Pod Save the World - Breaking down the Baghdadi raid

Episode Date: November 6, 2019

Tommy and Ben discuss what the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi means for ISIS as well as Trump's strange lie about Baghdadi's "whimpering" demise. Then they cover the Paris Climate Agreement and the future of climate activism, Iran's increased nuclear activity and use of hostages as a foreign policy strategy, and protests in Chile and Iraq. Later they shout about Mike Pompeo, discuss the House resolution on Armenian Genocide, the Uighurs, bad guys hacking WhatsApp, and Rudy Giuliani, butt dialing cyber security czar. Then America Dissected host Dr. Abdul El-Sayed joins to discuss Ebola, superbugs, and how trust in government is key to global public health. 

Welcome back to POT Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben, you're in New York, home of the U.N. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I haven't seen you since Chase Street. I know, I know. A lot to digest there. I hope the world those enjoyed all those conversations. Yeah, a lot of conversations, a lot of work more than I think both of us expected, but pretty interesting that that conference ended up solidifying the fact that the party has pretty much moved to the left in a significant way when it comes to U.S. assistance for Israel and, you know, the willingness to put pressure on the Israeli government if there are either annexation attempts made or continued settlement construction. Yeah, I mean, you heard a diversity, right? So you had Pete saying that if there's annexation,

you know, then assistance is on the table. Where you had Bernie saying, you know, I will immediately essentially try to use assistance to pressure the Israeli government and maybe even try to get some support to people in Gaza. And, you know, you had different candidates making similar statements worn in her video. Julian Castro in his conversation with us saying he would make clear that he'd reopen diplomatic representation of the Palestinians in East Jerusalem and say that would be a future embassy site. Those are all new positions for candidates. Obama didn't go that far.

It's obviously a sign of the frustration with Netanyahu and the Trump relationship. I thought the other interesting thing, Tommy, is that there's so little. foreign policy conversation in this campaign. Yeah. That it's one of the only times in the campaign that there have been kind of extended conversations, interviews with these candidates on foreign policy issues. And so you've got to see how, you know, Abudajij, you know, how his kind of message, which is progressive but trying to cast it in a conciliatory way, Bernie, much more kind

of combative in how he comes out. Klobuchar, you know, more recognizable in terms of the position of the Democratic. party over the years. You know, you just saw an interesting set of perspectives that, you know, mirrors kind of some of the positions they've taken domestically when applied to foreign policy. Yeah. I mean, we can debate Medicare for all financing as long as we want, but it's going to be a lot easier to just do things on foreign policy than to get things through the Senate. But I digress. Pax show today. Our guest today is Dr. Abdul-A-Syad. He's the host of America Dissected, a crooked media podcast that you should check out because it's fantastic. We're going to talk about

a whole bunch of global public health issues and emergencies in some cases. And then we're going to talk about all the things we didn't get to talk about last week because we were at the conference. So that includes the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the formal withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords, a bunch of Iran news. We're going to talk about some protests in Chile and Iraq. Let me just check in with our friend Mike Pompeo because we respect his leadership. We'll talk about the House passing a resolution, recognizing the Armenian genocide, WhatsApp getting hacked, and then I just want to check in with Rijuliani. So a lot going on here. But let's start with Baghdadi. On Sunday, October 26th, during a long rambling press conference from the White House,

President Trump announced that the U.S. military had killed ISIS founder and leader Abu Bakr all Baghdadi. Baghdadi had been hiding out in a compound in Idlib province in northwest Syria, which is on the border of Turkey. He apparently some reporting after the fact unveiled how it all went down. And I guess a close confidant of Baghdadi's turned on him. He disclosed his location to Kurdish intelligence and even stole a pair of Baghdaddy's underwear to get a blood sample for DNA testing to confirm it was him. Hazard pay for the guy who had to touch those things. But key point here is that the Kurdish presence on the ground in Syria is really the only reason we found Baghdaddy in their relationships. Since that time, ISIS has confirmed Baghdaddy's death.

They've named a new leader, someone named Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Kurashi, who is either unknown to Western world or was just given a new nom de Gehr when he got the top job. I don't really know the answer there. The U.S. military also took out the top ISIS spokesman who was seen as an heir apparent to Baghdadi. Shortly after these operations went down, the New York Times reported that the decision to withdraw forces from northern Syria actually forced the Pentagon to speed up planning for this raid. So I think you saw a bunch of senior leader. get taken out because the Pentagon was worried this was their last chance with a presence there. So, you know, despite all of Trump's demands for credit and he does deserve some credit, I want to be clear about that, it does appear that his decision to withdraw from Syria via tweet almost screwed up this raid on Baghdaddy's compounds. So Ben, first question, what do you think the impact is of taking Baghdadi off the battlefield? And what does it tell us about the strength or lethality of ISIS? Well, it's important. I mean, Baghdadi was, the unquestioned leader of ISIS and had kind of helped formulate the vision of there being

an actual caliphate that could attract fighters into northern Syria and Iraq. Obviously, a particularly brutal and sadistic guy, which we tragically experienced most acutely in the beheadings of four Americans. So it's justice to some extent for those horrific crimes. I do think that, you know, His role had already been diminished somewhat by the fact that they lost this territory. And in talking to some people who I know who continue to work on these issues, you know, he'd been hiding out an Idlib province, which is not particularly an ISIS stronghold because he had nowhere else to go after they lost their capital in Raqa. I guess he was paying off some other extremist groups. They actually, they literally found receipts from where ISIS had been paying for Safe Haven in these areas.

Yeah. And there were a lot of people who wanted to kill back. like that he in Idlib, not just the Americans, you know, the Iranians as well, other extremist groups. So he was probably a guy living on borrowed time. But, you know, so it's important, particularly symbolically coming after them losing so much territory. I don't think he was probably that able to be an effective operational leader, given that he was hiding out in, you know, this kind of war zone in Idlib. I do think it's really important to note the context you gave, which is the only reason we had a beat on the sky is because we had a presence on the ground through the Kurds,

which we've now lost. And so the thing that I think should concern people is not only did we essentially lose that relationship to the Kurds, lose our own presence on the ground through the special forces who were removed and they're now hanging out some oil field that's totally insignificant. But also, we don't have eyes onto this kind of area of Syria where ISIS could regenerate, particularly given the fact that we know for a fact that ISIS prisoners escaped during the Turkish operation. So I think the thing that should be concerning is that ISIS starts to regenerate and we don't have that kind of presence. We don't have those kind of eyes through the Kurds on the ground in the same way. And also I think for some time, you know, there's some danger that ISIS will seek to engage in either

revenge attacks or attacks to show people that they're still relevant. So this isn't the end of the story for ISIS. In fact, you know, the ISIS grew out of a group, you know, named al-Qaeda in Iraq that had its leader, Zarqawi, killed in the Bush administration. They obviously regenerated. So we shouldn't think this is the end of the story. And really, you know, Trump deserves credit for making the decision, but this did feel like the kind of thing that the military basically did on its own and came to Trump and said, okay, we're going to go get this guy. And so the credit really should go, I think, chiefly to, you know, the intelligence people, the Kurds and the, and the, and the, you know, the U.S. Special Forces that carried this out. Yeah, I mean, the U.S., you know, the U.S. can have as many satellites and signals intelligence capabilities as we want, but nothing can replace, like,

someone on the ground who has information, who flips and gives it to us. And if you don't have a presence there, you're never going to get it. Yeah. So we mentioned this strange press conference that Trump did. One moment that jumped out was when Trump described Baghdaddy as, quote, whimpering and crying and screaming all the way to his death. It was immediately obvious to me that he just made that up. Like, clearly they were monitoring the operation with some sort of drone feet or whatever it was. But, you know, those don't usually have an audio component. They don't. Yeah. If it did, it wouldn't collect whimpering, right? Like, the guy was in a tunnel. They didn't have him miced up. But so the uncharitable explanation for why Trump said that stuff is

that he's a liar who wanted to tell a grandiose story for the cameras. The charitable explanation is that he wanted to denigrate Baghdaddy and his legacy and make his demise sound cowardly as opposed to a martyr. And this whole situation reminded me of the briefing that you and I asked John Brennan to do after the bin Laden operation. So it was like days after John hadn't slept in a week, right? He's been tracking bin Laden for 15 years of his life. He'd lost friends to the guy. And so we put him up in the White House briefing room at the podium there, which is something that Trump people don't do anymore, but whatever. Initially, John said that bin Laden had been engaged in a firefight and had used his wife as a human shield.

That turned out to be wrong. but John didn't make it up. It was what he had been told by the Pentagon as they were debriefing the special operators that were involved. But as more individuals were debriefed, the story changed. And like, that's actually completely normal and standard. It's, you know, the fog of war is a term for a reason. But so, but I do think it's fair to say that John included those details because he was denigrating

bin Laden, right? We didn't want him to look like some heroic leader. And that's why we also later released images of bin Laden. and watching himself on TV and looking like this sort of sad, pathetic old man. But Ben, I just wondered what you made of that weird press conference, the whimpering anecdote, or really any of it. Well, look, the whimpering anecdote is clearly fake. I mean, there's no way you would pick that up on a feed. The military has been asked about this and has very carefully avoided answering the question. Yeah. Yeah. And the important thing you mentioned that, you know,

John got some of those initial details wrong, we corrected that the next day, right? So, So this White House is not going to correct anything Trump says. You know, I think it really served to just kind of debase the moment. You know, the moment should be about this achievement by the United States government. By frankly, some of the same people, Trump regularly denigrates, right? The intelligence community of the United States that found him, the Kurdish allies that, you know, he just, Trump just threw under the bus. So I think the sad thing about it is, you know, this moment that, you know, should have been, you know, a time to kind of

take stock of the achievement of this counter-IS campaign, you know, Trump has to make it about himself, you know, and not about the special forces, not about the Kurds, not about the people who've suffered under ISIS. You know, once again, he's just trying to make it, you know, kind of his own performance. And that, I think, did kind of debase the moment in a weird way had the opposite effect of what Trump wanted because the, you know, the story became, in part, you know, this kind of strange press currency ad. And look, you know, know, it's, it's, it's, it's an important, uh, achievement. I think the challenge that Trump, you know, felt so frustrated about is, you know, he wanted, he's the one who wanted to compare

this to bin Laden. Um, and look, the difference is just, it's pretty simple is that Osama bin Laden had 100% name recognition in the United States. Every American knew who Osama bin Laden was. That's just not the case with Baghdaddy. And that, it's just a different nature of terrorism, uh, you know, 20 years after 9-11 that, um, that, that this is not going to be of a similar magnitude. And the extent to which that seemed to drive Trump crazy was odd. And it's not because nobody else wanted to give Trump credit. It's just because, you know, Trump himself is the one who can't seem to help measuring himself against Obama in this kind of bizarre way. Yeah. He is at its worst when he needs credit for everything. He was apparently complaining that the

dog involved in the operation was getting better press than he did. So whatever, buddy. The dog did more in the operation. That's right. That's very true. I met the dog that was on the bin Laden operation too, by the way. That was a tough dog. Was it also a Belgian malinois? Is that what it is? Yeah. I think his name is Cairo. And we went out to Fort Campbell to meet the Navy SEALs for Obama to thank them after the bin Laden raid. And Obama asked to meet the dog. And one of the seals said, sir, I'd advise you to bring a treat. Because this is a tough dog, you know. So

the dog deserves credit. How big was it? He was a big dog. I would not, I did not go near that dog. Okay. No, so not a Labradoodle. This is not a Labradoodle. This is not like, you know, Luca or Pundit or any of the crooked dogs. I think would eat them for lunch. Literally. All right, let's talk about the Paris Climate Accord. So on Monday, the U.S. formally notified the UN that we would withdraw from the Paris Agreement and the climate change. You know, this has been coming for a long time. Trump has previously announced that they would do this. But Monday was actually the first day that they could technically start the process. It's actually a one-year clock before we actually actually exit. So this sucks. It's depressing. The good news is that next president could get us back in, but like since Paris was negotiated, there's been a flood of news that the situation is even more dire than we once thought. The Paris Climate Accords were a huge accomplishment. 200 countries agreed to cut emissions. They agreed to help poor countries cope with the impact of climate change. And those other countries are going to stay in Paris, but without the U.S. involved, it's not clear that they'll be able to have enough leverage to push China or India

or other countries to take further steps. And, you know, meanwhile, Trump is actually rolling back regulations in the U.S. on cars and coal plants that will make things worse. Cities and states are mitigating Trump's impact by taking action on their own. But, you know, it's a crisis. We need to respond as a nation. So, Ben, I mean, my question is kind of what now. Are there things happening in the world that give you hope or maybe even more importantly?

Like, do you have a sense of what effective climate activism and messaging looks like at this point because it does feel like you either believe it or don't, no one's getting convinced, everyone is dug in and like only young people are actually doing anything about it. Well, yeah, I mean, the good news, I guess, is that the U.S. is actually going to meet its targets under Paris, even with Trump's really destructive actions to roll back Obama-era regulations, just because there was so much done in the Obama administration and, as you say, states, municipalities, and even the private sector, you know, has continued to factor. climate change into their different models. And so activity is still happening. What's really lost,

as you pointed out, is it to get India and China and other countries to be more ambitious to fight climate change, it took a lot of U.S. leadership and a lot of U.S. prodding. The U.S. moving in a certain direction was also sending a message to markets, to invest in things like renewable energies, that that would be the future of the global energy economy. And without U.S. leadership, all of that is slowing at a time when the science is telling us that the problem is even worse. And, you know, Paris was supposed to be a floor, right? So Paris was not seen as sufficient. It was seen as kind of the baseline to set and then to try to get continually more ambitious as this is renegotiated, frankly, every year countries come together in the same structure as Paris. And every five years,

there's an effort to update the accord to get more ambitious. And so until the U.S. kind of gets back in the game, that's much less likely to happen, and we're just losing precious time that we don't have to stem the effects of climate change. You know, at a time, frankly, tell me where we live in Los Angeles, you can see the effects of climate change and the horrific fires that are taking place in California. I think in terms of how people should think about this, one way to think about it is the U.S. withdrawal from Paris will go into effect on November 4, 2020, the day after the presidential

election. And we can rejoin Paris in one month. The process allows a country to rejoin in one month. The U.S. will be the only country in the world that is not in the Paris Agreement on November 4th of 2020. So if you care about this, make climate change a central voting issue. There's, you know, make climate change something that gets you out and knocking on doors. Frankly, I'd like to see donors who care about climate change like, you know, Tom Steyer's done a lot of good work on it, spend their money to make climate change more of an issue in American politics. And be focused on practical solutions, not just scaring people with the science, that's important, but how can we transform our energy economy to get this done?

How do we connect the activism at home around things like the Green New Deal with what's going to happen, have to happen around the world to deal with this challenge, which is climate change has to be an organizing principle of American foreign policy, has to be top priority in bilateral relationships with every country, particularly the major emitters around the world. it's going to take that kind of effort. And, you know, Trump, if you needed a reminder of the stakes of the 2020 election, he just gave you one. Yeah, the fate of the world. All right. Let's talk Iran. So Iranian President Hassan Rouhani announced today that Iran is going to start the process of turning on nuclear centrifuges at the Fordo nuclear facility. That facility was secret. It was covert until it was disclosed by the U.S. and our allies back in 2009. And under the Iran deal or the JCP, POA. Fordo, that facility, was supposed to be just a research facility versus an active enrichment site, which is important. I'll get to that in a second. But specifically what the Iranians are doing

is they're going to start putting uranium gas into the centrifuges, which if you turn them on, they could start enriching the uranium and ultimately produce the fuel for a nuclear weapon. The Iranians have also announced that they're creating more advanced centrifuges that can enrich uranium more quickly. So they're clearly tiptoeing towards, you know, fully exiting the Iran deal as a a way of putting more pressure on the international community to give them sanctions relief that they were promised. So Ben, I reached out to our former colleague and nonproliferation expert Richard nephew to sort of get a gut check on this. And his take was, you know, the enrichment itself isn't the bigger problem. It's the facility because, as you know, well, the Fordo facility is like dug into

a mountain. It's incredibly well fortified. So if it starts getting used for these, you know, proliferation purposes, it makes the Israelis really nervous because they can't necessarily bomb it and take it out, and now they worry that Trump wouldn't. So that probably explains this quote from Bibi Netanyahu, who said Iran's brazenness in the region is rising and it's increasing even more due to the lack of response. And so that quote nearly made my head explode because the whole argument against the Iran deal was that it didn't deal with all of this Iranian malign activity and so we need to get harder on them. But here we are years after exiting and Iran is playing a far more destabilizing role in the region. And Bibi's answer to that, of course, is cracked down

even harder. So I don't know, man. Like, how do you think the maximum pressure campaign is going so far? Well, yeah, I mean, it's almost impossible to think of a policy that has more clearly failed than only Cuba. Yeah, you know, but if you look at what's happening. Yeah, Cuba and Venezuela. If you look at what has happened since Trump left the Iran deal, every single indicator has gotten worse. So they've restarted their nuclear program. They've resumed a stockpile of nuclear materials. Yes, now they are, are, again, reactivating their most dangerous nuclear facility because it's buried deep underground. Their behavior in the region has gotten more aggressive. We've talked about all the provocations emanating from Iran on this podcast, whether it's shooting down a U.S. drone, taking out Saudi

oil infrastructure. So by any metric, this maximum pressure is failing. And by also the metric of the sanctions that they've imposed, not only are they not affecting Iranian behavior, they're just hurting the Iranian people in ways that have a humanitarian impact as well. So this is an across-the-board failure, and it's just making us a problem that was solved. I mean, when I think about the things that he's done, you know, we talked about Paris. We can come back into the Paris agreement, you know, we'll have lost time. This, we had, this problem had been taken off the table, essentially. We had inspections and verified that Iran wasn't operating those centrifuges at facilities like Ford-O.

And it's just created a problem totally needlessly, just because Trump wanted to tear up Obama's Iran deal. And it's exposed the lie at the heart of this criticism of the Iran deal that if you just impose more pressure, Iran will somehow break. The opposite is true, that you squeeze Iran and they will lash out. And so until we get a rational foreign policy that tries to reenter the JCPOA, we're going to be stuck here because, you know, the Iranians point out rightly that the Americans were the first ones to violate this deal, so why should we abide by it? And the Europeans

have tried to keep them in, they can't, you know? The one other thing I just say is the scrutiny of our Iran deal vastly, you know, dwarfs the scrutiny that this failure gets. You know, the entire summer of 2015, the Iran deal was under a microscope by Congress and the media. And these stories pass like a ship in the night, you know, like they're resuming centrifuges. You know, I, I, I, spend more time defending how the centrifuges at Ford O were going to be turned off, then Trump has had to answer for the fact that the centrifuges are going to be turned back on, you know? And so I'd really, I know there's a lot going on, but it'd be nice to see the Democrats in Congress be making a little more noise about this, the complete and utter failure. Can you imagine

the ads that the Republicans would be running if you'd seen the direction of Iranian nuclear policy take the same course under Obama? You know, they'd be scaremongering ads all time. I think Democrats need to go on offense on this. Yeah, you can't win a foreign policy argument unless you make one, guys. Yes, exactly. Let's stick with Iran for a second because a friend of the pod, Jason Rezayan, wrote an interesting story in the Washington Post this week about the Iranian regime and how they they'll, you know, essentially kidnap or hold hostage foreign or dual nationals as a foreign policy strategy. So he writes about how this tactic really dates back to 1979 when Iranian students stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and held, you know, I think dozens of Americans captive for

444 days. Jason has been a guest on the show. He wrote a great book called Prisoner that you should check out and read. It details his 544 days in Iranian captivity and even prison. So, horrific. But basically, what happens is Iran picks up these people and they become leverage for a prisoner swap or an effort to, you know, sort of extort or extract something from another country. And they are subject to torture and psychological abuse and, you know, you get locked away after a sham trial with phony charges. And so, you know, Ben, I have two-part question. The first is just historical. And I'm hoping you could start with like a quick overview of what happened in 1979. Because I bet that's before many of our listeners were born. It's before I was born.

And then I think, you know, people probably don't understand or fully realize how much a hostage negotiation could just upend U.S. foreign policy. You and I dealt with this a lot, right? We had folks in North Korea, Iran who were kidnapped. And then, you know, you have terrorist groups like the Taliban who took Bo Bergdahl or Al-Qaeda who took prisoners. And, you know, Obama's approach evolved over time because, you know, I don't think things were great, right? They got better. I was hoping you could talk about that evolution and what you guys learned. Well, yeah, first of all, 1979, you know, after the Iranian revolution that ousted the Shah, who was pro-U.S. Shah, you had a group of Iranian students, you know, storm the American embassy in Tehran in November of 79, take 52 American diplomats and citizens hostage and end up holding them for over 400 days and, you know, subjected them to all kinds of psychological torture. They didn't know they were going to be executed. They didn't know what was going to happen. Jimmy Carter tried to rescue them in an attempt that went badly wrong because,

American helicopters crashed, killing American service members. And so for the U.S., I think it was seen as kind of this humiliation that we couldn't get these hostages released. Jimmy Carter finally did successfully negotiate their release. But, you know, the day they were released was Ronald Reagan's inauguration. The Iranians kind of really wanted to stick it to Carter, you know, who they blamed Carter for taking in the Shah. So the precipitating thing that led the students to storm the embassy is at the Shah, who is this corrupt, tyrannical leader, you know, found refuge in the U.S.

And by the way, the story goes back even further if people want to dig into it to 1953 when we helped, you know, and started a revolution. What's a great book by Mark Bowden, Guests of the Ayatollah, if folks want to go. Guests of the Ayatollah. If you want to read a book about the hostage crisis, definitely check out the It's The Itola. And if you want to read about the overthrow of the democratically elected leader of Iran in part with the U.S. support in the 50s, all the Shah's men is a really good book as well.

But yeah, the Iranians, you know, there's kind of a point of origin for all this stuff we've talked about because America, I think, never really got over that humiliation. And it speaks to this kind of endless confrontation we've been. And, you know, with good reason on our side that the Iranians have continued to do things, take hostages and obviously support terrorism ever since. On the broader question, you're right, the first responsibility of the U.S. government is the security of our citizens. And, you know, in all kinds of scenarios, we've had citizens taken hostage and, you know, either because they've been imprisoned in other countries or taken by terrorist organizations. And it's incredibly complex because it does overwhelm your relationship with that country. You just want to get these people out. And in North Korea, there were some kind of bizarre

instances where what they really wanted was kind of a high-level visit. So Bill Clinton had to go as an exchange for getting some people out of prison early in the Obama administration, for instance. One of the things that we came to see is you can also use a hostage negotiation to try to address other issues. I negotiated with the Cubans, for instance, an American named Alan Gross was imprisoned in Cuba. He was a USAID subcontractor, and he was distributing kind of satellite communications technology. The Cubans arrested him. Interestingly, my negotiations to secure Alan Gross's release led to the negotiations around the normalization of relations with Cuba. So we both were able to get Alan out of Cuba, but we're also able to use it as this kind of entry point to address the broader relationship.

And so that was a positive example of essentially how you can begin to talk about a hostage situation and make the conversation bigger. With the Iranians, we never really had that. We had different tracks to deal the nuclear issue and then different track to try to get Jason and some other Americans out of Iran. You know, there's no magic formula to this, but I do think it's really important for the U.S. to make clear that we're going to prioritize the safety of our citizens and throw every diplomatic resource of getting them out and try to be opportunistic in addressing some of the underlying tensions and relationships like we're able to do with Cuba in that process. Because, you know, for Iran, they do need to see also a united front, not just from the U.S. they've done this to some British citizens. I think it takes, you know, the rest of the world saying this is kind of a red line. You can't go down this route where you're using individuals as leverage like this. And there's a diplomatic cost to it. And so it's not just us prioritizing. It's us doing that

in concert with other countries as well. Yeah. And, you know, for what it's worth, I've never met him, but Robert O'Brien, the new National Security Advisor, actually served as the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs. So there is someone with some very impressive expertise. sitting in the White House right now advising Trump on these issues. Yeah, except he spent a lot of time trying to get ASEB rocking out of prison in Sweden. There is that. So their definition of a hostage, you know, was pretty broad. Yeah, you can't really help your boss's taste for me.

Yeah, that was not his fault. Yeah, to be clear, that was Trump's so strange. Let's talk about Chile. So for about a month, there had been massive protests in Chile, including one day when apparently a million people hit the streets in Santiago, Chile, which is the capital. I don't want to make broad comparisons, been to these protest movements, but it's interesting the comparison to Lebanon here because in Lebanon, the protest started because of attacks on WhatsApp calls. In Chile, it was subway fare hikes. But again, like in both places, the protests quickly grew in size. They spread to other cities. In some instances, they got violent. And then the demands grew. And protesters were speaking out about economic inequality, poor services and out-of-touch elite ruling class. The government in Chile declared a state of emergency, and they deployed troops to the streets, which was pretty jarring for a lot of people since the country was a military dictatorship until 1990. I don't think a lot of folks outside of Chile saw this coming, Ben. I mean,

but it's just interesting. There's so many common threads, right? There's economic inequality, corruption, the ease of social media-based organizing. At J Street, I asked Michael Bennett, a question that was basically like, you know, I think we talk about the Arab Spring is something that's in the past. But, you know, since none of these economic or governance problems have have been solved, it seems like we might just be at the beginning of a wave of protest and social movements. And from where I'm sitting, I don't see any sort of government, U.S. government, engagement or strategy for how to manage them. Yeah, I think I'm really glad we talk about this a lot on the show and for the world those out there, you know, because I think our audience is interested

at the nexus of kind of policy and activism. But I do think something is happening out in the world where there's a lot of common denominators. To me, it's really the root of it is inequality, corruption and bad governance. If you look at the Chile protest, if you look at the Julesjean in Paris, which started because of a fuel tax but became about broader inequality. The Hong Kong protests have a serious inequality element. The cost of living is just too high in Hong Kong. Some people are getting really rich. Other people are falling behind. Very different places. You know, Chile, France, Hong Kong, Lebanon, but a common threat of just frustration that is boiling over with this level of inequality that is truly global. There is a global problem

with the wealth inequality and the corruption in the sense that governments can't deal with these problems. Governments are not being responsive. And frankly, in the absence, I think, of effective and frankly progressive governance, what you're seeing is mass mobilization of citizens. Even the climate strikes, the Greta Thurneberg spearheaded, there's an element of just frustration that government's not reacting. And I think it's very healthy. I think it's a very good thing that when politicians aren't responsive, citizens are mobilizing, and they will continue to mobilize until they get that kind of responsive governance. And I think people should watch this space because you're going to see more and more of these protests.

You'll see them in the United States. If Donald Trump is reelected, I think we'll see a scale of mass mobilization around similar issues here as well. And so I think one of the macro trends, if you're stepping back and looking at the world, one of the trends that we're going to see is until government's reform that citizens are going to mobilize and it's going to happen in more and more places. Yeah, I totally agree. So let's talk about another different set of protests this time in Iraq. So I can't remember of you and I. I've talked about this, but Liz Sly, the Beirut Bureau Chief of the Washington Post and I chatted about this a while back, but it deserved more attention. So there was a big moment last week

when an estimated 200,000 Iraqis were marching in Baghdad to protest Iranian influence in Iraq. And as many journalists and commentators have noticed, that's quite a change from when the U.S. was considered the foreign occupier in Iraq. And over the weekend, these protesters actually attacked an Iranian consulate. Alyssa Rubin at the New York Times, a great reporter, had a piece on the protests this week. She talked about how they're protesting against Iran, but it's also about how these Shia militia forces are essentially acting like a mafia and extorting people. she found that there was a generational element to it and a fight between rich elites and the rest of the country. So again, similar sounding. The government in Iraq has responded with just totally unacceptable levels of force.

They're just shooting protesters and killing them. And predictably, that made everything worse. More people came out to the street. So, Ben, like, you know, this stuff happened so far away. And even when you and I were in government and, like, sitting in meetings with the head of the CIA, I always felt like I didn't have much insight into the actual concerns of, of Iraqi protesters, and I certainly don't now. But I do know that, you know, this constant political instability in Iraq will, you know, is likely to make it harder on the people themselves in the

near term. It will create security challenges that might make it easier for ISIS to gain traction or for bad actors like the IRGC, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps to gain more power. So I just think that it's one we should watch. Yeah. And, you know, part of the rise of ISIS inside of Iraq, when we were in power, Some of that came from the fact that the Iraqi government under Prime Minister Maliki at the time was so she-oriented and there was so much Iranian influence and the Sunni population in Iraq felt so marginalized that it created openings rices. So I do think it's a space to watch in that regard. It also shows you that, you know, yeah, it's not just a U.S. presence that can chafe on people. if the Iranians are overplaying a heavy hand, this is going to blow back on them.

And it's kind of extraordinary that given all that the Iraqi people have been through, that they still take to the streets like this, you know, it shows the kind of resilience among that population and a frustration among that population. You know, I think our colleague Brett McGurk, who knows Iraq better than anybody I know spent a lot of time there, you know, did however point out that, you know, Trump is kind of, you know, we're drawing down some of our diplomatic presence there and you haven't had particularly high-level engagement with Iraq, you know, I think the U.S. does have a diplomatic role to play there

that could be more assertive in trying to be something of a broker among some of these different factions that we know well. Because ultimately what you need in Iraq is this kind of tenuous power sharing among the different sects, you know, the Kurds, the Sunni and the Shia and some of the other minority groups there. And U.S. diplomacy should be about trying to make sure that that balance doesn't tilt too far in one direction. When it had tilted too far towards Iran in the past in 2014, Brett McGurk chiefly helped spearhead

an effort to negotiate with different Iraqi factions to land on a new prime minister. And that did resolve the crisis at that point. So U.S. diplomacy can make a difference here, you know, even without large numbers of troops. So I'm really glad you raised that because we just talked through a bunch of international political problems in different parts of the world. And but, you know, people like Brett McGurk have left government because of policy decisions by Trump and the person that's supposed to be managing these crises everywhere is Mike Pompeo at the State Department. But these days, like this guy is more interested in helping Trump get Ukraine

to interfere in our elections or flying to Kansas to campaign for Senate on the U.S. taxpayers' dime. I mean, he's also refusing to stand up for the diplomats who are being attacked by Trump or Rudy Giuliani. And these are the people who are living in Iraq in trying to manage through this kind of instability at considerable risk to their own lives. And so, you know, Ben, we talked a lot back in the day about Rex Tillerson and how he gutted and just demoralized the State Department. But Ed Wong and David Sanger at the Times had a piece this week about, you know, diplomats at state saying that Pompeo has actually done even more damage than Tillerson because he's just refused to stand up for the workforce and he's politicized their jobs. And they're just driving diplomats who are the equivalent of

three-star, four-star generals in the U.S. military out of the State Department. And so I don't really have a question. I just want to vent with you about Mike Pompeo and how much he sucks at his fucking job. He sucks at it. No, and you came in with his whole talk about restoring swagger to the State Department, right? How's that going? Himself. I mean, this is directly tied to the impeachment because for a number of reasons. One, we see in Ukraine the utter corruption of American farm policy, you know, and part of what makes me worried is, what do we not see? You know, in other words, we just, you know, you put one country under the microscope

like Ukraine and you see this kind of keystone cop's corrupt scheme to try to make a conspiracy theory real, to dig up dirt on the Bidens, to intimidate U.S. diplomats. Who knows how many places that's happening around the rest of the world, right? The other thing that we see is U.S. diplomats being treated like complete shit, you know. It's literally the ambassador, our ambassador in Ukraine, saying that she felt personally threatened, Like she wasn't secure in the country. And the head of the Foreign Service calling her and saying you have to come home because you're in danger over there because of what Rudy Giuliani and a bunch of hacks are, you know, stirring up in their fever dream, Sean Hannity, conspiracy theory world. Then what do they see in the testimony that what jumped out to me among many things is McKinley, right, who was the senior advisor to Pompeo of a career foreign service officer, went to Mike Pompeo three times, he said, and asked him to put out a statement of support.

for the U.S. ambassador who's being treated like such garbage, and Pompeo refused to do it. So if you're a U.S. diplomat anywhere in the world, you know that the President of the United States does not have your back. You know that the Secretary of State, who literally sits in the department that you work for, will not get your back. How do you think it feels to be a U.S. diplomat anywhere in the world right now? And like these are the people who actually know what the fuck they're doing, unlike Mike Pompeo and unlike Donald Trump. And they're leaving in droves. And as you say, it's like thousands or hundreds, if not thousands of years of experience are walking out the door that we cannot replace. If someone walks out the door with decades of experience in all these different countries, we don't have that.

And we get downgraded in terms of our capacity to conduct diplomacy around the world. And the last thing I want to say here is Mike Pompeo, who spent four fucking years investigating Sunday show talking points, went on ABC's Sunday show with George Stephanopoulos and was asked point blank whether McKinley had ever asked him to put out a statement of support. for the ambassador in Ukraine, and he said, no. That was a fucking lie. We know from McKinley's testimony, which is totally credible, that actually McKinley did raise it with him three times. So you've got a guy who's both inept, won't get his own people's back, and he's a liar. And he's in, so he's to be in charge of American foreign policy. And it's just leaving all these diplomats out to hang on a limb all around the world at a time when we've got all these different crises

that we're talking about on this show. And so if the Republicans don't vote to remove Trump, What they're saying essentially is we're okay with this. We're okay with the complete corruption of American foreign policy. We're okay with essentially intimidating our own diplomats instead of getting their back. And that, again, points to the stakes in this election. Yeah, totally agree. Oh, that felt good. Okay.

Let's talk about a vote in the House of Representatives last week. So the House of Representatives voted to recognize the mass killing of Armenians by the Ottoman Turks as a genocide. So the genocide happened between 1915 and 1915. 16, this was during World War I as the Ottoman Empire is collapsing. Historians believe that more than a million Armenians were murdered, but through starvation or disease when the Turks forcibly deported them from eastern Turkey and it's like, you know, the desert of Syria. The horrific death toll, like there's a range, but, you know, I think the upper range is like

1.5 million. I think most historians believe we're talking about a million people. So that's not really disputed. But what has been debated is whether that killing was orchestrated and systematic and thus constituted a genocide. If you want to read much more about this, check out Samantha Powers book, A Problem from Hell. You and I have talked about this issue before. Obama did not call the Armenian genocide a genocide in part because he was told that Turkey and Prime Minister Erdogan would flip out and overreact and potentially cutoff cooperation with the U.S. on key issues and ultimately that it would create more harm than good. And you and me and Sam Power and many other citizens said that that was a mistake, we should have called it a genocide because the truth is the truth, no matter what the circumstances.

The House vote was 405 to 11. Turkey has not surprisingly condemned the vote since and so they don't recognize it. One surprising vote was Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who has been a friend of the pod. She voted present on the resolution. She said she didn't dispute the facts, but was frustrated that the vote happened in the context of general criticism. pressure on Turkey after their invasion of northern Syria. So I get that. Like, I think you want to be voting these things on the merits and the merits alone, but sometimes it's messier than that. And I still think it would have been better to vote for it and then issue a statement, you know, condemning the timing or expressing frustration with the timing. But Ben, I wonder what you make of

the importance of this vote and why it happened now. No, I think it's really important. And for a couple of reasons, you know, one, this is just so important to the Armenian people. It's central to their identity in the same way that the Holocaust is central to the identity of the Jewish people. And there are enormous numbers of Armenian Americans who can trace some of their origin to that genocide because they were displaced and made their way to the United States. I also think it's important for the U.S. to do the right thing and to call history by its name, just as we should do that today. Because the Armenian genocide was also kind of a point of origin for people trying to get their minds around the concept of genocide and the effort to

eliminate whole groups of people. And Samantha's book tells the story about how that kind of led to the concept of genocide entering into international discourse and ultimately international law. And so you're recognizing the Armenian genocide. You're also recognizing the challenge of genocide in the world today. And tragically, it continues to be a challenge. We made a big mistake. I mean, I would have liked to have seen us recognize the Armenian Genocide in office. We were wrong not to do that. One of the worst meetings I ever had in the White House is I had to meet with a group of Armenian Americans on the 100th anniversary of the genocide and told them that we weren't going to do it.

And I could see just how crestfallen they were by that, how betrayed they were, because Obama had said that he thought he would do that. And I've always felt really bad about that, that that was the wrong thing to do. I think Adam Schiff, who has a large Armenian-American constituency in spearheaded this resolution, deserves a lot of credit for working on this for years. And one of the reasons why I don't agree with a friend of the pod, Ilhan Omar's vote and statement on this is this wasn't just something thrown together in response to what happened with the Kurds. People like Schiff have been working to get this resolution passed for years. And now the Democrats have the

majority. They had the opportunity to do that. There are a lot of people around the country, activists, Armenian-Americans who've been working to get this done. So it's a good news story. And I'd like to see the point in time when the U.S. President, U.S. Congress, you know, altogether recognizes the genocide. It's the right thing to do. And frankly, you know, if you have a tough call to make, better to do the right thing. Yeah, totally great. All right. This is the dark crime against humanity section of the show today. The Washington Post, Fred Hyatt, who's an opinion writer there, who has, you know, been very critical of Obama in the past that's not relevant here, but just context. You know, he wrote a very important piece that I hope everyone reads about the

treatment of Muslims in Western China. Yeah. You and I've talked about this issue a bunch of times. In Xinjiang province, millions of Uyghur Muslims are being locked up in reeducation camps and forced to renounce their religion. Hyatt wrote up a report that also documents through satellite imagery the systematic destruction of mosques and cemeteries and other religious sites. He called it a cultural genocide.

And I think in his piece, he makes a compelling case that, you know, normally historians avoid comparisons to the Holocaust because it is this singular horrific event in our history. But the scale of what's happening to the Uyghurs right now in China is starting to reach Holocaust-like levels. And I was impressed that he made that connection because you can often be criticized for doing so. What might be equally troubling is the fact that the Chinese have managed to lock down reporting on what's happening. And they've also seemingly been able to silence or buy off people like Muhammad bin Salman. and Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, who you would expect would actually speak out and condemn this kind of stuff. So an important report worth reading. Yeah, because what he gets at in comparison

to the Holocaust is this kind of systematic destruction of the faith, you know, of the ability of people to practice our faith, you know, detention of imams, destruction of mosques. I think as a basic rule, we should think to ourselves, what would we be saying about this if these were Jews or these were Christians. You know, this is like a horrific crime against humanity being targeted at a particular ethnic group and a particular religious faith in China. I think the other comparison that disturbs me is one of the things that always, you know, bothered me about the Holocaust as someone who had family who died in the Holocaust, is that it

was carried out by such a sophisticated people. You know, the German people, you know, were at the heart of European civilization. obviously any time any crime against humanity happens, it's a travesty. When you see it happening in like a brutal civil war, you know, it's a complicated thing to get your mind around. It's even more horrific, though, when you see, you know, a very advanced society engage in this. And that's what's so chilling here is that the Chinese don't have some large insurgency in this province. They, you know, there was some very minor flare-ups of intercommunal violence. knife attacks. Yeah, knife attacks, things like this. What you're seeing is a very sophisticated

country, very sophisticated government, very educated people, systematically use all their levers of power, surveillance, technology, organizing these camps. That's the echo of the Holocaust. This is not happening in some out-of-control civil war or not an overreaction to a mass insurgency. This is like a very calculated decision that is playing out before our eyes. but we can't entirely see it because of their ability to mask it. And that's what's so chilling. And I think people really do need to elevate these concerns. You know, we talk about China as if what we're worried about is that they steal intellectual property.

And what we should be worried about, too, is what they're doing to human beings within their own borders. And we can spotlight it. We can do more. Like, you know, the U.S. government could be due more to publicize this, to publicize imagery, to raise it at the United Nations. I wish we were on the United Nations, Human Rights Count. So we could raise it in that kind of four as well. Yeah. I mean, if private entities can release satellite imagery,

documenting tens of thousands of mosques being, you know, wrecked or whatever, then the U.S. government could go far further because we had better capabilities. And to give credit to people we never get credit to, you know, Pence and Pompeo have made comments about this recently, and I was glad to see them do that, but not Trump, you know. And if the President of the United States isn't doing it, it doesn't have the same effect. Yeah, agreed. Another technology story.

So WhatsApp, which is a messaging service that's owned by Facebook, and I think it has like 1.5 billion active monthly users, so it's massive. They are suing an Israeli cyber surveillance firm called NSAGro group for allegedly letting its technology be used to spy on journalists and human rights activists. WhatsApp says that 1,400 people were targeted in 20 countries. They name Mexico, Bahrain, the UAE. I don't know that they name it in the suit, but those of those countries have been associated with these stories before. Ben, so this is a scary, relatively new thing that you've had to do with. with personally, which is the privatization and export of spy services and technology. It is, you know, undoubtedly still the case that the most sophisticated tools are in the hands of governments

like the U.S. and spy services like the NSA. But I do think it should worry us that this stuff is now for sale. And, you know, it's not just tools to hack your WhatsApp. It's drone technology proliferating. It's people like Eric Prince, formerly of Blackwater, trying to sell the White House on privatizing and outsourcing war fighting for God's sake. So, Like, we need some guardrails on these sorts of businesses and activities immediately. Yeah, you know, and if you've got friends in Africa or Latin America or Asia, like, everybody's on WhatsApp, you know. And part of the reason they're on it is that they assume that they're protected. They assume that it's encrypted.

They assume it's beyond the reach of, you know, there's not a coincidence. I mean, in part it's because it's a free platform, but a big part of it is also the presumed security. And so to get rid of that would be really concerning. We, another thing I'll say that, you know, in retrospect, we probably got wrong in the Obama administration, right, is when, you know, we had the fight with the tech companies about getting in, you know, back doors into certain things. And, you know, Tim Cook took a stand on getting into the phone of the San Bernardino shooter to kind of make this point. But I do think citizens should have the right to have an expectation of privacy in certain places, you know, particularly as we're more and more of our lives and data are online. I think privacy concerns. need to be elevated as like an international issue that the U.S. government, I would like to see us playing a leading role in advocating for it. And also, I think there needs to be much more scrutiny of these efforts you talk about. As someone who was targeted by one, right, it had an Israeli firm, Black Cube trying to dig up dirt on me. You know, who knows that they're trying to get

in my comms? I don't know. I assume so. But we don't want to live in a world. Think about how much power would give to people if they're just these kind of rogue, semi-perperms, private intelligence operations that are breaking into your comms and stealing your data, that's not like a world we want to live in. So I think there has to be much more regulation. And frankly, questioning why do these firms exist, you know, these kind of like supercharged private investigation type firms or blackmailing operations, you know, I think democracies in particular need to take a look at how this operates.

Just as the U.S. government needs to take a look at how someone. military contractors operate because the privatization of things like spying and warfighting raises a lot of ethical concerns and I think needs to be subjected. I'd like to see the candidates talk about this. You know, Elizabeth Warren would be well positioned to do this because she's raised some of these types of issues to be looking at how you can give our citizens greater assurance that their privacy will be protected. Yeah.

I mean, these things are right for abuse when governments are involved and there is some a transparency or at least oversight. God help us all when it's just profit-driven. But I want to end on some good news, Ben, which is that the Trump administration has a top cybersecurity advisor who is on it. So you know Rudy Giuliani. When he's not but-diling reporters, Rudy was spotted at an Apple store in San Francisco because he got locked out of his iPhone. Now, I think we've all made a trip or two to the genius bar, but if you're going to hawk your services around the globe as a cybersecurity expert and communicate constantly with the president of the United States, you probably shouldn't hand your phone over to some dude at the genius bar.

Ben, do you feel like Rudy is protecting us from hackers? Noted cybersecurity expert Rudy Giuliani can unlock his fucking phone, you know, the shadow secretary of state too. And, you know, the other thing to think about that's both comical and tragic is, can you imagine what, like, foreign governments know because of... Because can you imagine how Trump and Giuliani communicate, right? Like the Trump administration won't hand over basic information to Congress, but they're basically handing it over to China and Russia.

Oh, yeah. And anybody with a spying capacity because they're talking on their fucking unsecured cell phones all the time. They're probably taking no care. You know, one of the, you know, early issues that led me to rent on this podcast, you know, security clearance is being given out to people like Jared who, you know, you know, the intelligence community doesn't think they should have them for probably good reason. So somewhere in Beijing and Moscow and probably some other capitals, there's a much more extensive

record of the abuses of the Trump administration than even Adam Schiff has because they tried to fucking stonewall Congress while making it perfectly easy for these other countries to get this information. Look, cybersecurity needs to be a higher priority. And like everything with this administration, you know, you kind of indicate how seriously you take it. by who you put in charge. And the fact that they had announced early in the administration to great fanfare that Rudy Giuliani was going to be one of their principal cyber advisors, tells you everything to know about how much we're doing to try to protect our critical infrastructure

from cyber attacks, including, by the way, our 2020 election infrastructure from cyber attacks. Yeah, he took on the squeegee guys. The hackers are next. Yeah, somewhere in China, there's an Intel guy who is really sick of translating, like, long rambling, call some Donald Trump. All right, buddy, that's all we got for today. When we come back, we will have my interview with Abdul El-Sayyad. I'm now joined by Abdul al-Said.

He's a doctor, former executive director of the Detroit Health Department, and he ran for governor of Michigan in 2018. He's also the host of America Disected, a fantastic crooked media podcast, Abdul. How you doing, man? I'm well. I'm well. Thanks for having me. It's great to have you on the show.

You were in my years this morning because you released an amazing episode of America dissected on Monday. It's about the ways the Michigan government failed to be. people of Flint. And everyone should listen to the whole thing because, you know, you went there, you know the people involved, you talk to all the experts, and it's incredible. But I was hoping you could give us sort of an overview of what happened, both because it's an important story that's not being told this many years after. But I also think that it sets up a broader conversation about public health and trust in government. Yeah, so much of what we're trying to do with this series

is show people that the stories that come to light about our health are there. the moment where failures in our politics or failures in our government or failures in our socioeconomic system get under our skin and into our bodies. And the Flint water crisis is a perfect example of that, right? Because the story is 100,000 people, 9,000 kids got poisoned by lead. But the real reason why has less to do with lead itself and everything to do with a pattern of taking away people's democratic rights of the way that we've marginalized people of color in this society for a long time, the ways that a set of corporations invested in and then completely pulled out of a city. And then the people who were there and affected by it. And also the people who stayed

and decided that they wanted to be a part of the next step, the moment where you force people to pay attention to what went wrong and to heal. And so I think the story of Flint is that. And we wanted to really peel back beyond the lead piping, beyond the water crisis to tell the story of the city of Flint, which is a community I know well. It's in my backyard. And, you know, I watched the Flint water crisis happen in real time. I just can't imagine how enraged I would be if I had a small child and the local government was telling me over and over again and the media was parroting those comments, that everything was fine, that the brown water coming out of my tap was safe and just boil it and drink it. Like I just, I would just be enraged. It's rage and then it's just the

constant anxiety and fear of not knowing how this thing is going to manifest. Because the fact is that, you know, this happened five years ago now and the consequences, they're going to last for decades. And even beyond the direct consequences on those kids, it's the consequence of not believing you can ever trust the government, which is in our democratic society, supposed to be an institution that you have staked. And yeah, I mean, the rage, the fear, the anxiety, the sense of betrayal, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it did happen in America, but then, you know, everything we know about the system of insecurity that, that people have to live under, the

kind of marginalization of people of color, um, a system that benefits corporate elites more than everyday people, like, yeah, it did happen in America, because we created the circumstance where something like this can't happen. And what I really want people to leave this episode recognizing is it's not just Flint. Like these are, these are patterns that happen across our country in communities of color that have been marginalized for a really long time. And even though they happened as quickly and as catastrophically as the happening Flint, they're happening elsewhere just slower moving. So we don't hear about them. And these are real American tragedies that are happening every day because of the circumstances.

that people are living in and that sometimes we don't have to pay attention to. Yeah. So this question about trust in government kind of brings me to Ebola. There was a really terrifying Ebola outbreak back in 2014. And there was one happening as we speak. I had left the White House by the time Obama was really managing this in 2014. But everyone I know who is there talks about some of those meetings about Ebola as literally the most frightening things they were ever a part of.

And these are national security people who are in meetings about al-Qaeda. and ISIS and stuff all the time. And, you know, it's clear that the government was able to manage that outbreak because people did what they said and they trusted the government. You know, the government was making like scientific, but maybe counterintuitive arguments that say, shutting down flights to Western Africa would actually make things worse because people would sneak in through a different means without going through the screening protocols and that might actually increase the risk of the bullet spreading. But meanwhile, you know, you had people like Donald Trump, the current president, tweeting the most alarmist shit possible and the media reporting

it out. And so I guess my question for you is, how worried are you that that kind of trust that's necessary to tackle a challenge that big just wouldn't even exist today? You know, Ebola is such an important case study in understanding the difference between government and politics. And to answer your question directly, I'd be really, really concerned. Because good government at the end of the day is about making sure that we are focused on providing a set of services that that empower people in their lives. Unfortunately, politics tends to get in the way as your example perfectly shows. And the thing that happened with Ebola, right, is that we used high-quality science to move government policy, to drive a response that we and we alone as a country

in the world could have offered in a place that was not our own. And when we think about what's happening today, we have this politics of fear and this politics of America first, which is dismantling both the means of government action, you know, cutting funds to places like the CDC. But then also, also it's cutting our impetus to recognize that actually we've had a really big responsibility in the world. And unfortunately, we've used that responsibility in terrible ways, all over the world many times over, I think the Iraq war. But Ebola is a perfect example of actually American leadership done right, right? Sending over a U.S. public health service to take on a potentially global pandemic of an incredibly contagious, incredibly dangerous disease that we alone

had the infrastructure to solve and to tackle. And to do that in a way that promotes science and reason over fear and hostility. And, you know, we did that. And American leadership, you know, in the moments where we can celebrate it, it's what we do best when we do things like send our Army and our U.S. Public Health Service to tackle epidemics like this. And then the last thing about public health that I think it recognized, it shows, is that we actually never know when the next big epidemic is going to strike.

You don't know where it's going to come from. You don't know what it's going to be, but you have to be ready for it, and you have to do the basic things on the ground to prevent it. Public health operates that way in the background. It's not foregrounded. We don't really see it operating. And we only recognize how important it is, in fact, when it fails or when it is overtaken by the strength of something like this kind of an epidemic. And in so many ways, we have to make sure that it's robust so that it's there for us when we need it. Yeah. So you mentioned, you know, sort of CDC funding and those investments today. that are helping us down the road. I mean, are there cuts that are happening that could compound the problem and put us at more risk? Oh, absolutely. So in each of the last budgets that the Trump

administration has promoted, they've tried to cut funding to key public health institutions like the CDC, institutions at state and local levels that are fed by federal grants, and then things like the NIH, which are responsible for researching the diseases. is that, you know, that could pop up anywhere in the world and that are consistent, but that we don't pay as much attention to, like the flu, right here in the U.S. And so there are real threats to this. And, you know, luckily we've had leadership at the congressional level that is recognized. And I have to say, on both sides of the aisle, has recognized the criticality of this funding and these institutions. But really, it's only a matter of time because what this politics and

this political moment of Trump is doing is cutting our belief in government's capacity to act and in showing that in terms of cutting funding and focusing on the politics rather than the government of a situation. And so I worry a lot about about our capacity as a government to act in the next global public health crisis in ways that potentially can kill many hundreds of thousands of people. We were lucky with Ebola that it didn't spread beyond, but we have to remember that it still took the lives of tens of thousands of people, and it didn't have to. Yeah, that's right. Another issue you covered is the anti-vaxxer movement. And I think it's a related challenge around trust, because, you know, there are people who sincerely believe

that vaccines are not safe. They think that the CDC is potentially corrupt or dishonest. And I think it's easy to get angry at them or mock them. But I'm also aware that there's tons of disinformation online that is easy to find. And if you get a critical mass of disinformation that confirms the other piece of disinformation, you end up believing it. Right. That's why people believe that Hillary Clinton had a kill list, right? It's crazy shit, but like you read it enough, you believe it. And, you know, I don't have kids, but I also imagine that all these folks who are not vaccinating their kids want to do what's right for their kids. They want them to be healthy, but they're terrified about what they're reading and, you know, sticking vaccinations into an infant. So,

I guess my question for you is like how big a public health problem do you think the anti-vaccination movement is? And like when you're trying to communicate with people who just don't believe that vaccinations are needed or safe, how can you convince them or can you? I think you can. So first I'll say that I do think this anti-vaxxer epidemic. I really think the epidemic here isn't, you know, aren't the viruses we're trying to prevent. It's this, this virus of misinformation that is being communicated online and between folks who are fundamentally afraid. And I think we can take it on. Unfortunately, there are two things that are standing in our way.

The first is that a lot of the institutions that people have trusted for a very long time have been corrupted in certain ways. So you think about the pharmaceutical industry and the ways that they are pushing to nickel and dim us on medications that we fundamentally need. And what that leaves everyday folks saying is I can't really trust these big institutions that I used to be able to trust in the past. And, you know, that shade is sort of being thrown on to anyone and everyone associated. The second part is that when we communicate, we tend to stigmatize folks and we tend to forget that empathy is the way forward if we really do want to build trust and allay people's fears. And what unfortunately has happened is that in the process of trying to take on this virus of misinformation,

I think we've forgotten our empathy and we've created the kind of dynamic where we reinforce the fear that drives conspiracy theories. And so what we really try to do in this episode is recognize that, yes, we have to focus on policy that limits people's abilities to make decisions that hurt all of us in choosing not to vaccinate. But also, when we talk about this issue, we've got to foreground our empathy and recognize that most of the time people are driven by a sense of fear. and the way you reinforce fear is to yell at folks who are afraid, rather than to treat them with some empathy, meet them where they are, and continue in a thoughtful, engaging, but empathic way to push back on the misinformation that they're hearing and to invite them to see the world based on reason.

And we've forgotten that a little bit in this sort of Twitterized world of communication. Yeah. So one thing that has really been on my mind a lot lately is, I keep reading these stories about people getting sick from vaping. And I feel like we're in the middle of understanding a public health crisis. Like there's a part of your Flint episode where a doctor, you know, finds information that leads her to believe that kids are getting sick from the water because there's lead in it. But it takes like eight months to peer review that information, right? And they just attack her until, you know, in the time between, you know,

disclosing what she learned in the peer review process. Like when you see something like this vaping, you know, public health emergency popping up, how do you think a government should deal with something like this that's happening in real time? Is it dangerous to pull all vapes off the street because if the government is wrong, they won't trust you the next time? Like, what would be your approach? So a couple of things. Number one, we've got to remember that, you know, in the first place, vaping was sold as an alternative to smoking, right? You get the nicotine without the tobacco. But it was also sold by a group of people who had a deep incentive to sell a product.

And when anybody has an incentive to sell a product that may or may not be harmful, you've got to question whether or not they're true arbiters of public health. And so on the one hand, I would say, A, we've got to be extremely communicative about what we know and what we don't, which is to say we actually don't know what's causing this rash of, of, of, of, extreme injury and death right now. We're still in the process of learning about it. B, the best case scenario is that people don't vape or smoke. And for folks who never smoked in the first place,

they should never be starting to vape in the first place. And then we've got to take it to the corporations who recognize that right now, there is a whole new industry to be made by hooking young people on vaping who never were smoking in the first place. And that means, going hard on those corporations and really taking them to task for some of these really vile marketing approaches that put vapes in the hands of influencers so that they specifically targeted young people, made it look cool. We're talking about how to evade your principal and teachers

at school if you wanted to vape. And so I think there's a communication and an empathy with the people who are actually vaping, an honesty about what we know and what we don't. And that then full court press on the corporations that took this idea and, you know, really misused it to target people who were never smoking in the first place to create newly nicotine-addicted people. And I think that that's got to be the approach right now. And then obviously, full court press on the science, we've got to understand why this is happening and what's happening here. Sometimes we forget, though, that we don't know everything.

And like institutions like the NIH and the CDC, their job is to learn these things for us and then tell us what's going on. And this is why you can't cut their funding because you really never know what's on the horizon. We would never have thought that vaping could be this dangerous. And now we're in the situation where you have this rash of deaths. We don't know what's causing it. And we need our institutions to be ready to study it. Give us an answer and then let us know what we should do next.

Yeah. You did another great episode on superbugs in the overuse of antibiotics. And I feel like that's one of those issues where every six months, like I'll watch the network news. do some alarmist story about a super bug and I'll get freaked out and then I don't really understand it and I never hear about it again and I don't know like how worried I should be. How concerned are you generally about the overuse of antibiotics, them just not working anymore? And is this a problem that's in the U.S. because we, you know, maybe use more medicines than we should or is this a global concern? Yeah, to set this up a little bit, right? We're in this sort of cosmic arms race with

bacteria. And we created antibiotics, you know, the first one being penicillin in the first use in the 40s. And then those bacteria evolved to be to be able to evade our antibiotics. And every time we come up with new ones, they evolve. And we've got to kind of understand that this arms race isn't going anywhere, but we've got to keep up. And what's happened right now is that because of the broken incentives of the pharmaceutical industry, they don't really make that much money selling antibiotics because they're not the kind of drugs you use regularly, right? Like a pharma company would rather sell you Viagra because you got to use it every once and a while chronically throughout your life after you realize you need it.

Then an antibiotic would you use for two weeks and then it's over. And the problem is that we haven't kept up in this arms race. So this is a serious issue. But the bigger problem also is that the things that we can do, which is to be good stewards of our antibiotics, this is particularly hard in, in our country where, you know, to get these antibiotics, you actually have to get a prescription. But it's even harder in other countries in the world. And, you know, given the fact that travel allows us to be in effect one United Globe, it's only a matter of time until the misuse of antibiotics

where somebody can just go and get some antibiotics at a pharmacy in, you name a lower middle income country until some super evolved bacteria travels to our country or, you know, or really takes off there. And then you've got a serious issue. And so it's not a linear thing. It's not a slow progress. It's all of a sudden one bacterium hits a lot of people and then we've got a real problem on our hand. So I'm really quite concerned. And the hard part of raising the alarm here, and this is we're really tried to do in the episode, is that we as humans aren't really set up to care about problems that we don't see every day. And so we, totally. And so like that's, this is the big problem with, with our psychology and our,

our ability to deal with problems on the horizon. And so this is one of those problems that's sitting there on the horizon. It's only a matter of time. And we can't seem to muster our own responsibility around stewardship and then better global public policy. And then finally, forcing our pharmaceutical companies to actually do the work that they're supposed to do that we pay them to do to research and develop new drugs. Yeah, I will stick it to future. me over and over again and sign myself up for terrible things that I don't want to do if it means I can just hang out of my couch tonight. Is that a good analogy? Yeah. I mean, it's like, yeah, I mean, it's like, it's like smoking and, and, and obesity, right? It's like, I really enjoy

ice cream. I would much rather enjoy a little bit of, or a lot of ice cream right now and potentially deal with the heart disease I have to get, you know, 10 years earlier than I should, because it's enjoyable right now, because we'll just keep putting off the consequences. Smoking's the same thing. I enjoy the hit I get when I, you know, hit my vapor, I smoke my cigarette. Never mind the fact that I may get emphysema and other lung diseases and lung cancer, you know, 30 years from now, because, you know, 30 years from now me, that's a long time. I'm not all that worried. Maybe they'll figure out how to treat it by then.

And we shouldn't be as trusting of what 30 years from now me is going to be thinking about then. Yeah, agreed. Last question for you. So the average life expectancy in the U.S. is more than five years. year shorter than the average life expectancy in Japan. Why is that? What do you think is under those numbers? So, you know, just to explain life expectancy real quick, oftentimes when we think about, you know, life expectancy of 79, we assume that somebody's just sort of walking around, they hit their 79th birthday, and then they just drop dead, right? That's not how it works. It's an average of how long

people live. And what tends to drive life expectancy in a global and a historical context is how long children live. And one of the challenges that we have in America is that we continue to have an epidemic of infant mortality. Now, most folks, thankfully, because of public health and medicine, haven't had to experience a baby's death, but it's still exceedingly common and exceedingly common in low-income communities and in communities of color. And that infant mortality gap is really what is truncating our life expectancy in the United States. Because every time a baby dies, that's 79 years of life that's gone, right? And that that's lost from our national average.

And so infant mortality disparities really do drive our low life expectancy. The other part of it, though, is that we're starting to see life expectancy fall. In fact, life expectancy's fallen for the past three years in a row. And what's driven that are these, what they call diseases of despair. So death by suicide, overdose, and alcoholism. And a lot of that has to do with frankly the deep inequities in socioeconomic opportunities in this country and the consequences that those have for mental illness. And the fact that we haven't really invested in our mental health infrastructure or the kind of lifestyle that empowers us to be together and to deal with the challenges and the traumas of a life. you know, when we talk about public health, it's easy to focus on diseases and superbugs and,

you know, anti-vaxxers, the things that we do, you know, to protect ourselves from disease. But what this really gets at are these social determinants of health, things like housing, things like access to a good job that pays a good wage, access to health care in general, access to other people who love you and care about you. These are the things that tend to drive our health in ways that are chronic and hard to put your finger on, but they really bear out in numbers like life expectancy, why it's falling and why, frankly, it's never really been as high as it should have in our country compared to other high-income countries. Yeah. Well, look, I mean, I love the show. I know you and I talked about some

heavy shit today, but you also get into like the wellness industry and goop and some of the quacks that are out there. And it's just like it's a fun, fantastic way to learn a lot from a real expert. So everyone should check out, download, subscribe to America Dissected. Abdul. Thank you so much for doing this, man. Yeah, Tommy, thank you so much for the opportunity. I've really enjoyed putting this together and thank you guys for your input. I hope that the listeners out there realize that there's a lot that we can do and a lot that we have to protect. And you know, you think about the people you love in your life. And we're all asking, how can they be healthier, happier, and how can we do that together? And that really is what the series is about.

Yeah, I totally agree. Well, everyone check it out. It's fantastic. Dr. Abdul-Assad, thank you again. Tommy, thank you. The policy of the world is a product of crooked media. The senior producer is Michael Martinez. Our assistant producer is Jordan Waller. It's mixed and edited by Chris Basil. Kyle Seglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Nar Malconian, and Milkoen, and Milo Kim,

who film and share these interviews on video each week.