Pod Save the World - Israeli elections, Iran under fire and the IRA's history

Episode Date: April 10, 2019

Iran expert Kelly Magsamen joins Tommy and Ben to discuss Trump's decision to designate the IRGC a terrorist organization. Then, Tommy and Ben discuss the Israeli elections, spies at Mar-a-Lago, Egypt's President at the White House, protests in Sudan, fighting in Libya and Brexit. Then, author Patrick Radden Keefe joins to discuss his new book SAY NOTHING and the history of the IRA and the Troubles in Northern Ireland. 

Welcome to Potta of the World. This is Tommy Vitor in the studio with Ben Rhodes. Ready to roll. Great to have you, man. We have a pack show today. First, our friend Kelly Magsman, will dial in to talk about Trump's designation to designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, a terrorist organization. So you'll hear from her. She's an expert. Then we're going to talk about the Israeli elections. Chinese spies trying to infiltrate Mar-a-Lago. Personnel issues. The president CC visits the Oval Office from Egypt and then, you know, Sudan and some of the Arab Spring 2.0 like things we're seeing across Northern Africa and then Brexit. After that, you'll hear an interview I taped last week with a author named Patrick Raddenkeith. He has an incredible,

incredible new book out called Say Nothing. It's about the IRA and the troubles in Northern Ireland. It's one of the best books I've ever read. And it also is really relevant today because Brexit could reignite the troubles and the conflict that really destroyed Northern Ireland for a long time. So Pax show and let's get into it. Okay, the first news item today has to do with Iran. So Ben and I decided to get our favorite Iran expert on the line. Kelly Magsman, it's great to have you. Good to be here, guys.

So on Monday, Trump designated the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or IRC as a foreign terrorist organization. It's an interesting timing to do this the day before the Israeli elections. What a coincidence, Kelly. I guess that policy process just really landed right before. That's amazing how things work out. So, Mags, the IRGC is an arm of the Iranian military carries out operations across the Middle East and it's led by some very bad people. You're an Iran expert.

You've worked for Republicans. You've worked for Democrats. I imagine a lot of people have debated this move previously. Can you tell us what the IRGC is and what this designation means and if you think it's a good idea? Sure. I mean, the Islamic Revolution Guard Corps for folks who don't follow Iran every day is pretty much basically kind of the elite army and navy and forces of the Iranian regime. It's about 125,000 or so as estimates. It could be larger. But these guys, these are good guys. In fact, as you know from our time in the Obama administration, these are a bunch of goons. These aren't good dudes. And they're pretty well tied in to. to the Iranian economy as well. So they run a bunch of front companies for the Iranian regime and make a lot of money. So these are, you know, their sole purpose is to protect the ideals of the revolution, but they're also a deeply corrupt organization within Iran. So they're not great guys. In terms of the move yesterday, you know, from my perspective, it doesn't really do anything materially different. I mean, we have sanctioned these guys under previous sanctions authorities in both the Bush. and Obama administrations, both under for counterterrorism reasons, as well as for counterproliferation reasons. So this new designation actually will have no real material effect, I think, in terms of

putting additional pressure, economic pressure on the Iranian regime. It's really, from my perspective, a largely symbolic move right now. And of course, as you mentioned, it happened right before the elections in Israel. It's pretty much a gift to BB Netanyahu from Donald Trump. So I think it's mostly a symbolic move. Now that said, I do think that it imposes a bunch of risks on us that were frankly unnecessary. So, for example, you know, U.S. forces in the region could now potentially be targeted by the IRGC and retaliation for this decision. So that, you know, potentially puts our forces at risk. This was against the advice of the Secretary of Defense and some of the members and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the cabinet who were worried about this issue. And it also kind of

put some of our allies in a tough spot, especially our Iraqi friends who are working really hard to stabilize Iraq. And this could potentially be destabilizing for the Iraqis. So in some ways, it's a symbolic move. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me other than just being a rhetorical win for the president. Yeah. So, Kelly, I mean, the Trump administration, they obsess with Iran in such a weird, disproportionate way that I feel like I'm constantly in this odd position of sounding like I'm defending Iran, even though I'm not. The IRC, as you said, is horrible. They do terrible. things. Notably, the Pentagon estimates that one in every six combat fatalities in Iraq were attributable to proxy forces that were sponsored by the IRGC. So that is a very notable fact.

But I mean, because the question I have for you guys is, do we think that a move like this helps or harms the IRGC standing within the broader political system? I mean, I think it's, if the goal of the administration at this point is to put additional economic pressure on the regime or to somehow try to fracture the regime or potentially do regime change, which we all think is a bad idea. I think this is actually potentially a counterproductive move because it's going to solidify support for the hardliners within Iran, especially within the IRGC, because frankly, if there was going to be any regime change in Iran, you know, there are going to be elements of the security forces that would be in play. But I think this actually

potentially solidifies them around the regime. What do you think about it? Yeah, I mean, I agree. with Kelly completely. The two things I'd say are one, you know, if there's some kind of unwinding unraveling in Iran, perhaps because of the economic pressure, some of the internal pressures, actually the most likely forced to emerge from that is Qasem Soleimani is the IRGC. They've got it pretty well wired there. They've lived under sanctions, as Kelly said. It's not like these guys haven't been sanctioned. They've been sanctioned as an entity. They've been as individuals, sanctioned, so it's not like they've just lost a bunch of freedom of movement or freedom of action that they had. So they will also know how to play the game of essentially using this

to try to pull Iranian politics in a harder line. And the second point that concerns me about this designation is, I don't know what you think, Kelly, but the only rationale I can see behind the direction the administration has gone is they're trying to go to Iran almost into a conflict. That's what this feels like to me. It's like, They're going to squeeze and squeeze and push and push and push every button that they can. They want Iran to stop complying with the nuclear deal. Keep in mind, Iran has thus far continued to comply with the JCPO. It's almost like they're looking to try to push the Iranians so far in a corner

that they then lash out and do something like the Iran deal or launch some attack against our forces that can spiral very quickly into conflict, right? So my concerns are double. It's both what does this do inside of Iran? You saw Rahani come out. You know, they designated CENTCOM as a terrorist organization yesterday in a kind of what aboutism tit for tat. That's not the normal orientation of the Iranian political leadership. That's a reflection that the Iranian political leadership has to circle the wagons in their system. I'm not saying that's right. I'm just saying that's how their system operates that if this kind of shot is taken at them, everybody rallies behind the flag and that strengthens the IRGC. So that concerns me. And then the other thing, again, that concerns me is that. If the administration is just trying to press every button they can to get an escalation. Yeah, I totally agree with Ben. I mean, I think, you know, from my perspective, it's not really this move that's necessarily concerning.

It's the cumulative effect of all of the decisions that the administration is making. And what's weird to me is that I don't really know that Donald Trump is like itching to go to war with Iran. I'm not sure that it's a winning issue for his base. And so he's, but he's surrounded by a bunch of people who are like, as you said, obsessed, right? with this issue. And so I don't think even he realizes, maybe I'm giving him too much credit for being stupid, but, you know, that the cumulative effect of this could potentially be backing us into a situation where we do end up in a conflict with the Iranians. I just don't know how much of that the president himself is actually conscious of. Man, do you guys think there's a, there will be a

point where European allies or others start criticizing us for seemingly going after the Iranian regime too hard? You know, I was just in Europe, and you get a sense there just this overwhelming frustration with us that we put them in this horrible position where we brought them along for seven years with sanctions and diplomacy to get the Iran deal. The American government under Barack Obama did that. Now the American government has put their companies in this difficult position where they are having trouble doing business in Iran or have to pull out of Iran. Their European governments are trying to keep this deal alive, and they see Trump and his administration ratcheting this up. You know, I agree with Kelly that what worries me is like Trump probably just cares with the politics of this, right? You know, doing this favor for BB or telling his own audiences here, how hard line he is and how tough he's being on the Iranians and now he's going further than Obama. But Bolton and Pompeo, I think those guys would be, you know, perfectly okay with the war.

And I think, you know, a year and a half is a long time. They're moving pretty fast. At Kelly's point, this cumulative steps are accelerating. And a year and a half is a long time. And as we talked about before, there's a lot of ways. that a conflict can escalate with Iran. I think another point that's worth making here is I don't give a dime's worth of value to the bullshit that they spew about supporting the Iranian people and democracy in Iran.

We had Jason Resign in here. You have Iranian Americans in here. You have Iranians that you talk to who want Iran to reform, who want to move away from being kind of a terrorist sponsoring state, who want better relations to the West. They will consistently tell you, unless they're like the weird M.EK guys who pay Rudy Giuliani to speak at their conferences about overthrowing the government in Europe, they will consistently tell you, you want to help the Iranian people get rid of the fucking travel ban and let Iranian middle class people come study in the United States, you know? Even right-wing hawks will say that.

Yeah, like this is insane. There's no consistency to their rhetoric. And so it makes this rhetoric about helping the Iranian people, we're hurting them with sanctions, we're hurting them with the travel ban. We're empowering the worst actors in Iran by embracing this frame of escalation. We're setting back the cause of democracy in Iran. Yeah. I think this administration, it's very clear that, you know, Pompeo and Bolton, you know, have decided that they're going to do regime change through economic pressure and that that's going to. to be how, you know, they changed the regime. I just think they have no sense of what comes afterwards. It's not like it's going to be an easy, you know, transition if it ever did happen. I don't even know if it would work. But it's clear to me that they're just throwing all of the eggs, you know, against the wall or whatever bad metaphor. But, you know, and just seeing what happened. That's actually the right one. That's the right metaphor, Kelly. It's not a basket. They're just fucking throwing them against a, I can picture John Bolton saying that it's like

hurling eggs against the wall. I know. Anyway, it's Easter, right? almost. So, yeah, I mean, I think it's just there's no, I don't get the sense they've actually thought through the second and third and fourth steps and what comes afterwards. And it reminds me a lot about Iraq. I mean, you know, leading ourselves into a situation where we had no idea what the outcome would be, you know, once there was regime change in Iraq. And look where we are now. So I think there's a lot of deja vu for me in this situation. Agreed. Well, we will watch this closely. And Kelly, thank you so much for joining. because literally no one has taught me more about Iran than you have.

So thank you for that. I like having the Goon Squad reunited. Yes, there we go. All right, buddy. Thanks again. Talk to you soon. Bye. Bye, Kelly.

All right, Ben. The Israelis went to the polls today and we'll soon know whether our best friend, B.B. Netanyahu is still in charge of Israel. But, of course, no Israeli election would be complete without a bunch of super fucked up, desperate, 11th hour haymakers. So the first one was Netanyahu announcing that he plans to annexed. settlements in the West Bank. No huge surprise there as entire party supports that position, but no, Israeli Prime Minister is done that yet. But the the Likud Party also was reported today, apparently

hired 1,200 people to secretly film Arab voters and polling locations. So that is deeply racist. As we were recording this, we don't know Bibi's fate yet, but there is a chance that win or lose. He just killed off any hope of a two-state solution. So thanks for that, Bibi. What do you make of this election, Ben? What are you looking for? Well, I, you know, I, I, I think. think people have to recognize, you know, it's always kind of strange for me to see, like, he'll come out and say he's going to annex the West Bank. And people act like, oh, my God, they're shocked. Like, this is what the guy's been doing for 10 years. The settlements they've been building have been a de facto annexation. He's already said there won't be two states who's on his watch. The goal on Heights annexation clearly foreshadowed what they could do in the West Bank. So I'm getting a little tired, frankly, of people, you know, in the media or in politics being like, wow, you know, shocking move by Beebe. Like, no, they've been telegraphing this for a long time. It's not only the death knell to this two-state solution, but it's really the

transition of Israel potentially to being an apartheid state. We should just say it. I mean, what else is it? You know, when you have millions of Palestinians living there without any rights, I don't know. I know this is a super controversial language, but please tell me what it is. if you have millions of people living within your borders who have no status, who can't vote, you know, we have to start talking about that reality because that's where this is going.

On the filming Arabs voting, again, it's like here in the U.S. where, and again, to be fair, that I'm not singing Israel out, we've seen these anti-democratic practices around voting and around national identity in a bunch of Western countries. but like again let's kind of not sugarcoat this I often talk you know the the standard talking points about the U.S.'s relationship are about our shared democratic values like are those part of our shared values like I'd like the next politician who you know stands up at A-PAC and gives an homage to to the shared democratic values to be asked well when a bunch of thugs go around you know trying to intimidate Arabs by videotaping them as they vote like is that yeah what part of the democratic values is that

It's not particularly Democratic. Yeah, I mean, so Bibi is very good at solving a near-term problem for himself, which is in this case to get elected potentially and creating a much larger long-term problem. So if they just annex all of these settlements, if they essentially take control over the whole West Bank, that would mean, what, 2.8 million Palestinians are now part of a greater Israel. You'd have a one-state solution. Now, the question then becomes, do they have voting rights? Are they allowed to participate in politics?

And then you get to the point that you made earlier, which is how is that a democracy? No, and this is just uncomfortable, because it's 2.8 million Palestinians on top of the, you know, Arabs who already live in Israel who have been somewhat downgraded in recent years. Right, by the nation state law. Yeah. And so people have been trying to point this out for a long time. I remember Obama giving a big speech about this at APEC, intentionally went to APEC saying, you cannot have a Jewish state and a democracy without a two-state solution. Because if it's a Jewish state in which Arabs are second-class citizens, that's not going to be democracy. If you have one-state solution that is a democracy, it's not going to be necessarily a Jewish and character because you could actually have a Palestinian majority in those borders.

This is a conundrum. Now, BB's whole plan all along, we've always said, and I've thought, like, he wants to get the next election, he makes his alliance to political convenience. But maybe this was the goal. I mean, maybe actually the method was that he wants annexed the West Bank, and he's on the precipice of doing that. and with the U.S. administration that will back him in anything he wants to do, you could see that. What we don't know is what will the Palestinians do? How would they react? Mass nonviolent resistance. Is there a danger of another intifada? You know, there are other actors here other than Bibi and Trump, and it could be a very volatile situation.

But I do think, as we've talked about, you know, exhaustively on this pod, but importantly, people can't like kind of hide under the table on this issue anymore. You know, like they can't just say, well, I'm for two-state solution, but we can't pressure Israel and we share democratic values. I don't, we don't share values with a country that would have 2.8 million people who've been under military occupation and absorbed and denied any rights in that country. And so we need to be having a conversation now about what it means if that's where this is going. Yeah. Interestingly, Pete Buttigieg came out and criticized Netanyahu's announcement about annexing the settlements. Beto O'Rourke referred to some of Netanyahu's comments as racist. So I was

hard on it, but then I saw some people being like, well, wow, Beto said, what is he if he's not racist? Like, this is the same problem we go with here with Trump. Like, this is a man who trashes Arabs repeatedly, who backs settlers who commit acts of violence against Arabs, who's got people on his behest out videotaping people voting. And people saying, Beto, you know, wow, what would you call that? What's the polite way of identifying that? It feels pretty clear cut. So we're sitting here, I think polls have closed. We don't know the outcome. Betty Gantz has been running a pretty strong campaign as an alternative to the VB Netanyahu. And the way the Israeli political system works is wildly complicated proportional representation. So you have like, I think,

40 parties are running. They each would need to hit a 3.2. percent vote share to get representation in the Knesset. After that, the parties have to build a coalition so that they can form a government. It's complicated. So we'll know more next week. But, you know, tough way to close out the election, guys. Yeah, and I will say, you know, like, we don't know yet, but Bibi tends to find ways to eke this thing out.

Always. Cobble together his coalition. And even if Benny Gons kind of matches him in vote total, like Bibi's a survivor for a reason. And it's always because he moves to the right. and I'm not sitting here with a lot of optimism. Yeah, me either. But I would be happy to be surprised. I would be too.

So, okay, turning to spies in Mar-a-Lago. Yeah. So on March 30th, a Chinese woman was arrested trying to get into Mar-Lago. She said she wanted to use the pool. She was carrying four cell phones, a bunch of hard drives, including some loaded with spyware. So, you know, standard pool stuff. You had to blow up donut or whatever in your spyware. It turns out that when investigators went to her hotel room, there was even more gear.

including a device that detects hidden cameras with radio waves. That's pretty cool. Nine USB drives and five SIM cards. I guess a Secret Service agent put one of those USB sticks into his laptop. That's not the best practice there, just everybody listening. So, Ben, like, this person is clearly a foreign spy. Foreign governments are going to run spies at us. That's not Trump's fault.

That's going to always happen. But we never really talk about the fact that the President of the United States spends, like, every weekend at a club for any asshole with 200, grand can be a member. It is like such an obvious, reliable, glaring, intelligent target. Like, compare Mar-a-Lago to how hardened the White House is or Camp David. It's crazy. This is why they built Camp David, right? I mean, the whole fucking reason to build this retreat deep in the desert, or not desert, deep in the woods of Maryland, is so you can go someplace to be totally secure and private, right? And you've got this club who,

nearest I can tell, has a membership that's a bunch of trashy, rich people. grifters, like right-wing suck-ups and foreign spies. Like, that's who's hanging out at the fucking pool of Mar-A-Marlago, you know? Like, I don't know. When I go on vacation, like, I'd like to be around some, you know, interesting, like-minded people, generally not around a bunch of fucking, like, right-wing hucksters and foreign spies. You don't want the editor of Newsmax to have dinner with you every night or whatever right-wing out with? Well, there were these pictures of Trump, like, having meetings about, like, North Korea in, like,

the dining room, right? That was my favorite. There's all these, like, so these aging people with, like, cell phone cameras. Like, you think they're not recording devices on some of those things, and you think they're not some foreign spies in there? So this is, insofar as people knowing what's going on with Donald Trump are penetrating our systems, this is a pretty brinking red light, you know? Like, we caught the one spy dumb enough to carry seven USB sticks and ask for where the pool is. There's got to be 400 more that got through. Because the secret service isn't protecting the infrastructure there.

That's not their job. Yeah, and guess what? The Chinese aren't always sending people who are Chinese, you know? They probably have some right-wing grifters on their payroll. And so, well, I don't know that for sure, but I'm just saying that they have other people that they can have to do this. The important thing is, as much as we cover these issues in a news cycle way, if you stack this with the security clearance thing, right? So they're giving security clearances to people who have been deemed to be potential risks by our own government. Very serious risks in some cases.

Yeah, they've got people hanging out at Mar-a-Lago. Who knows how compromised in the last two years are national. security information has been. Like, God only knows, like, what penetrations have been into systems or what secrets have been shared. That should really worry people. Yeah, it really worries people. Another quick just note on personnel and best practices. So a reminder that we now have an acting secretary of defense this week, Trump purged, basically the entire leadership team at the Department of Homeland Security. It's kind of scary. Including the secret service director. I guess he just had to shick in everybody down until we got to the person he wanted to make the acting head.

So we also have an acting secretary of interior, acting SBA administrator, acting chief of staff. So I just want to note, like, there is a cost, especially in foreign policy world, to staffing the government that way. So like an acting sect-def is going to be treated differently by a foreign leader than your handpicked guy. A full-time chief of staff can recruit a better team to work for him or her. They are hamstringing themselves. And again, it's the thing we don't really talk about. They're hamstringing themselves. And like you say, Secretary of Defense, who's acting, who's just some Boeing lobbyist.

is not going to be taken seriously by other people around the world. He's just not. Nobody's going to think he speaks to the president. Nobody knows if he's going to be around. But importantly, Tommy, there might be a method to this. So Kelly referenced that the Defense Department was against the designation of the IRGC. We've known in a lot of these interagency debates, the defense department has been against what Trump wants to do because what Trump wants to do is usually stupid and they would potentially pay for it. And maybe they want a weak voice at the table because I can guarantee you that when they had the meeting, on the IRGC designation, and Bolton and Pompeo came into that meeting loaded for bear, and the Secretary of Defense has to come make the case against it, and he's just some Boeing lobbyist instead of Jim Mattis. That's a big change. So they may want not just Trump, but people like Bolton and Pompeo, to kind of lead this hanging. I think that's hugely responsible, given that we've got thousands of troops at war in harm's way.

We've got millions of people that work for the Pentagon. It shows a fundamental disregard for this military that Trump likes to ratcheworthy. himself then. Yeah. President of Egypt came to Washington today. President Abdel Fata L. Cici showed up in the Oval Office as he's proposing some constitutional changes that would undercut the judiciary, expand military control over the government, and I guess that's probably Trump's wish list as well. It has been six years since C.C. deposed Muhammad Worsi in a coup in the name of stability. Unfortunately, things have just gotten worse, not better. It has not stopped him from locking a protesters, activists, including some American citizens, who are.

are in jail right now. Okay, Egypt's an important relationship. They have been, you know, the cornerstone of critical diplomatic work over the years. It's an important military alliance. All that stipulated. Do you think Trump should have taken this meeting? No. I mean, and you don't have to. And it's not like we have some urgent, pressing matter of business with Egypt. And frankly, I think we got it wrong. We should have called it a coup when he had a coup. But we also kind of iced the guy and put some limits on what we did with them. But all that said, I don't think you do this. It sends a message, I mean, not that there needed to be another message sent from Trump, but it sends a message that we just don't care about these issues. And I'll be honest,

like, even if C.C. is somewhat, you know, he's going to be around, you can still make a difference, at least around the margins, and getting certain people out of prison or getting the worst laws roll back. Like, there is such a thing as unsatisfactory, but, you can't. but still relevant human rights progress by using some pressure. And it looks like they just don't care at all. And so for them to do this meeting as he's changing the Constitution, as he's kind of increasing his iron fist rule of Egypt, it sends this kind of more chilling message,

the same when we say with Mohammed and Salman, that not only do we not have concerns about this, we're validating. We're actively validating this repression. And again, in addition to just how bad that is for activists and democracy supporters around the world, it makes us look completely full of shit in Venezuela and Cuba

when these only two countries in the world where we say we care about these issues, who's going to believe that when he's sitting there with Cece, giving him a foot rub. It also just reminds me that every time a democratically elected leader comes to town, whether it's Theresa May or whether Trump goes to Europe

or whether it's Macron or Justin Trudeau, it results in some pissing match. Every time some authoritarian strong man like Cece comes, it's all love in the Oval Office. Just think about that, like how backwards that is. So weird. Yeah. Don't like it.

I don't like it. It makes me sad. So, Ben, let's go to Sudan for a minute. So there have been protesters holding sit-ins for several nights in a row to call for the resignation of President Omar al-Bashir, a reminder that Bashir, just a world-class asshole. He is the first sitting president to be indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide in Darfur. So last night, security services reportedly fired live ammunition to break up the protests.

There were some other reports that more rank-and-file military members were protecting them. So that was an interesting dynamic. But what's happening in Sudan does seem to dovetail with our conversation last week about protests in Algeria, calling for President Butta Flika's resignation. They seem materially different than what's happening in Libya, where there's a warlord fighting the UN-backed government. I'm just curious if you had thoughts on what you're doing. seeing in Sudan or Libya? Well, I think, you know, first of all, in Sudan, it is pent up frustration with an awful, corrupt, repressive government.

Somewhat similar to Algeria, the circumstances are a little different than that Algeria is prompted by this election and the weekend of Bernie's nature of the leader. But there are commonalities there. In Libya, what we have is essentially the factionalism there that has been grinding away for years is coming to a boil where you have this strong man, Hufftar, who's kind of controlled Eastern Libya and Benghazi. He's kind of backed by Cici and the Gulf states and kind of trying to root out some of the Islamists in Benghazi. And he's essentially invading Tripoli and see over the objections of the United States government, by the way, Trump probably hasn't figured out yet.

No, no chance. That his friends are all backing Hufftar. But over the United Nations and Europe, I do think what it does say, though, to Cici, particularly Sudan and Algeria. again, CC looks pretty good. It looks pretty entrenched. So did Budaphylika two years ago. So did Bashir a couple years ago. These things can boil over if you are corrupt and you are authoritarian, even though right now, in this moment today, that the trendy thing to say is, oh, the strong men is ascendant, you know, Bolsonaro and Trump and Duterte and Putin, blah, blah, blah. You know, the pot, you know, takes a while to boil over. And I think it's a message to us and frankly, hopefully a message to activists. around the world, that things can change very quickly. And so Cici, whether or not he's still there, five years from now, ten years from now, I think is an open question, particularly if he keeps this restrictive rule in place. So this conversation feels familiar.

It could be 2011, 12, 13, and the initial Arab Spring. You know, obviously, the response then was all-consuming, right? I mean, was it 16 days of protests in Egypt before they finally forced. the resignation of Mubarak. You know, it was an all-consuming thing for the White House. President Obama is constantly going on and giving speeches about universal values and backing the protesters. Knowing what you know now, and you see these protests in Sudan and Algeria and to a

weirder extent, Libya, do you think there's a role for the U.S. to play in terms of how we're talking about this or supporting people, you know, looking for a better life through protests and democracy? Yeah, I mean, you know, one of the things interesting is, is part of the reason why there was such an interest in, you know, what we were going to say, what Obama was going to say, really, in 2011, is it that was new, right, that, you know, now people are kind of numb to this. But also because people just assumed that Obama gave a shit, right?

Very good point. And this is actually an important point. Like, nobody thinks that Trump cares about these protesters. No. So nobody even, like, let's say they had a press briefing in the White House, which they don't. nobody would, I think, even ask because, like, nobody thinks that they care, right? And I think that's sad. I think the American president uniquely in the world has been a figure that gives voice to imperfectly and hypocritically at times. But if we're not speaking up for human rights, if we're not

speaking up for democratic change, there's not many other voices out there. I mean, maybe occasionally a European leader. I do think there's a role to speak out. I think speaking out with humility is important in a way that recognizes that we can't dictate outcomes and we can't control what happens. But I think, you know, being on the side in terms of the things we say of people who are at least trying to bring about change, and it could be even more incremental change is important. I also think, frankly, we need to consider, in this day and age, how do we have a set of policies that is able in the long term to support civil society and support the development, you know, a better

discourse within in between countries. You know, the old toolbook used to be that we funded opposition parties. Right. And as much as I can see why, the autocrats have kind of figured out that strategy and they just shut down those parties and cut off that funding. I think you might want to look at, well, because we should still be trying to support the development of civil society, hopefully by working with governments to invest in institution building. But if not, like, maybe regional approaches where we're connecting activists from, you know, at kind of hubs in different parts of a region so they can share strategies. We want to support people aren't even political, but maybe entrepreneurs who are change makers in society. We want to support women's rights

and participation in politics. We should be trying to find new ways not to overthrow governments, but to empower people. Not so much to bring about these moments, only the people in the countries can, but to create a better basis that when these moments happen, know what they're doing. People have institutions that they can channel their energies through, or people have a discourse that has already been more open. So there's the short game where I do think you have to speak out for these things. And the longer game is I think we as a country need to think about how do we promote an advanced democracy

in different ways, frankly, than we have in the post-coil war years, because the autocrats figured out how to stamp out those ways. Yeah. Turn to Europe for one minute. So the UK Parliament passed a bill that prevents a no deal or a hard Brexit, I believe. Yeah. So that means they can't leave the European Union without all the details ironed out. It means the people won't feel screwed.

They won't be runs on medicine. The parliament then approved Prime Minister May's decision to see an extension, right? So it looks like they punted this thing down the road again. There's a whole bunch of wrangling happening at the EU about Brexit. So I'm never again going to ask you what's going to happen. My only question to say is do we have a sense of when these guys might figure it all the hell out? No. But I think one of the things that will be interesting to watch, so the one new point I'd make from our discussions about this in the past, the Brits cannot figure this out.

And I don't see how they're going to. You know, they don't want a no deal Brexit, but there's no Brexit that can get past Parliament. at a certain, so they're just punning and getting extensions. And I think at a certain point, the Europeans, the timeline question shifts out of the British Parliament and shifts to Europe. How long is Europe going to tolerate this uncertainty? For now, Europe is saying better to extend it and see if we can work something out because they don't want a no-deal Brexit.

But at a certain point, I think this timeline question shifts to European politicians and whether you're going to get the 27 leaders of the EU to continue to give the British all this time and space that is being used to just argue with each other, I think that time could run out sooner than the Brits think. So we'll go obviously a few more months here, but I think actually at a certain point when the inability of Britain to do anything continues to be clear, that ultimately the final decision might actually be made by continental Europeans. Speaking of Europeans, you were just in Berlin with Obama? Yes.

How was it? We learned anything cool? What were they up to over there? I think what was cool about it, I mean, he saw Anglo-Americal, who's still hanging on. And, like, look, part of what she's trying to do is before she passes the baton, she's trying to manage this Brexit situation, too. But, you know, we've talked here. They've got their far-right problem. There are a couple interesting things that struck me, though.

One is we had all these activists and parliamentarians and politicians from across. Europe come together for this meeting with Obama, and then I met with a bunch of them separately. And what I'm struck by is how similar the energy is to hear in that you do have this real renewed sense of activism from younger people who are just fed up and tired of the political elite. And they're getting into politics themselves, and they're shaking things up. And I met everybody from like an amazing Afghan woman who's become a refugee advocate has an organization to, you know, an amazing young parliamentarian from Macron's party, a woman in Switzerland who's beating back far-right ballot initiatives,

almost single-handedly with her organization. Young people are really filling the space that need to be filled in European politics. And that was kind of inspiring. And I think it could be interesting over time, you know, world those out there, for like the American progressive movement that had been building to kind of build some contacts and ties across the Atlantic. Because frankly, as we talked about here,

Bannon's doing that. The right wing is well networked across the Atlantic. And the second thing I notice is there's similar debates happening there. So in some of these countries, like we were in Germany, the number two party in the polls in Germany after Merkel's party is not the traditional center-left party of Social Democrats. It's the Greens. I met this guy who's the leader of the Green Party in the Netherlands, really remarkable young, talented politician. They just picked up in a historic number of seats. Some of that is the kind of left, center-left argument we're having the Democratic Party here. And some of that is just how much people care about issues like climate in Europe. So interestingly, you know, they're going through the very similar, very familiar

process here where there's a much more energized left that is in the process of figuring out what it is and how they can both win elections and what they should stand for. Well, that is a great hopeful note to end of the way. Yeah, I left more hopeful than I went, which is not always the case. Yeah, not always the case with this show either. But stick around, because when we back my interview with Patrick Raddenkeef. Amazing book. Say nothing. I learned more about the troubles in the IRA in Northern Ireland's history than I knew

previously in my life. So check it out. On the line is Patrick Raddenkeef. He's a New Yorker staff writer and the author of an incredible new book about a notorious murder in Northern Ireland. The IRA and its consequences, the book is called Say Nothing, a true story of murder and memory in Northern Ireland. Patrick, thank you for doing the show.

Thanks for having me. So anyone who follows me on Twitter knows that I read your book in less than a week, and I've been annoying about how much I like it. So truly congratulations. It's like it is an incredible piece of work. First question for you, who is Gene McConville? And how did you learn about her story? So Gene McConville was not a name I knew until about five years ago, five, six years ago.

She was, but it's quite a well-known name in Northern Ireland. She was a woman who was a mother of 10 and a widow in Belfast in 1972 when one night she was in her apartment in a housing complex in West Belfast and a gang of mass intruders barged into the apartment and pulled her out, dragged her out with her kids, cleaned her legs, and told the kids, you know, we just need to take her away for a few hours. We'll bring her back, but they never did. she disappeared. And so she became kind of an iconic victim in the troubles, this woman who disappeared. And, you know, in vanishing like that, you had 10 kids who were orphaned. Yeah. So I'll be honest. Like we both grew up in the Boston area. So I had a lot of Irish friends. I had heard of the IRA. I had heard of the Good Friday Agreement. But I honestly did not know anything about the genesis of the conflict, how brutally violent it was. Can you give us a bit of a one-on-one

on the troubles, like, who are the major players and how did it start and how bad did things get? Yeah, you know, it's a tricky story, right? Because there's this question of where do you start? Right. My kind of somewhat humorous illustration of this is in one of the memoirs that Jerry Adams has published. He's got this, you know, he's got like a timeline, as you'll sometimes see in a memoir, and his timeline starts like almost a thousand years ago. Oh, good.

You've got to go back to the beginning of the conflict. Basically, in the 1920s, you get the Irish War for Independence. and the establishment of what we today call Ireland, which is the Republic of Ireland. And when that happened, the island of Ireland is partitioned, and there's six counties that remain under British Dominion. They remain part of the United Kingdom. And for decades, there was a fair amount of discrimination against Catholics in Northern Ireland. Catholics were a minority in Northern Ireland. And there were these tensions that kind of simmered. And they finally came to Boyle in the late 1960s.

And so when we talk about the troubles, it's a period of time really starting in 1968, 1969, in which you had a conflict, a violent conflict that lasted for three decades. And the players were the IRA and Irish Republican groups, which were paramilitary groups that wanted to drive the British out of Ireland once and for all. Loyalist paramilitary groups. And so these would be loyal to the British crown. primarily Protestant groups. The police who were not really perceived necessarily as a neutral force,

but were largely Protestant and also not always necessarily following the law themselves. And then the British Army, which comes in pretty early, and is essentially dealing with kind of multi-vector insurgency, and then there are also a lot of accesses by the British Army. So you have all these different parties. really at war in the streets by 1971. And, you know, the violence kind of waxed and waned over the course of three decades, but it was, it was really an undeclared war right until 1998 when the conflict ends.

And the reason I love the book so much as I learned so much about the troubles, but I did it through the window of, you know, these real individuals who you track throughout and their lives weave together and really unbelievable and fast. I don't want to give away anything because the ending is so fun. I want to let people find it themselves. But that's why the book is cool because it's a great narrative, but you actually learn a ton about the troubles. So fasting forward a little bit.

So the Good Friday Agreement's negotiated in 1998, I believe. How much has Northern Ireland healed and integrated since that agreement? Well, this is one of the things as an American and even an Irish-American guy from Boston that was really startling for me as I got into this. It took me four years all in to do the – it started as a New York. article and then the book and I made seven trips over to Northern Ireland and this was one of the this was the steepest part of my learning curve early on was that I think my ambient sense of the Good Friday Agreement in 98 had been this is this landmark peace deal

they improbably end this long running grinding conflict in Europe and I sort of thought everything was coming up roses and you get over there and you realize the divisions are incredibly stark. You still have literally these huge walls. They call them peace walls that separate different communities in Northern Ireland. There's amazing tension, really everywhere between these communities. 90% of school children in Northern Ireland go to segregated schools, schools that are segregated by religion.

So on the one hand, there's peace, and we should celebrate that. On the other hand, when you actually get over there and you get out into these communities, you realize it's an incredibly brittle, fragile piece. And that was part of what I was trying to do in the book is, you know, as you say, I sort of wanted to approach it not as a history book, but almost more like the way you would with a novel, in that I wanted to tell the story of a handful of people. And you would see the conflict through their eyes and their lives

and see how they experienced it. But one thing that was true for all of those characters was that the past over there is not the past, right? It's the present. I mean, on the one hand, hand, the conflict is over. On the other hand, everybody, every day is surrounded by the kind of resonance and the tensions and the trauma of that past in a very real way. Yeah. I mean, tell me if this is a bad comparison, but as I read the book, I couldn't help but think about

and compare Northern Ireland to, say, Gaza and the walls you talked about and the response to occupation there. And then it also made me think about how depressingly widespread sectarianism is and how, you know, I think unfortunately, it's constantly talked about as a Sunni Shia problem or a Muslim problem. And, you know, clearly there's a very different example in Christianity happening in Northern Ireland. Like, is there something universal in the story of Northern Ireland that came to you or am I just making it sound? No, I'm so glad to hear you say that, to be honest with you, because this was a thing I, it was a dilemma in the writing of the book was that I kept feeling these echoes of other places and times. But I also felt as though I wanted to keep the aperture pretty tightly. I wanted to focus pretty tightly on this.

I didn't want to keep breaking out and giving you comparative examples. But believe me, I mean, whether it's Gaza or I spent a lot of time as I was working on the book talking with my colleague at the New Yorker, Philip Garevich, who's written about Rwanda, another community in which you had people who were really at war and then the conflict ends, but you still live across the street from the person you used to be at war with. Right. I mean, I also thought a lot about, you know, the book is very much about radicalization, about the sort of the process through which a young person becomes kind of drunk on their own righteousness and gets absorbed into a cause and starts to do terrible things in the name of that cause. And so to the extent that you read the book and it feels like a specific story, but you can feel those echoes, I'm really glad because I deliberately didn't keep breaking out in the book and saying, which is like this other conflict in this other place and this other time,

but I certainly heard those harmonies along the way myself. I mean, you mentioned Rwanda and living across the street from the person you were fighting. In Northern Ireland, I mean, so many of these IRA militants went on to be political leaders. I mean, you document in great detail in the book how Jerry Adams, who is, I guess, arguably the most famous IRA leader, was an operational leader. you directing people to kill. Does it surprise you that he was ultimately welcomed into the Oval office by Bill Clinton? Yeah, this to me is one of the big ironies here, and it's one of the kind of inescapable complexities of this story, is that Jerry Adams is a guy who I think I pretty,

you know, if Jerry Adams were with us on this podcast today, he would tell us with a straight face that he was never in the IRA. Of course, nobody believes that. You know, he's always claimed that he was just part of the political wing, Schenfein. I think I document pretty substantially in the book that this is a guy who ordered war crimes. He was an operational figure in the IRA. Yet I would also tell you that I think it took real vision on the part of Bill Clinton to give him a visa and have him come to New York. And not only that, but there's a strange sense in which the BS story that Jerry Adams has always told about his own past in the IRA created a kind of political space in which when the peace process starts, starts up, people like George Mitchell and Bill Clinton and

Tony Blair and others could negotiate with Jerry Adams. And they had a kind of rhetorical cover, right, in which they could say, well, I'm not negotiating with terrorists. I'm negotiating with Jerry Adams. And he was never in the IRA. But it was understood that Adams could bring the IRA along. So I don't think there are easy answers here. And I certainly in the book didn't want to, you know, there aren't a lot of uncomplicated. heroes. But I think one of the ironies with somebody like Adams is that you're absolutely right. I mean, he's

I think there's no way to look at the evidence and not think that this is a guy who ordered war crimes and terrorist attacks, but also see that he ends up playing a really significant part in ending this conflict. Yeah. I mean, it is also remarkable how many

Americans openly supported the IRA. For example, Peter King, a Republican Congressman from New York, who is on the Homeland Security Committee he attended a pro-IRA rally in the early 80s, and he said, we must pledge ourselves to support those brave men and women who at this very moment are carrying forth the struggle against British imperialism in the streets of Belfast and Derry. End quote.

Can you imagine if Rashida Taleb, a congresswoman who's Palestinian, said that about Hamas, you know, it's like, I think clearly race and religion play a huge role in this. But like, how did it become acceptable for people in Long Island, for example, to support a terrorist group? Yeah, I mean, some of this I think is just pure tribalism, right? And there's something like 30 million Irish Americans. There's way more Irish Americans than there are people in Ireland. And there has long been a strain among Irish Americans of support for the IRA, even during the worst years of the troubles.

When you push into it, it gets a little weird, right? When I was growing up in Dorchester and Boston, and the bar down the street from my house, they used to pass the hat for the IRA. When you go over to Northern Ireland, what's weird about this, right, is that it's kind of easy from the safe distance of Boston to give money to pay for bombs. They're going to be planted in public places

where there's no danger that your kids are going to get caught because they happen to be at the shopping center on the wrong day. And there were other strange dissonances. I mean, one of the weird things about the 1980s is that a lot of the people raising money, and these would be Peter King's constituents in some instances, are like Irish American, wealthy Irish American guys in construction who are all Republicans, like conservative Republicans during the Reagan years. And in the book, I described some of the meetings they would have with actual guys who work for the provisional IRA. And the provisional IRA, they thought of themselves as socialist revolutionaries. Right?

So you get these weird moments where these guys actually start talking about what they want. and the American donors who are paying for the bombs, wait a second, you're a socialist? So I think sometimes they had less common ground than they thought they did. But it is a strange thing, and I'll tell you, even to this day, Jerry Adams, you know, the IRA now, the Sinn Féin is now a legitimate political party in Ireland. Jerry Adams is a famous, kind of legitimate political figure at this point. But they still come over every year and have a big banquet at the Sheridan, in New York,

I've been to it, and they'll raise like $400,000 in an evening from Irish Americans who are eager to give them money. Wow. You wrote this great piece for The New York Times recently about Brexit and how that agreement, or read the moment, I guess, lack of an agreement, how the vote could reignite the troubles in Northern Ireland. Can you explain that? How is the Ireland-North Ireland border related to Brexit? So during the troubles, the border was a real hard border. symbol of that conflict. You had sandbags, you had gun towers. You know, if you wanted to cross, you'd have to show ID. If it was a bus, you'd get British soldiers who would board the bus and search it.

The border was a real symbol of the conflict. And if you think about it, if you were in the IRA, part of what you were fighting a war for was to erase that border. You wanted to reunify Ireland. And with the Good Friday Agreement, the border essentially disappears. You can now drive from the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, and you cannot even know. The only way you know that you've crossed the border is that it changes from miles to kilometers. And, you know, if you're looking at your cell phone, the service changes that you get. Other than that, you wouldn't even know that you'd cross the border. And that's been great for peace. It's been great for the economy. The insane thing about Brexit, I mean, one of the many insane things, but I think a contender for the most insane thing about Brexit, is a is that nobody, when they were designing the leave campaign, thought about the idea that if the UK leaves the EU, then that border, which had essentially disappeared in recent decades, is going to have to be reinscribed, right?

It will become the only land border between the UK and Europe. And that's been a big sticking point. I mean, once they realized that you could jeopardize the peace in Northern Ireland to see nothing of the economy, that became a big sticking point in the negotiations. And it's really one of the biggest stumbling blocks is, what do we do about this idea that if you are going to leave, how do we deal with the border? We have to have some kind of customs checks, but nobody wants to redraw that border. And Theresa May has no good answer for this. Nobody in London has a good answer for this. And there's a very real prospect, depending on how Brexit goes. I mean, right now,

as of the moment that you and I are having this conversation, it could be that the UK crashes out of the EU without any kind of deal about how they're going to do it on April 12th, if they can't postpone it or avoid it between now and that. And if that happens, they're going to have to redraw that border. And if they redraw the border, I think there's a very good chance that you're going to receive a return of some violence, not the full-blown violence of the troubles,

but that those tensions that I was talking about are going to boil up once again. Great. Great work, everybody, over in the UK. Yeah, seriously. My last question for you, how do you go about writing a book like this? I mean, you said you spent four years working on it, but you're able to write this narrative where we know what people are doing

and actually thinking and saying in these moments over the course of so many years. How do you get into all these characters' heads and a true accounting of their lives? It's tricky. I mean, it takes a lot of legwork, particularly when you're writing about people who either won't talk to you or are dead. And I knew from the beginning that I wanted to have the story feel intimate so that you could really, really see these experiences through the eyes of the participants. But honestly, I do, in my day job, I do this kind of thing a fair amount at the New Yorker.

I do what we call write-around, where you don't have access to the central figure. And so a lot of it is just legwork. It's, you know, did they give interviews to other people? Are there unpublished letters that you can get? Are there friends of theirs who you can talk to and try and make it as vivid as possible? So the trick for me with this book was I wanted to write something that was both really well documented and entirely factual, but that in your hand would read pretty quickly. Right.

You know, you'd sort of, it would be absorbing enough as a narrative that you didn't feel like you were having to slog through a lot of unnecessary exposition or an encyclopedic history. And, you know, I mean, that's the struggle with this kind of writing. But the useful thing in this case was the characters are so outsized. I mean, whether it's Dolores Price or Jerry Adams or this guy, Brendan Hughes is another big figure in the book. I mean, these people had extraordinary, very dramatic lives. And they clashed with each other. And so there's a lot of conflict. And there's a way in which you can kind of tell the story of this history through the braided stories of these.

individuals and, you know, I hope I pulled it off, but that was the ambition. Yeah, I'd say you pulled it up. This is the Jerry Adams has a cold version of the book. If you haven't read, Frank Sinatra has a cold. Everyone should check that out. The book is Say Nothing, a true story of murder and memory in Northern Ireland. I couldn't recommend it more. It's just a hell of a fun read, and I learned so much about Northern Ireland. Patrick, thank you so much for doing the show, and go Boston, Celtics, et cetera, et cetera. Thank you so much. That's it for Ponte of the World.

Thank you guys for listening. Rate and review us, and that's all we got. It's time to go home. Enough recording. Bye.