS Donald Trump is ready for sacrifice.

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called The Art of the Deal. If Donald Trump becomes president of the United States, there's just no way I'm going to be able to stay in New York. You would leave? Definitely. I mean, first of all, he's probably not even going to leave New York, which means I'm going to be stuck behind a barricade for like six months while the presidential motorcade loops the city past the New York Times building up Fifth Avenue down to the Lower East Side just so he can lean out the window and flip everybody off with his tiny little middle fingers. I mean, there's no way. I'm just gonna have to

pack up the family and go to France. There could be worse places to wait this thing out than Paris. Well, maybe. I mean, I don't want to knock my one refugee option, but all of these terrorist attacks, it's like there's one a week now. Well, Trump might lead to, say, the collapse of the world economy or a nuclear first strike. But I can say with certainty that you will be safer in France if Trump becomes president. Really? The reason there are so many terrorist attacks in France and Europe right now is because ISIS is losing on the battlefield. Their caliphate is crumbling.

And that's great. I mean, fuck their state. These Cretans need to be wiped off the face of the earth. Obviously, Benjamin, you aren't familiar with the radical Islam debate on Dubuque versus Dabiq. No, I'm not. Okay, before ISIS, if you wanted to grow out your beard and decapitate apostates, you only really had one option, and that's Al-Qaeda. People forget, but they were really totally focused only on the West. In fact, one of Osama bin Laden's early mottos was, first we take Manhattan, and then we take Dubuque.

Dubuque, Iowa. Yeah. Osama had a total hard-on for the heartland. For him, Dubuque would be the new center of radical American Islam. He even had all these little architectural models built up where the Sharia Supreme Court would be, where the mosques would go, jihadi summer camps.

Come on, that's ridiculous. That's exactly what a young al-Qaeda recruit named Abu Mausab al-Zarqawi, who you may have heard of, said to Osama bin Laden's face when the two met for the first time in Kandahar. Zarqawi believed real jihadis would aim for Dabiq, which is actually a town in Syria. There are some old Islamic prophecies. This is where the final battle of Armageddon will supposedly be fought. In Dabiq, an epic end of the world battle between invading Christians and Muslims. Dabiq is also the name of the ISIS propaganda magazine.

Yes, exactly. But before ISIS, in 2002, Zarqawi was totally pissed off by the brush off he got from bin Lut. So he then goes to Iraq and sets up a jihadi camp waiting and hoping that the U.S. will invade because he believes, Zarqawi, he believes that if the U.S. does invade then he'll be able to use that chaos to foment a sectarian war between the Sunni and the Shia and inspire young Sunnis throughout the Middle East to sign up for jihad. Which is exactly what happened. And we knew this would happen.

But the worst part is, we could have taken Zarqawi out before the invasion. Why didn't we? Because Dick Cheney vetoed the strike. The Bush administration needed Zarqawi alive going, once he's leading what he now calls Al-Qaeda in Iraq, once he's bombing the shit out of the Shia, Osama bin Laden wants nothing more than to shut this guy down. He sees him as like a total disruptor. Zarqawi made like the original viral jihad video, right? The one with Nicholas Berg? million dollar bounty on Zarqawi's head which is second only to the bounty on

bin Laden. When bin Laden learned about this he went apeshit and he ordered Zarqawi to stop. Well of course Zarqawi doesn't stop. He put out another video in which he stated his vision for jihad and that it was better than Osama bin Laden's vision, which was an Islamic state. So he founded ISIS? No, we killed him in 2006. But the Dubuque debate lived on. It was the only thing that you would hear being talked about in the prisons and so on where all the Al Qaeda and Iraq dudes were locked up.

And this is where Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi comes in. Baghdadi is really the first guy who's able to take Dubuque off the table. He persuades all these hardcore jihadis that the focus has to be Dubuque, the Middle East, not the table. He persuades all these hardcore jihadis that the focus has to be Dabiq, the Middle East, not the West, and most definitely not Dabiq. Now, we could have taken out Baghdadi

before he got going as well. Yeah, I don't want to rehash all the stuff we screwed up in the Middle East. I want to know about Trump. Okay, I'm getting there there but this part is really important see what people don't understand is that if you were an intelligence around this time and you learned about some terrorist group that doesn't want to blow up new york or london or paris but instead wants to hide out in the desert and build

up their own fantasy state and then wait for us to come there to fight. It was like super convenient. Yeah. The brass were like, there's no way we're killing this guy. If we did anything, we built Baghdadi up. The brass were like, there's no way we're killing this guy. If we did anything, we built Baghdadi up. What do you mean? Well, he does have this whole thing about how he descends from the prophet. Wait, so you like forged his ancestry.com files?

I'm not going to comment. I'm not going to comment on operational details. But what I will say is that once the Syrian civil war got going, all these former Al-Qaeda and Iraq dudes followed him to Syria, and boom, ISIS is born. No wannabe jihadi wants anything to do with Al-Qaeda anymore when ISIS can give them an actual state. And this is when Al-Qaeda officially breaks it off

with Baghdadi. Al-Qaeda's mad because they can't compete. So Dubuque can breathe easy once again. Lots of folks were breathing easy, but now that ISIS is losing territory, now that their state is falling apart, they're having a hard time convincing young wannabe jihadis to sign up. Al-Qaeda is actually making a comeback. In fact, there are a lot of folks worried that the two organizations might even patch things up. And if this happens, we get the savagery of ISIS plus the global ambitions of Al-Qaeda.

Yeah, that's bad. And that is where we are right now. But what does any of this have to do with Donald Trump? I mean, I can't imagine he even knows the difference between Al-Qaeda and ISIS or Dubuque and Dubuque. Well, say what you want about Trump, but he definitely gets how important it is to keep Dubuque on the table. I was watching the Republican convention at this bar near my house. And there was this guy next to me who was also watching. And we got talking and it turns out that his boyfriend is working with the campaign advising Trump on Middle Eastern issues.

And believe it or not, Trump really understands the importance of Debeak. I mean, he gets it. No. Yeah. Trump is convinced that as president, he'll be able to negotiate a deal with ISIS where they get a version of the beak and they stay enemies with Al Qaeda and swear off targeting the West. What do you mean a version? Yeah, it's still going to be a real city but it's just like made for tv i mean like reality tv yes okay so this is something i've never understood about this whole trump thing and and maybe it's just because i never watched the apprentice but how does that experience like translate to any real world expertise, like especially when it comes to something like ISIS?

Well, well, see, I think what people like you are missing is just that you've never watched the show. Right. You don't even have the name right. It's the Celebrity Apprentice. The Apprentice, the non-celebrity version, ran until 2008. The ratings were so low, the show was set to be canceled. But then Trump had this idea to use celebrities, and the show became the powerhouse it is today. But the magic is the celebrities. You watch this show. Dude, the season with David Cassidy is amazing.

Okay, but since you're too cool to watch the show, what you don't know is that no real celebrity has ever appeared on the show. Trump only gets washed up, B-list celebrities, okay? People who wanted to be famous. They wanted to be famous, they wanted to be important, but... People like David Cassidy.

Yeah, exactly. Losers. Which is the profile for most of these young jihadis, especially the really dangerous ones. The guys who radicalize like overnight. Many of these pieces of garbage tried to make it in music or film, and they all failed at becoming famous.

So hate on Trump all you want, but you got to admit he is really good at making losers feel important. He just might be the guy who gets ISIS to take a deal. What exactly is this deal? Okay, he's going to build a city in the desert somewhere in Iraq or Syria, and it's going to be a real city. He's going to let them have Sharia courts, burqa boutiques. But who's going to live in this Potemkin terror camp?

Well, not all the details are worked out yet, but he's hoping we can send the Syrian refugees there and maybe even some Mexicans. Come on, this is insane. They're refugees because of ISIS. I know, I know. Like I said, it's a work in progress right now. But there are some really intriguing elements here. Like what?

The sports arena where the fights will take place. Fights? Yeah. Trump's big idea is that this whole DeBeak thing can be financed by the TV rights on the fights. So America will send in fighters to battle these jihadis on their turf, which gives them a shot at fulfilling their prophecies, and the whole thing will be filmed for TV. So Trump sends in some tough guys, ISIS chops their heads off, and America is just going to be psyched to watch that on TV?

Well, obviously it's going to be a new kind of fighting. Did you watch the Republican convention? Of course not. I'm living in abject fear that I'm going to have to move to France. Why would I have watched that? Well, the first speaker was dana white you know who you know who he is the trump butler no no he's president of the ufc ultimate fighting championship trump with dana white's help is going to get is to adopt UFC rules.

That's the deal. So Donald Trump thinks he can get a bunch of dudes who are used to chopping people's heads off to start doing fake headbutts. No, no, no. That's the WWF. The UFC is real fighting. You have real blood, okay? McCain once called it human cop fighting. You have real blood, okay? McCain once called it human cop fighting. But what happens if the ISIS guys win?

Well, obviously Trump thinks that's impossible. It's like he's always saying, when he's president, there's just going to be so much winning. But okay, I did get a call yesterday from that guy I met at the bar. Apparently, he told his partner about me, and they're interested in seeing if I might want to help out with my expertise and all. You're gonna go fight ISIS?

No, no, I was just on a big conference call. A Google Hangout. No way. Well, there were I was just on a big conference call. A Google Hangout. No way. Well, there were like 50 people on the call, and the only person who talked was Trump. He thinks his ISIS plan might be the thing to put out there to show just how much he gets radical Islam. And he's readied up the stakes. He wants the world to understand that he, Donald Trump, is not a man afraid of sacrifice. In fact, he's now going to offer ISIS the opportunity to fight his sons first. Really?

Yeah. This would be the premiere episode of the DeBeak series. So it would be ISIS versus the Trumps. It's kind of brilliant when you think about it. If Eric and Donald Jr. win, Trump wins. If ISIS wipes the floor with Eric and Donald Jr., Trump still wins. That is the art of the deal. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called The Art of the Deal.

This episode was produced by myself, Benjamin Walker, and it featured TOE's special correspondent, Chris. His first appearance on the program in quite some time. Check out the early TOE archives for more. Special thanks to Mathilde Biot and everyone in France.

TOE's a proud member of Radiotopia, the world's best podcast network. You can find links to all of the shows at Radiiotopia.fm radiotopia's launch sponsors are MailChimp the Knight Foundation and listeners like you you you Radiotopia from PRX.