Pod Save the World - Should America boycott the 2022 Olympics?

Episode Date: April 7, 2021

Nearly two dozen people are arrested in Jordan as confusion swirls about whether a coup was being plotted there. Calls to boycott the 2022 Olympics in Beijing pick up momentum, including from within the United States. New reporting sheds light on violence taking place in the Tigray region of Ethiopia. And more. Then, Tommy talks with Washington Post reporter Joby Warrick about his book, “Red Line: The Unraveling of Syria and America's Race to Destroy the Most Dangerous Arsenal in the World.”For a closed-captioned version of this episode, please visit crooked.com/podsavetheworld. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Welcome back to Potsave the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben, we're almost back, man. I feel like pretty soon. There's going to be a point in the near future where I'm going to actually see your face when we do this, like in person. April 15th, the vaccine's open for all here. Yes. And I saw Gavin was saying like June 15th, they might try to move to all open everything in California. So that is hopeful news since we've been pretty, you know, we've been very cautious here, I'd say. You have. I admire your restraint. I mean, I mean Californians, but yes. Thank you. I too have been very cautious in my life. I think I've seen you once in the whole pandemic, right, the day that they declared Biden the winner. Yeah, I didn't give a fuck about anything. Yeah, that day is, yeah, yeah. Just popping bottles and running around town. I think that was it, though. Yeah, I think that was it, too.

That's very sad. Well, I don't know. Not sad is how great a show we have for all you people today. So there are... Good transition. There are reports of a coup attempt to Jordan, so we're going to take into what we know about that. I just did a roundup of good news about the fight against COVID because I need to hear some of it sometimes. There's some Iran deal progress.

There's calls to boycott the Winter Olympics in China. Some updates on Netanyahu's corruption case is, plural, because there are many of them. a story about a modeling shoot gone wrong, and then some headlines out of Russia, Ethiopia, in Myanmar. And then I'm going to talk with Pulitzer Prize winning author, Joby Warwick, about his new book, Red Line, which talks not just about Obama's debate over whether to strike Syria, but the just incredible mission to ultimately get 1,300 tons of chemical weapons out of Syria in the middle of a civil war and then destroy them safely, which is a remarkable story. I wonder how much of this you kind of like were getting briefed on at the time ban or if this is one of those like

far flung military operations that just kind of happens in the background like do you remember yeah i was i was a source for joby's book um oh yeah you're quoted i think i'm quoted in there um and but you know you're right you don't so what happens in government that's kind of interesting and this is why the book would be so interesting to read is it like you make some agreement right you know the with the u.s and Russia and the UN Security Council and the OPCW, the organization that deals with chemical weapons, to, like, find and destroy, like, thousands of tons of chemical weapons. And then then a bunch of people just go work on that. It's good to it. And you get reports. Like, I remember getting reports, like, in the PDB about, like, how many chemical weapons have

been destroyed. And, but you don't, you can visualize that. Like, I remember sitting there thinking, like, what does that even look like to, move these chemical weapons? And, you know, and destroy them and dispense of them amidst a raging civil war with a government that had denied that they even had chemical weapons until, you know, the moment the deal was struck. So, you know, a reminder that, you know, international organizations and experts matter because, you know, that was no easy task. And look, as bad as a Syrian civil war was, there were much, like, potentially worse outcomes, right? If ISIS got its hands on tons and tons of chemical weapons, can you imagine?

You know, so... Yeah, oh, my God. And it got real close, and we're going to talk about that in an interview. But, yeah, I mean, the book spends a lot of time with, like, UN teams, and then these guys and sort of like the bowels of the Pentagon who literally built a machine to specially designed to destroy these weapons and then had to do it at sea on a ship. It's just like a pretty harrowing, harrowing story. So stick around for that.

Before we get to the news, don't miss hysteria. this week is Aaron Ryan and Alyssa Master Monaco talk about the fight for voting rights in Georgia, and then they are joined by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. So that's a big, whoa, whoa, whoa. I know. I got the housekeeping heads up from Michael and I was like, that's a big deal. And then make sure you're subscribed to Rubicon. It's a great podcast from Brian Boitler, where he is breaking down some of the most consequential decisions of Biden's first 100 days. It's been a really helpful deep dive for me to understand things that are, you know, not necessarily like front page headlines every day, but critical issues that that team is working

through. So subscribe wherever you get your pods. Ben, you want to start at this Jordanian coup? Yeah. I think these headlines caught all of our eyes over the weekends. So the Jordanian government says it is foiled a coup attempt against the current monarch, King Abdullah II. This coup attempt allegedly involved the king's half-brother, former crown prince, Hamza bin Hussein, and a handful of other members of the royal family and advisors to the king. Prince Hamza managed to release a video from house arrest, even though he said his internet had been cut off, where he said he had been detained simply for attending meetings where the king and the current government had been criticized for corruption and competence, et cetera. Interestingly, in the video, he then went and criticized the

government for corruption, crushing dissent, nepotism, misrule. So he's leading into this one. The Jordanian government says that the crown prince was conspiring. with foreign entities to destabilize the country, specifically with an Israeli businessman who might have ties to the Mossad. I don't know what the truth is. I do agree with the Crown Prince who pointed out that every government always routinely accuses people they lock up of conspiring with foreign entities. So we don't know here. Jordan has been hit hard by the COVID pandemic. Deaths are spiking. Poverty levels are spiking. The State Department has expressed U.S. support for King Abdullah in the government, the current monarch, as of other countries in the region.

Ben, what did you make of these reports? And how worried do you think we should be about, you know, political instability in Jordan, a close U.S. ally that has remained remarkably stable throughout the Arab Spring in, like, a pretty brutal decade or so? Well, I think, first of all, we should be a little careful in calling it a coup attempt in the sense that that's what the Jordanian government says, but there wasn't a lot of evidence that. that there was a coup. You had some very senior people arrested,

like former ministers and obviously the, you know, former Crown Prince Hamza put under a house arrest of sorts. But there was no indication that the military was involved, no indication that there was like a plot. If there was, they didn't produce any evidence. What it seems like is that Prince Hamza has been critical of the government, has engaged with parts of the government's power base, tribes along the East Bank that have formed kind of part of the monarchy's base of support in Jordan.

And look, here's the awkward truth for people in the U.S. and the West who like King Abdullah because he's very comfortable in bilateral meetings with Western leaders and in the salons of Europe and the United States. Jordan has a lot of problems with corruption, with long-term unemployment, with mismanagement. they cycle through prime ministers every year or two. And so while there's been this kind of appearance of stability and certainly stability in their foreign relations and their upholding of the peace treaty with Israel

and their cooperation with the United States on counterterrorism issues in hosting an enormous amount of refugees, particularly from Syria, you know, there's frustrations. And what this felt like to me is, you know, King Abdullah and his government kind of cracking down on a potentially popular rival, who, frankly, is probably a bit closer to Jordanian public opinion than the king himself. And so to me, it's a, you know, it's a warning sign, not necessarily of a

imminent coup, but perhaps of a sense by King of Della and those around him that, you know, his rule, his, his, you know, over two-decade rule faces more dissatisfaction than we may might be seeing from the outside. Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, we also point out that Hamza was stripped of his status and his privileges as Crown Brints in 2004 by King Abdullah, who then tapped his own son for the for the job. Queen Norr, I believe, was tweeting that this was slander and, you know, called on her son Hamza to be cleared of all these charges. So it seems like we are just at the beginning of this thing. Yeah. And again, you're like you point out, this bear is watching because, you know, we haven't seen this level of infighting and rivalry in the Jordanian monarchy in a long time.

And, you know, it just, it's a reminder that all of these arrangements, these kind of autocratic arrangements in the Middle East, are a bit tenuous, whether it's a guy like Cece in Egypt, or whether it's the rural families in the Gulf countries or even King Abdullah. You know, reminded me of an interesting story, Tommy, which was in the U.S. statement reminded me of this. After Obama had called for Mubarak to step down, and after Mubarak himself stepped down, Obama, you know, I was kind of saying, like, you know, what a great thing. And, you know, I'm glad that you took this step. And he said he was potentially helped by the fact that he didn't have a longstanding relationship with Mubarak in the same way that, you know, Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton and the Bushes had this long relationship with Mubarak. And he said to me, you know, I wonder if it was King Abdullah, who I like and who's kind of my generation and we get along.

You know, there's such affinity for him as just a person, you know, and he was an interesting guy. He'd come to the U.S. and he'd ride his motorcycle up, you know, the California coast and all this stuff. And yet, like, you know, if you look under the rock of, you know, governance in Jordan, they're highly dependent on foreign assistance. They don't have the resources, the oil and gas that the Gulf countries have. And yeah, there's a lot of corruption and a lot of reason for Jordanians to want more from their government. So I hope that King Abdullah's response, the American government's response as a huge provider of that foreign assistance is not to kind of crack down on dissent, but rather try to figure out a way to be more responsive to what is bothering people in Jordan in the first place. You know, just locking up your half-brother is not the answer here.

No, that's a very Saudi move. Yeah, yeah, totally, totally. Yeah, I remember being a lot of those situation room meetings with you during the, during the sort of Egypt crisis before Mubarak's, you know, stepped down. And there were lots of 60 and 70-year-old generals being like, look, Hosni and the boys were with us. Yeah, they were with us in the 90s and Gulf War I and, you know, a lot of familiarity by us there. Well, we'll keep an eye on this one. And obviously, COVID is the backdrop for a lot of these, you know, sort of escalating situations of discontent in places like Jordan.

That being said, I did want to round up some COVID good news because it has been such a dark, dark year. So light at the end of the tunnel is the point. So the first piece of COVID good news I saw is that President Biden just announced that a woman named Gail Smith will be his coordinator for the global COVID-19 response. Ben and I both worked very closely with Gail on the NSC in the Obama years. Obama later tapped her to run USAID. Gail is a global development expert. She helped spearhead the Ebola response in 2014, and it's just like a dogged worker who gets shit done, and it may be very excited. Two, there's reports about a new COVID-19 vaccine entering clinical trials that is expected to be even more effective than the current options, and it's designed in a way that can be mass produced in chicken eggs like flu vaccines, which would potentially allow less technologically advanced factories around the world.

to create billions of doses per year. So that's exactly the kind of like surge of vaccines we need. It's going to take a while for these trials to conclude, but scientists were optimistic. Lastly, Ben, you know, like the Biden's team rollout of vaccinations is really cooking. We saw a couple days in a row of over four million shots delivered per day. So, you know, all this is to say the pandemic is far from over.

Global vaccination rates are nowhere close to where they need to be. There's massive inequality. But I was glad to see Gail get this job. I was glad to see, you know, scientific pathways to increase availability. So a lot of good news out there. Yeah, I mean, you're right to highlight it. I'll just talk about Gail for a second. I mean, first of all, you know, we've talked recently about, you know, diversity of experience

and kind of personality types in government. And Gail Smith definitely fits the bill. I love Gail Smith. Totally. She, you know, she was in the Obama White House for the first term and part of the second term and then ran USAID. And as you said, notably, spearheaded, like, a lot of the Ebola response. But also just a fascinating life story. Gail was a journalist. She was in Ethiopia, kind of embedded in some of the conflicts there covering them, then became a development expert, then founded the enough project to, you know, really that was rooted in the Darfur movement. So she's been an activist, a journalist, and a practitioner of foreign assistance. She's run the one campaign for the last few years, so deeply familiar with Africa. And what I take away from this is like they're serious about, you know,

you know, globalizing the fight against COVID as we've talked about an urge on this podcast. And when I think about Samantha Power and Gail Smith, kind of tag teaming this, it makes me, you know, excited about government in a way that I don't normally get excited because they're both like dogged, persistent, insistent on outcomes that benefit all people's on equity. So I'm really excited, you know, once Samantha gets confirmed, Gail gets in that role. I think this is a great signal that you're going to have people that are really going to prioritize this. It's not going to be a secondary concern to vaccinate and stamp out COVID, not just in the U.S. in Europe, but in places like sub-Saharan Africa and around the world. I think this is a great, great, great signal. Yeah, we'd be in

these Sudan-related meetings with Gail, and we'd be talking about some like rebel leader. And she'd be like, oh, yeah, I spent a couple weeks out, like, in the bush with that guy. What the fuck you're talking about? She was in the bush with all these people. I remember when we went to Ethiopia, she knew Ethiopia better than anybody I've met. I mean, she lived there for years. And we went to Ethiopia with Obama. And she was telling him how he had to go out. Like, you know, he's like, what are you doing in Ethiopia?

And she's like, I've already made arrangements. We have to go to this one jazz club in Addis. And she went on about how great this jazz club was and how they have like an after hour sing. And Obama's like, Gail, like I'm the president of the United States. I can't do that, you. I can go back to Ethiopia with you someday, hopefully, and go to this jazz club. But anyway, that's a side note that Gail's like been out in the world. She hasn't just been living in. She's not reading reports. Yeah, she hasn't just been like educating herself off of other people,

SingTanks reports that she then writes another report. And that experience will be helpful. Just in the way Samantha has, Samantha was a stringer, a journalist, you know, a writer before she was in foreign policy. I just think it's great to have people of that kind of background. And the Biden team needed that. You know, they have a very DC-oriented team, not that Gail hasn't spent plenty of time in DC-2.

Some both, yeah. Yeah, but this is good. No, it's definitely good. Some more good news out of the sort of Iran deal talks. Well, hopefully it's good news. Let's see what you think. So officials from the U.S. and Iran are, I think, as we record, Ben, hanging out in Vienna to discuss the Iran nuclear agreement.

They're kind of hanging out. So the U.S. and Iran aren't directly negotiating. Instead, there are what are called indirect talks where European diplomats are intermediaries. They are shuttling messages from, I assume, one hotel suite to another the way you'd, I don't know, have your friend pass a note to a girl you liked in. middle school. I'm kind of kidding. But it does seem, it's a touch childish. Ben, the clock is ticking here, right? Because the Iranians have an election in June. Do you think indirect talks are a sign of progress that Biden might be able to break this impasse with Iran, where each side is demanding that the other

offer concessions first before they'll reenter the deal? Like, how did you read this? I read this as a positive step. And I've been frustrated, no secret about that. In part because I just think there was like time lost. You know, you come in on a campaign promise of reentering the JCPOA, just why not just reenter the JCPOA? And I also thought that the U.S., having pulled out of the deal, could go first. But this feels like a real effort to initiate a process to get back into the JCPOA, the Iran deal. Now, as you say, there's a clock ticking here because there's an Iranian election coming up. And so there's a pretty tight window here for the U.S. and Iran to just get to brass tax and get back into the deal. And if people, you know, so what does that mean? The U.S. needs to do a whole bunch of

things in terms of restoring sanctions relief owed to Iran under the agreement. And the Iranians need to return to all the restrictions that they were under under the JCPOA. And there's this question of who goes first and how do you sequence it, which can sound complicated, but it's been done before. So when the Iran deal was reached in the summer of 2015, there was a formulation constructed called implementation day, which is essentially you pick a date on the calendar and you say on that date, both sides will be in full compliance with this deal. The U.S. will be in full compliance with the sanctions relief and the Iranians will be in full compliance with their nuclear steps. And there was a sequencing that led up to that. But the point is that it's been done before. They've negotiated a process

where you set a date on the calendar and then a whole bunch of experts just figure out how you get from A to Z. So they can do this. I think the sticking point, just so people know, on the U.S. side is a Trump people, in part to sabotage an effort to come back into the JCPOA, stacked on a whole bunch of additional sanctions, many of which are duplicative of the nuclear sanctions. So, for instance, Iran has owed sanctions relief under the JCPOA, and the Trump team kind of double sanctioned them for some things. So the same things that they sanctioned the Iranians for for their nuclear program. They sanctioned them for. for terrorism-related purposes too.

And the Iranians will claim, I think, with good reason, wait a second, you can't create a different rationale to impose the same sanctions on us that we're supposed to be lifted under the nuclear deal, right? And so the Biden team is going to have to face criticism from right-wingers in the U.S. that you're lifting additional sanctions beyond what the nuclear sanctions are.

This sounds very complicated, but the simple answer, as a bunch of people have been pointing out recently, is the Trump team didn't even hide the fact that they were putting these sanctions on to foil an attempt to go back in the nuclear. In fact, a lot of the people that support a hawkish line on Iran said that publicly. And so the bottom line is that the Biden team needs to get back to the status quo ante of the JCPOA, which, by the way, still leaves in place a whole bunch of U.S. sanctions for other things. But you have to get to the place where we're going to be a place. where the Iranians are getting their sanctions relief, and the U.S. and world powers are getting all of those restrictions under the Iran deal that the Iranians have been violating in recent months and years. Let's hope they get there. Because you know, you're certainly seeing some of the usual suspects in D.C. line up against this thing. I don't know if you saw this. There's a really creepy group for listeners called FDD, which is just like Gulf-funded, like right-wing anti-Iran group. One of the heads of it, this creep named Mark Dubowitz, tweeted on Easter. On this day, Easter and the end of Passover, we're blessed to be alive and witness the warm ties that have developed with the Abraham Accords, blah, blah, I'm cutting it.

And then at the end, he says, the end of the Islamic Republic in Iran would complete this. So he used his Easter tweet, which I did not read all of, it's fine, to call for the regime change in Iran, which I think, you know, tells you all you need to know about a lot of the critics of this deal, frankly. Yeah, I don't know about you, Tommy, but on religious holidays that are meant to signal resilience, redemption, in some cases, forgiveness. I usually like to call for the end of certain governments that bother me. Look, FDD, people should, you know, what I've never understood is why, like, this guy like Mark Dubovitz, who could not have more of an agenda, right, of regime change in Iran, not been shy or subtle about that, runs an organization called the Founderese. for the defense of democracy that regularly flax for authoritarian governments, right, which has kind of always been an interesting irony, why, like, you know, autocratic governments in the Gulf are funding a foundation for the defense of democracies. Maybe their goal is not to

defend democracies. Seems off, yeah. But it's kind of turned to as like an impartial analyst, you know, like all the time, all the time, like every article, they just start to notice, like every New York Times article about Iran, like this guy is quoted in it. In a way, by the way, which they would never quote like some bomb-throwing leftist, you know. Yeah, like code pink or something. Yeah, no, it'd be the analogy, like, of having a code pink quote in every story about Iran, right, right? So take it with a grain of salt. And yeah, like, I don't know about you, Tommy, but I didn't pass my Easter and Passover holidays, like wishing the end of governments.

But, you know, it's another story. Yeah, no, my family starts every Christmas with a quiet prayer calling for the death of Kim Jong And so, yeah, no, maybe Mark and I would get along. Let's talk about the Olympics, Ben, because you flagged the story. This is incredibly interesting to me. So world leaders are under increasing pressure to boycott the 2022 Winter Olympics, which are in China. The reason is an issue we've talked about a lot on the show, which is the ongoing detention

of more than a million U.S. in, you know, reeducation or forced labor camps in northwest China, which has been called a genocide by the U.S. So the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee would ultimately decide. whether or not the United States boycotts the Olympics. But human rights groups in some, but not all Republicans in Congress, are pushing Biden to weigh in or to pressure the IOC, the International Olympic Committee, to try to change the venue. The White House recently seemed to show some flexibility on this and say there's no decision made, which means maybe they're considering it. Republicans are contrasting the potential Olympics boycott with Biden's

comments about Major League Baseball, moving the All-Star game out of Georgia to protest its voter depression law. So China was awarded the 2022 games well before, you know, the genocide against the Uighurs began, but obviously the treatment of the U.Gers isn't the only human rights issue when it comes to China. There's Hong Kong. There's Tibet. There's much more. So the U.S. A little history here. The U.S. boycotted the 1980 Olympics in Moscow to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Human rights groups are also targeting corporate sponsors of the Olympics to put pressure on them, like Airbnb, Coca-Cola, Visa. You know, Ben, when I think back to the 2008 Olympics, you and I've talked about this before,

which were also in China, they were a huge propaganda win for the Chinese government because that opening ceremony was incredible. What do you think about these calls to boycott the 2022 games? I mean, I think when you look at the 1980 boycott by the U.S. and other Western countries over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and then the fact that the Russians or Soviets remained in Afghanistan another nine years. and then we later invaded, by the way. I don't think anyone would call that a success.

But how do you judge success here? What are the things you'd be thinking about? Yeah, I mean, I thought like this, because this is going to be an issue that we're living with for one way or another for the next year until the Olympics. Yeah, for sure. And like, on the one hand, I saw the IOC,

the International Olympic Committee saying, you know, well, sports isn't political and, you know, this is different. But the problem with that is that there's no question that the Chinese use things like this for political purposes. I mean, the 2008 thing was a massive flux on the world stage. And given Xi Jinping's, well, you know, very assertive nature, you can bet that there'll be like military parades and shows of Chinese ascendance. Totally.

It's going to have a political purpose to it. And so that makes all these debates valid. I think on the one hand, a boycott by the U.S., I tend to come down on, like, what does that accomplish? It ends up kind of hurting the athletes, you know. I remember even as a kid, like, you know, learning about these athletes in the 84 Olympics who didn't get to compete in 1980, who didn't get to compete against their best competition in 84 in some areas where the Russians and Soviets in the Eastern Bloc didn't participate. And so that's a, it's worth consideration, and it should be debated because,

of the Uyghurs because of Hong Kong because of the need to just try to this kind of steamrolling dissent of China's human rights record. I mean, it's even far worse than it was in 2008. It demands attention. I do think that for the time being, the targeting of the corporate sponsorship is very interesting to me because one of the things that we've noticed, right, is that like a lot of these big corporations, a lot of U.S. venture capital, you know, totally looks the other way on these human rights issues. I mean, some of them are literally invested in Jingjing province. They say nothing about what's happening in Hong Kong. There's a kind of duck in cover, you know, Hollywood studios making movies that they censor, you know, to appeal to Chinese audiences.

The idea, in the same way, by the way, that there should be discomfort for American companies around things like the Georgia law, like there should be some discomfort around your investments in China and your sponsorship of things in China. This has to become a part of the conversation of China's human rights practices are going to continue to go in this direction. So I think for the time being, that's a very healthy way to channel this in terms of like just spotlighting this, making this uncomfortable for the Chinese. Like there's going to be a lot more attention on your human rights record this time around than in 2008 when they largely got a pass. There's going to be a lot more pressure on sponsors. I do think it's pretty extreme and you might

just end up punishing athletes to pull the plug on the Olympics altogether. That's my current take, but we should all watch how this evolves. And I'm very curious what you and other people think about this. It's really hard, man. I mean, look, the IOC banned South Africa from Olympic competition from 64 to 88 because of apartheid. If the IOC could do that to China until they stop a cultural genocide, that would make a lot of sense to me. I kind of agree with you, though, that like these athletes who have been training their entire lives for this moment, they had no role in selecting where the games would be played. They've just done the work. And also, you know, if we boycott, it doesn't mean that the Olympic Games won't happen. We'd obviously try to get our allies to

boycott as well. But, you know, look, they would probably be televised to the majority of the world, right? I mean, I don't know. So these things tend to be factionalized, right? The 1980 boycott was 65 Western countries boycotted, 80 participated. So sort of split the world. All that said, you know, I don't know if you read it yet, but the New Yorker just had a huge piece out this week on Xinjiang. Oh my God. They followed this woman who was held in camps for, you know, I think a year and eight months. And look, frankly, her story isn't the worst thing that we've read about, right there are horrific stories of systemic rape for sterilizations like some of the worst things you could ever imagine but the the like kofka-esque nightmare that she was put through where

you don't know why you're detained you can't get off these lists you're you're you're the suspicion that you're under once you're detained puts everyone you know at risk you're isolate i mean it's like it is truly harrowing truly evil 16 000 mosques have been destroyed um you know we Uighur family. First of all, Xinjiang province is the size of Alaska, right? The border spans eight countries. It's a massive place with tons of people. And the pervasive surveillance of these people is unlike anything, you know, the world has ever seen before. So it's horrific. It's horrific. Well, and yeah, and the other concern, right, is that Jingjing could be kind of a laboratory for, you know, that kind of surveillance state, maybe not to the extremity

of camps, but the similar tactics of like total surveillance of a population to Hong Kong, to other parts of China, to exporting those technologies to other places. I think the other thing it's worth just, you know, coming back to and thinking about over time is international sports generally. My interaction with it in government was like there's a lot of corruption there, right? I remember, you know, this may sound like sour grapes, but when Chicago had an Olympic bid in 2009 and was bounced in like the first round. It was not even subtle. It was like openly discussed, not just by U.S. officials, but by everybody that like the Olympic bids were fundamentally corrupted, you know. His bags of cash. And by the way, so like fast forward to the Sochi Olympics,

Russia hosted in a winter Olympic Games in a summer resort town, right? Not the kind of place that you would pick like on the normal merits, right? Which suggested that Putin had Greece, the wheels a little bit in the same way that he got the World Cup. And by the way, then the Sochi Olympics, famously, there were billions of dollars of contracts to build stadiums and roads that just went to Putin's cronies. That whole games was under a cloud of corruption. Then there was a huge doping scandal with Russian athletes cheating. That whole thing was gross, right? From the mess, the selection. It's not an anti-Russian comment because I love Russians and I love Russia's role in sports. But like this was not that.

This was like Vladimir Putin's personal Olympics, right? And then they invaded Ukraine. And then they invaded Ukraine like the week after, right? But if you look at the World Cup in Russia and Qatar and Beijing getting the Olympics twice in like less than 20 years, like this is not like on the level here. And like let's just kind of get. If the IOC wants to say like let's get sports out of politics, well like maybe like, you know, pick some places that are a little less fraught, you know? Like, I have such good memories of, like, the Soul Games or the Sydney games or the World Cup in Africa. How awesome was that in South Africa?

You know, like, it doesn't have to be in America. And I guess L.A. has, you know, an Olympics in, what, 20, 28. But I do think international sports, particularly the Olympics and the World Cup and, you know, needs to, if they want to be a political, then be a political. Don't try to have it both ways where you're, like, taking the envelope of cash under the table and then saying, above politics. Yeah, I also think the Chinese beat out like a couple other authoritarian countries for the 22. Yeah, to be fair, to the IOC, I think Kazakhstan was like the runner-up bid. So, you know, it's not like, yeah, it's a tough. Yeah, yeah, that's fair. Tough menu, right, tough menu. Look, if you were to say to me, if you were to say to me, I think this will work. I think if we boycott the

Olympics and lead an effort of the world to boycott the Olympics, then the genocide against the Uyghurs would stop. It would be a no-brainer. If you told me there was a 51% chance, that it would stop this atrocity from occurring, no-brainer. I just, I don't know. I don't think this is like, like judging the current Chinese response to all criticism, the way they lash back, it doesn't seem like this would do it. Correct me if I'm wrong. I think you're right.

I do think, though, what needs to begin to happen is corporations, venture capital, people need to start feeling like there's going to be some pushback. if you just have an open spigot of money flowing into China. I mean, look, you know, you can heap all the criticism you want on the Chinese government for developing these kind of surveillance technologies. But you know what? Funded a bunch of that, if not more than half of it, like U.S. venture capital. You know, look, investing in Chinese AI and things like that.

I mean, so I think it's, you know, it can go to a Tom Cotton extreme that is uncomfortable, but I think the idea that there should at least be scrutiny. on what companies are doing and where money's flowing, that's a healthy thing. Even if it's – even if that's not going to change everything, it might – it just makes it harder for China to do this. You know, they did this with impunity and to some extent for a while, and now there's more attention on that's good. Yeah, no, this is a good conversation to have.

Obviously, like, we are no fans of what China is doing here. The juxtaposition with, like, the what-aboutism about, you know, anti-voter suppression laws in the U.S., that conversation I have no time for. That said, you raised the 2022 FIFA soccer World Cup in Qatar. I mean, that's a human rights disaster on its own, right? Like 6,500 migrant workers have died in the process of setting that up. So, you know, there is a bigger, look, politics and sports, they intersect. We both listen to Take Line now, so we know that to be the case.

Let's talk about one of our favorite people on the planet, BB Net and Yahoo. So in the last couple of episodes, we've talked about the recent Israeli elections and what it means for the Prime Minister Netanyahu's political future. The short answer is that it's still unresolved. But we do have an update on Netanyahu's corruption trial. This is from case 4,000. There are so many that they had to number them. It involves allegations that Netanyahu used his authorities to do special favors for the controlling shareholder of Israel's biggest telecom company. And in return, BB got favorable coverage from the news outlet owned by that company. It's called Wala. So on Monday, the former CEO of Walla testified that his boss, the website's owner, ordered him to, quote,

make negative articles about the prime minister and his wife disappear, and to post articles the co-after Netanyahu's rivals. In return, the company got regulatory relief. Ben, that sounds pretty bad, man. Like, are the walls closing in on BB here? What do you think? Well, I think the reason that's so important to highlight this is, you know, we've talked vaguely about corruption charges. And, you know, that can sound like it's, you know, anything, right? And some of it is like kind of gross stuff that doesn't feel fundamental to democracy, like gifts of cigars, literally, or even skimming off the top of some contract, not that that's okay. But the reason that this is so important to highlight is, you know,

the corruption charges against Nanyahu fundamentally go to his authoritarian nature. Like, this isn't just corruption. This isn't just like skimming off the top or getting a take. This is like using your power in a fundamentally undemocratic way to control Israeli politics and media, right? And Netanyahu's been doing this for years. And oh, by the way, like the pro-Net Nihahu media, you know, it was not subtle. I mean, it was like turbocharged. And Sheldon Adelson, you know, was a huge, you know, investor in that. But that's one thing, just to kind of, in the same way that there's pro-Republican party media that, you know, Rupert Murdoch pursues in the U.S. That's gross, but not necessarily corrupt.

But this is literally using the powers of the state, like your regulatory authority. And I think that it was indicated by the witness, like, at a value of like hundreds of millions of dollars, right, you know, in terms of these licenses and potential penalties versus rewards, to tilt the balance in your favor. So I think it's worth just looking squarely at this and realizing. This is about corruption. It's also about anti-democratic, fundamentally illiberal governance by Nanyahu, where he's been in power so long that he's basically co-opted elements of the state to serve his political project. And that's not a democracy. That's something else. And that's what Israelis need to deal with. Yeah, they got to get rid of him so he can just deal with these charges. I mean, it's time to move past this guy. Clearly. So it's so clear why he and Trump got along so well, too, right?

I mean, Trump was trying to emulate everything BB's been doing for decades. Let's go sort of in the same neighborhood and talk about the UAE. Because according to a report in the Daily Mail, 40 women were arrested in the United Arab Emirates this past weekend for allegedly participating in a nude photo shoot on a balcony in Dubai. This shoot is believed to have been organized by a Russian man for an adult website. These women are in their late teens, early 20s. They're mostly from Ukraine or. other ex-Soviet states. But what's really scary here for these women who clearly just thought they were like signing up for a modeling shoot or a photo shoot in this modern, like frequently Instagrammed city, these women could face fines, serious fines, or up to six months in jail. So, you know,

like, again, visually Dubai is this like extremely modern city, but the UAE has strict and draconian public decency laws that they're being charged with. So then, I just thought this was an awful story because it seems extremely likely, you know, that these women maybe were brought to Dubai and didn't know what the shoot was going to be until it happened or they just had no, you know, idea how risky the shoot would be, right? I mean, it's like a pretty public place, a balcony of a building. People are going to see it. In New York, you can imagine that that kind of thing happening. But in Dubai, you know, it is, it can get you in serious trouble. And I really worry for them, like, who is going to stand up for them, fight for them? I don't know if they'll have sort

diplomatic access. I mean, it seems like, a huge problem. Yeah, and I talk about the ultimate, like, punished the victims here, you know? Yes. Because these are, like, young women from Ukraine, largely, I think. And, you know, yeah, like, who knows under what auspices they were brought to Dubai, right? Promised money, promised cash. Who knows that they controlled their travel and freedom of movement and passports and the rest of it? who knows if they knew that they were, you know, going to be used in pornographic images or what have you. I think the couple things that I'd flag are like, you know, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, you know, in other places, by the way, I didn't, Seychelles, I don't, you know, like, there's this kind of luxury world out there that you and I are not a part of, Tommy, but like, you know, yachts and, and, you know, 20 naked women on a balcony, like, they kind of, cultivate a bit of that.

It's an ostentatious wealth. There's an ostentatious wealth of like Formula One races and yachts. And so on the one hand, you're kind of cultivating this image of this place where rich people come to party or whatever. And then you end up punishing the women who were like, I don't know, potentially trafficked there, you know? And then that leads to the second point, which is that like, it's interesting how QAnon is so insane, right, and alleging that the whole world is run by a cabal of child sex traffickers and the

like, I've been a bit worried that in the necessary pushback against that conspiracy theory, we not lose sight of the fact that there is a major human trafficking problem in the world, right? And often intersecting with the sex industry and often involving wealthy people, right? And And so this is, and I know you've been like the Q and on correspondent, it's just going to be very important that as we rightly point out the absurdity of the conspiracy theories about these things, we don't lose sight of the fact that, you know, there's gross stuff happening in lots of places. And this story is like, this story is one of the stories you read. And by the way, you feel, you know, I read like the Daily Mail story and I felt even bad.

just like seeing pictures of these women, like, you know, how many people in the world are looking at pictures of these women, you read and you're thinking, like, I'm seeing the tip of some iceberg here of like a trafficking operation or a sex porn industry operation. So I'm curious how, you know, like how do you separate out the vigilance against trafficking, particularly young women, against the absurdity of the conspiracy theory? That's going to be hard work, you know. That was my exact take, because you could see, like, the New York Post and all these places did, like, articles that were, like, designed to just gawk at the photos, right? And you can just feel there, this, like, subterranean element that goes deep into these

inequality questions and wealth and class and misogyny. And then you're right, like the Q&N people, when they got banned from all these social media platforms, they started co-opting other hashtags, like, Save the Children and started hosting Save Save the Children events because they figured you can't ban that, right? But, like, you're right, it's absolutely distracting away from, like, the core problem. Have you watched the HBO documentary about Q that's out now? No, I've been a bit, like, I have to. Like, it's one of the things I want to watch, but like I don't want to watch. I felt the same way. I mean, look, if I, like, there's six episodes,

so it was pretty long. There were times on like the second and third episode, right, where I felt like I had been brought down into a rabbit hole and was learning a ton about people that I just, my life would be better not really knowing about. But then at the end, I thought it delivered, not like not 100% an answer for who Q is, but a pretty damn good theory of the case. And it tied it all together with the insurrection and the broader like sickness of our media ecosystem and that in the MAGA world that I thought was actually a very important story. Yeah. No, I've had every time I've like dove into the Q&N stuff, I've been reticent and then always found it very worthwhile. Like there was a great Atlantic cover story. And I think it's

important to reckon with this as Americans that like Q&N comes up and you're like this is batch of fucking crazy like our country's lost his mind and then you're reminded that throughout American history they're frequently batched crazy conspiracy theories that that gain massive followings that last for years and not just like JFK assassination stuff but I mean belief systems right that are rooted in conspiracy theory that Q&ON is just like the latest

flavor of something that's been around so I think it is important for Americans to kind of wrestle with why we are so susceptible to these kinds of things, you know. Totally. Yeah. We are a country that loves conspiracy theories and it's been supercharged by, like, social media platforms and YouTube and everything. Okay, we're going to end with some quicker headlines about some important things that we wanted to make sure you guys knew about. So we've talked a bunch on the show about Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, an anti-corruption activist that Vladimir Putin tried to poison multiple times. So Navalny is currently serving a two and a half year sentence in a Russian penal colony.

He has been talking about his experience. He has horrible back pain. He has numbness in his legs. He has a high fever and cough. And he says that tuberculosis is spreading through the prison. So the health situation sounds really dire. Obviously, COVID is a big concern too. Navalny is now at least a week into a hunger strike to protest the conditions in the prison.

So, you know, a worrisome situation, Ben, about a case that had kind of fallen from the news. I think we should try to just talk about it. Yeah. And I, you know, does anybody doubt that Vladimir Putin, you know, having failed to kill Navalny with poison, might just kill him through like the steady mistreatment of like a grotesque penal colony in which illness is allowed to run ramp in? He's denied care and maybe he's like poisoned again. I mean, people should keep their eyes on this. And again, we talked about the amnesty decision to not make him a prisoner of conscience. I've seen some other commentary like, you know, pointing out like problematic statements and not in Navalny's past but like this is this human

being like tortured to death you know um for his beliefs and his beliefs are that the state should not be fundamentally corrupt and should be democratic like the eyes of the world should stay on this case um because i can guarantee you that if they drift um you know Putin has no compunction about killing him, you know, do whatever means he can. Yeah, including neglect. I mean, yeah, at front of the pod, Julia Yafi, great journalist, flagged for me the other day that two of the doctors who had treated Navalny back in August when he was poisoned have died and another quit his job.

This is scary shit. I mean, and this is, again, like, where I get, I mean, just to grind another axe here, like, the kind of, there's a left strain, right, that all the criticism of Putin is overblown and Russiagate and this guy's a terrible person. You know, like I don't, I don't understand get that. I just don't get in this zeal to like dunk on, I don't know what, like the Mueller investigation or something, we become apologists for Putin or we diminish, you know, what he's doing or the what aboutism about American prisons. Look, whatever your points of view, this is wrong. And it shouldn't happen. And people should call it out. Full stop.

Yeah, we should be able to hold two ideas in your head at once. It's not that hard. The other thing I want to point to, or two more, the BBC published evidence of a massacre by the Ethiopian military in the country's northern Tigray province. We've talked about this a few times since late last year, I think it was around November, October. There has been intense fighting between the Ethiopian government and members of the Tigray People's Liberation Front or TPLF, which is a resistance movement in this northern province. the conflict has just very quickly created a humanitarian disaster. Millions of Ethiopians have been displaced, thousands have been killed. So what the BBC did was they obtained video of Ethiopian troops, murdering prisoners, and then shoving their bodies off of a cliff, literally.

And so unfortunately, this evidence is probably just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the horrors of this war. Ben, are you seeing signs that there is enough of an international response to do anything to end the fighting, to seek some accountability. I don't know. I think I've asked you this exact question before because I'm just wondering when we'll hear more about this. You do sense this kind of like growing alarm from the EU and from the U.S. But I still think that you could see more in the sense that like this has a potential to, as we've talked about, spill over and refugees going into Sudan and conflicts kind of migrating to Somalia and instability.

in that whole region where Ethiopia was kind of an anchor. Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia, you know, places where conflict can really run out of control fast. So there's the need to kind of get this under control, the need to get humanitarian access. And Samantha Power has already been beating this drum even before she's gotten into the job of like, we've got to get humanitarian access into Tigray to just start trying to save lives. And in part because, humanitarian access is a check on fighting. If you get aid workers in there and the international community has a presence. But yeah, I'd like to see like just more sustained high level attention. We should talk on a future pod. The UN Security Council just feels totally absent

from everything that's happening in the world, whether it's Myanmar or Tigray. I get that China and Russia hold things up, but we got to find other ways to make the UN system work because back in the day, you would have had like a bunch of emergency meetings and pass some resolutions and put some pressure. That doesn't feel like it's happening. And if it's not going to happen there, like, then you're going to have to do it on your own. So I think this has been building. I think the Biden team has tried to prioritize this, but I do think you can't overstate the humanitarian and political and geopolitical necessity of focusing on this. And that video, you just can't look away from that. Well, you don't want to watch it, nor can you look away. It's horrifying. It's horrifying.

Yeah, it's horrifying. Yeah, I mean, the urgency is like literally intervention now to stop, you know, thousands more people from me. We don't want to, yeah, you don't even position in like 10 years where you're wondering how did it come to be that like a million people got killed in a multi-country conflict. And this was like the starting point, like this small thing and not small, but this seemingly smaller conflict in Tigray. Like it feels like we got to get our arms around this faster. Yeah, you mentioned Myanmar. So update there is that Aung San Suu Kyi, who is the duly elected leader of Myanmar, she was deposed by a military coup back in February. She and several of her ministers were charged with breaking the country's official secrets law. This could carry a prison sentence of up to 14 years. I also saw that the military's ordered internet service providers to shut down wireless broadband services. This comes on top of them shutting off the internet to people's phones every night. So it's really scary stuff. Also comes in the wake of just, you know, ongoing escalating violence against peaceful protesters in the midst of this general strike by huge swaths of the population. Ben, you know way more about Burma than I do, but I saw this New York Times piece and then

it was an episode of The Daily over, I think, a Monday that talked about just how separate the military is from the rest of society. Like soldiers don't marry into, yeah, like soldiers marry other soldiers' families. It seems like they barely communicate with civilians. I guess I just didn't realize that it almost had a sectarian dynamic that can feel, you know, zero sum for the people involved. Yeah. No, and this, I mean, like, it's such a strange dynamic because the military, it's almost, yeah, it's like a separate organism ruling the people. And Aung San Suu Kyi was always the emblem of the actual people. And part of her overwhelming support, you know, part of it was she's the daughter of the founding father of Myanmar, the man who led them to independence after World War II. Part of it is that she has

incredible charisma herself. But part of it is just that she was the only person emblem to put your hopes and aspirations into. You know, like she became the only alternative, really. And when she was under house arrest, she was kind of experiencing the same thing the whole country was experiencing, right? Everybody felt persecuted and traumatized by this military. And, you know, that's why, again, I just think the military, they have, there's no way in which they can co-opt public opinion. There's this kind of all or not, either they literally put the entire country essentially in prison or they're going to be finished. And that's the kind of the extent of the zero-sum dynamic. I do think it's also just worth noting that, like, you know,

she got a lot of criticism for not speaking out, obviously, about the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya, you know, deserved criticism. And, you know, we've talked about that. I wrote a long piece with Atlantic about this. I will say that her, she would always say, if I push too hard, there's going to be another coup. And a lot of people dismiss that as alarmist, you know, this in no way, shape, or form justifies for silence on Rohingya. No, of course. It's just to say that, like, She wasn't wrong about her criticisms of the military, I guess, is the point. And, you know, people should remember that. I think the military is playing a dangerous game.

If they, if anything happens to her, you know, there's already been a movement. I mean, the place will just blow, you know. And so, you know, this bear is watching too because she's old and, you know, not in the strongest health to begin with. So I just think Myanmar is not going to go away. This is not an issue because the people are not going to accept the military. So whether it becomes a failed state, whether it turns into some kind of civil war, whether there's kind of flare-ups of horrific massacres, like, unfortunately, tragically,

until this is sorted out, I think this is going to be on our radar screen. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. Finally, to conclude, Michael had, our fantastic producer, Michael Martinez, had recommended, we talk about a story about how there is an epidemic of dog napping in the United Kingdom. Apparently, dogs are hard to come by. You can't buy them. You can't adopt them because of the pandemic. Everyone dogged up, as we should.

And now criminals are stealing people's dogs and trying to sell them or extorting money from them. And I'll be honest, Ben, I couldn't really get through the article. Because, you know, if someone came up to me and said, give me your phone, give me your wallet, give me your keys to your car, I'd be like, pick it all. If someone came up to me and tried to take my dog, I think I would fight them to the death. And it would probably be my death, if we're being honest. Just like, come on, guys. Like, what the fuck?

We've, like, just think about what we've talked about. Like, can we just, can we not dog nap on top of that, you know? I mean. Can we steal anything else? Maybe not children. Yeah. Maybe not dogs. How about?

No living things. How about that? We'll just, you know. No living things. No living things. That's a good rule of thumb, even for the worst people on the planet. Just, you know, steal anything else. Hey, I got a good TV recommendation for you because we haven't done this in a while. There's a show on Netflix called Last Chance You. They usually follow a junior college football team.

The first two seasons were about football teams in various places. There were good seasons. The problem is the coaches were just some of the shittiest people like you've ever been around. The latest season is about basketball. And it's at a college, a community. community college in eastern LA. And it's this group of players in this coach who just like seems like one of the better humans, three coaches, who seemed like some of the better humans you'll ever meet. And it follows this team through this season where they're trying to compete for this sort of national junior college championship. And all these kids are like players that could have gone D1 or didn't have the grades or gotten some trouble or, you know what I mean,

or like needed that extra year. And it's just the most heartbreaking but also inspiring season of TV. I've seen it a long time, so I highly recommend it. Yeah, I don't know if I've done this on the pod, but the Bureau, like, I'm just totally obsessed at the Bureau. I know that's like a trendy thing now, but like if you want, it's a French show, but trust me, like you'll get past the subtitles quickly. This is like the best espionage show I've seen in years. And then, I mean, one plug, because I just got an email today from Friend of the Pod,

Patrick Radankeef, his book coming out about the Sackler family. I've not read it yet, but I can't wait to read that. I'm sure in the same way that everything that guy writes is about what he's writing about, but it's also about everything else. Like, the story of how this family got us all addicted to opioids and profited off of it and then used philanthropy and political donations to insulate itself, like is clearly a story about what's happened in America the last 20 years. So keep your eyes peeled for the release of that book. And I think it's next week. So I have zero sympathy for the Sackler family.

I hope they lose all their money and go to prison where appropriate. That said, could you imagine getting a call from Patrick Radden-Keefe saying, hey, I'm working on a big article about you or your family business? That's got to be the scariest fucking phone call that you're ever going to get. Because that guy is going to get to the bottom of what you're doing. You have no hope of hiding it. Yeah, it's like one of those 80s TV shows that has an Avenger, like, you know, the equalizer or something.

Like when the phone rings, like the gig is up, guys. you're fucked. Yeah. You know, him or Jane mayor, like, they're going to smoke you out, you know. Yeah, no, you have no, you have no shame. But I'll tell you, Tommy, as a New Yorker, like, what's gross is you go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, right? Which is, like, the big museum there. The fountains outside are named after the Koch brothers.

All the wings inside are, like, the Sackler wings. It's just kind of, like, awful that they basically try to buy off, like, social standing for their grossness, which I guess is an American tradition, I guess. The robber barons used to do that. But hopefully we can put some better names on those things. I totally agree with you there. Okay, we are going to take a quick break, and when we come back, we'll have my interview with Washington Post reporter Jobi Warwick about his new book called The Red Line,

which talks all about the effort to get serious chemical weapons the hell out of that country. So stick around for that. I am very excited to welcome Jobi Warwick to the show today. He's a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, reporter at the Washington Post and the author of the new book, Red Line, The Unraveling of Syria and America's Race to Destroy the Most Dangerous Arsenal in the World. Joby, great to talk to you again.

Awesome to be here, man. It has been a while. So I've been reading the book. It's fantastic. I feel like I was versed in a lot of these discussions and debates at the White House and, you know, obviously followed this stuff closely. I didn't know any of these stories about how the individuals or how these chemical weapons were actually disposed of. It's like the most complicated problem I could ever imagine. But let me start

at something broad, which is that I'm sure that almost every listener of this show knows about Obama's Syria redline, and they have heard the, you know, in many cases valid criticisms of his decision not to respond militarily to Assad's use of chemical weapons on his own people. I bet very few people listening know that in the wake of that debate about a U.S. military strike, the U.S., the Russians, the Syrians cut a deal to remove 1,300 tons of chemical weapons from Syria in the middle of a raging civil war. Why did you decide to tell this story? And why do you think that it kind got buried? Yeah, this is great. And actually, it's been a subject of frustration for me since, you know, way back when you were in the White House, because in 2011, 2012, I was covering

Arab Spring. And there were two red lines. There's the political one. There's the president's offhand comment, which was not a scripted moment. But if something, something he happened to say at a press conference that gets hung around his neck. But the other red line is the fact that of all the countries involved in Arab Spring, Syria is this place that has a real weapon of mass destruction, not a sort of false intelligence, but a serious WMD threat in the form of 1,300 tons of really bad stuff, sarin, VX, all the really bad nerve agents. And it's in a middle of a country that's being torn apart by a civil war.

And you can see in 2011, 2012, the country's in the region starting to freak out. about the possibility that some of those weapons would get stolen and go into the hands of some really bad guys like ISIS, which moves in next door. So that kind of becomes the origin of this other crisis of let's not just try to solve this Syrian conflict, which turns out to be an impossible thing, but let's figure out a way to get rid of this stuff before it hurts us all. Yeah, I mean, when you talk about like things that are debated in the White House situation room, when you ask a president who has to deal with every problem in the world to sort of rank in tier priorities, weapons of mass destruction are at the absolute top of the list. And I think even the

term WMB is colored by the George W. Bush experience. But can you help folks just understand what weapons were in Assad's chemical weapons arsenal and why they are sort of viewed so differently? Yeah. We know a lot about this problem because it turns out, and the very start of the book, is a story about a spy that the CIA had inside serious chemical weapons program. Chemical weapons are bad anyway because they're they're easy of compared to all the other WMDs. You don't need armies of physicists to build a chemical weapon. The science is well understood. And once you have them, once you have a few gallons of sarin, it's portable.

You can take it outside the country. You can use it somewhere else. So it becomes a much more sort of practical tool for a terrorist organization. And so, you know, we, you know, Obama was, you know, very mindful of the, of the intelligence debacle that preceded the Iraq war. But he also was very concerned about weapons and mass destruction. He made this one of the central themes, one of the things he wanted to address, to make a nuclear free world to eliminate this threat. So he was very, you know, very mindful of the fact that this threat existed in Syria. And of all the objectives the Americans had in addressing this

Syrian conflict, this was a key one, not just solving the conflict, but getting rid of a threat. And that animated him, that motivated him to try to find a way to not just, you know, force the red line, but to get Syria to give up the stockpaw that was so dangerous. Yeah. So you quote a senior member of the Dutch Navy in the book describing just a portion of Assad's arsenal in terms that I hope to never hear again, which was inside those containers is the death dose equivalent for 21 million people. I think that that was describing one-tenth of the arsenal that was eventually recovered. It was just a small amount that was being loaded on to a Danish ship to take it out to see to begin this destruction process.

which the book describes in some detail. But yeah, you can't, the lethality of these substances, there's some of the most deadly chemicals that were ever made. Sarin itself actually came out of a Nazi experiment program back in the 1930s. They were actually looking for new kinds of insecticides, and they stumbled upon this thing that, oh, yeah, it's really good at killing people, too. Think of Sarin as being compared to cyanide,

something we kind of know a little bit about. It's 26 times more deadly than science. So just a whiff of this stuff is lethal. It's cousin VX, which is another thing the Syrians had. You don't even need to breathe it. Just a little bit on your skin is enough to kill you. And so these things are so terrifying and so horrific to contemplate that you can understand why neighbors like Israel are starting to hand out gas masks and starting to give their citizens' chemical protection suits because they're worried that these chemicals are going to start coming their way.

Yeah. I mean, so there's a lot of echoes in Iraq in the book. You know, you talk about how when Obama was first deliberating whether or not to strike, there was a UN team in Syria looking for evidence of chemical weapons use. Several folks on Obama's national security team are quoted in the book saying that if that UN team hadn't been there and been at risk, that Obama probably would have struck almost right away. Can you explain what that UN mission was doing and how that impacted the deliberations over the way? whether or not to strike during those intense times. It's really fascinating because you have the situation in Syria where small amounts of chemical weapons are showing up on the battlefield. The Assad government is starting to use them in little pinprick attacks, almost as a test of theory. Can they use these weapons to break the back of the opposition?

They're running out of troops or running out of ammunition. We've got these chemical weapons that covered. Let's start to use them. So that stuff is going on. And the United Nations decides to send a team of inspectors into Syria to look on the ground to try to figure out if this is really, chemical weapons or is it something else who's using them. And this team is present in Damascus in August of 2013 when suddenly this horrific chemical weapons attack takes place in the service so close

that these inspectors can see it from their hotel rooms a few miles away. And so you have this moment where Obama is horrified. You know, he's had this red line statement, but more than that, just as a human being, witnessing the death of all these women and children from Sarin. It's just is horrific. And so he's motivated to try to do something about it. His entire national security establishment is saying, we're ready for a military strike. We think this is appropriate in this case. But there are things that stand in the way. And one of them is that the presence of these very UN inspectors who happen to be there right in the middle of this attack. And there's a worry that, first of all, they could be used as human shields. They might be used as hostages. Or just the fact

that you have fact fighters on the ground, how does a U.S. President send missiles in to the country when the UN is still gathering evidence to trying to make the case. So all this forces Obama to slow down a little bit. And then other things happen. The British were going to join us in a military strike. Their parliament takes a vote and says, no, thanks.

We don't have any part of this. And so America is suddenly almost on its own. You could see that the president being, you know, anguished about what to do and he decides this fateful decision to go to Congress and try to get Congress to back him up. And of course, they don't. Yeah.

And look, I was at the White House when Obama made that red line statement. I think I was like sitting right next to it in the briefing room. And I remember he made those comments because there was this intelligence that Assad might be about to use chemical weapons or maybe to disseminate it somewhere. In that warning, Obama's statement did deter the Syrians for a little bit, but not forever. I was not there for the later debates about a military strike, but I've read your book. And I watched at the time how Republican members of Congress refused to give Obama authorization, Democrats too. But then those same Republicans lavished praise on Trump when he launched a military strike later against.

Syria without authorization. And there is a part of me over the years that has thought, you know, with the benefit of hindsight that, you know, look, Obama should have just sort of done what Trump did, basically, right? You launch a bunch of missiles as sort of a symbolic response to show that the red line was an empty talk. But then I was reading your book. And you write about how Assad had loaded a bunch of military airplane hangers full of political prisoners in the hopes that the United States would kill them for him, basically. And it just made me realize all over again how unbelievably difficult and complicated

all these sets of options are. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's what occurred to me, too, as I was reporting this book. And I hope that's what I can convey to people that read it because it was an extremely difficult decision. It's not, you know,

what are your options when you're weighing a possible military strike? You want to punish Assad. You're not looking to decapitate. Nobody was talking about regime change. So you're talking about, you know, essentially, you know, making him feel some pain for what he's done. But, you know, the big question of what happens with these chemical weapons remains because you can't strike chemical weapons themselves.

If you try to do that, you're just going to spread them. You're going to create a deadly plume that's going to kill the very people that you're trying to save. And so the only option really is to do what Trump did years later, which is to wrap Assad's knuckles, to, you know, to knock out a few airfields and destroy a few of his airplanes. And when Trump did that, he got a lot of praise for it. The airplanes were flying the same day. The airports were repaired. It didn't really do any elastic damage. It didn't change his behavior.

But what Obama managed to do was to come up with this deal that allowed weapons inspectors to actually remove chemical weapons to remove the source of the problem. And that was painful for Assad. This was his most important weapon system. But it was also just, you know, made Syrian safer, made America safer to get rid of them. Yeah, it made the world safer. I mean, one just terrifying detail in the book that I didn't really know was just how close Islamist fighters came to actually getting their hands on chemical weapons in Syria. I mean, you write about how there was a Syrian military base that was overrun by, I don't know, assume Al-Nusra fighters, you know, sort of Al-Qaeda-linked fighters just after the CW had been cleared out. Another base was surrounded with its stockpile still there.

I mean, can you just sort of help people understand how close, you know, like serious, terrorist groups may or may not have gotten to getting their hands on these weapons? This was the nightmare scenario that people had been imagining and beginning. And the Islamists, the Al-Qaeda's and the ISIS folks were slow to get into the game because they didn't really start to become a major presence until late 2012 in the case of ISIS in 2013. But once they're in place and once they're seizing territory and knocking over military bases, it occurs to them, hey, we've got weapons of mass destruction out there.

Osama bin Laden said it's our religious duty to seize these weapons and to use them. And so what a tempting target? And that's why getting rid of the weapons become so urgent because there were these close calls. There were these moments when a base gets overrun right after the weapons have been removed. As you said, there's this base in eastern Syria that gets surrounded by an army of rebels. And inside is enough Sarin to fill a swimming pool. And you can just imagine what would have happened if trucks of Sarin would have been hauled across the Turkish border into Europe, showed up in a, you know, used in a soccer game or in a subway station, it would have been

not just a horrific calamity, but it would have forced the United States to get involved in a war. It would have been irresistible. We would have had to have responded militarily in Syria and perhaps involved in another Iraq type situation. It's certainly what the American officials were anticipating at the time. Yeah, the echoes of Iraq are just everywhere. So, right, I mean, there was the challenge of constructive. this diplomatic deal with the Syrians, the Russians, the U.S. to get access to this chemical weapons and get it out of the country. Then there was the whole separate problem of what do you do then? What do you do with 1,300 tons of the most deadly substances on the planet? Can you explain how

these specially constructed machines ended up destroying these chemicals and how it all ended up happening at sea? Because it's a really fascinating part of the book, the people in the bowels of the Pentagon, who were sort of handed this massive problem. Yeah, yeah, right. What do you do with 1,300 tons of chemical weapons? There is no place to take them. You can't, like, the Americans who aren't going to take them. The Russians didn't want them.

We had this moment in the book where Pentagon officials are literally traveling around the world, going to all these countries, hat and hands, saying, could you take this problem off our hands? We'll give you the equipment. We'll help you build a facility. You know, Albania will give you some money. You know, please do this for us. But there's nobody that wanted to take them.

Nobody wanted to get, you know, tons of chemical weapons coming into a major harbor. So the only solution left was to take this machine that the Pentagon had built as a contingency. I call it the Margarita machine because it's this big tinker toy-looking thing that uses high-pressure water and chemicals to neutralize sarin. And they built the machines and then with nowhere else to put them, they decided to put them in a boat and destroy the weapons at sea. And this is a terrible idea. Everybody knew this was a really, really dumb idea. because, you know, all kinds of things can happen in the water. You know, you get pipes and pumps being flexed by the movement of the ship.

If, you know, if the ship gets contaminated, it can never go to port. And, you know, what if the boat capsizes, which actually comes close to happening? And so, but it's the only solution that remained. So you have these brave guys, you know, from the bowels of the Pentagon, from obscure agencies that nobody ever heard of, you know, getting on the deck of this boat with these machines, with thousands of gallons of sarin sloshing, around and then destroying them one at a time, one barrel at a time, while getting chased by flotillas of activists who are searching for them while dealing with breakdowns and technical problems.

In the middle of the baking July, it's hot as hell, and they managed to get it done without mishap, without killing anybody. And it's this remarkable story. It's actually one of the most amazing feats of disarmament that have ever happened because all this takes place while a war is going on. And the people in the United States and the world didn't even know what was happening. Yeah. I mean, truly, truly heroic work.

Obviously, like sort of the eventual outcome is colored by the fact that, you know, I think the U.S. got out all of Assad's declared stockpile. And it seems like he clearly had some undeclared stockpile that he hung on to. And then he started using other, you know, non-designated chemical weapons like chlorine gas to, you know, kill the civilian population. So, you know, the horrors he was inflicting on his people continued. But, you know, it does seem like thanks to the work of this incredible team, like we dodged a massive bullet when it comes to access and availability to like sarin gas, VX gas, all these chemical agents. Yeah, exactly.

And there's not just the weapons are destroyed, but production equipment. Because inspectors on the ground go in, sometimes the sledgehammers, sometimes the bulldozers that literally crush the machines that were used by the Syrians to build the stuff to begin with. But yeah, it is ultimately, it's a mixed success because, you know, despite this victory, which is important, you know, Assad doesn't really learn his lesson. He continues to use chemical weapons, but he just switches to like a poor man substitute, which is chlorine, which is not forbidden. You're allowed to have chlorine. You use it to clean drinking water, using swimming pools. And so he just dumps that on villages instead. And in addition to that, it becomes clear later on that Assad didn't give up everything.

He keeps some of it aside. but his ability to make more of it is compromised. And so you see him using these dwindling stocks and later attacks, but there's no evidence he was ever able to make more. And again, the book is Red Line, the unraveling of Syria and America's race to destroy the most dangerous arsenal in the world. One last question for you.

Some people, you know, especially on the left, have questioned and criticized the OPCW for a report it issued that said that Assad used chemical weapons like Sarin, again in 2017 and 2018. These folks believe that this was a staged event by the Syrian opposition, presumably designed to get the West to retaliate militarily. I have no way to independently vet those allegations.

I completely respect and appreciate the need and desire to vet and, you know, scrutinize allegations like this that could lead to a war. But what do you make of those allegations and what do we know about these later instances of alleged chemical weapons abuse by Assad? It's mystifying. And I do feel there's quite a bit of, there's a counter narrative that's been developed that's really contrary to the facts as we know it. And it serves the interest of Russians and Syrians and others who have been on the bad side of this all along. There's no question. It's been well documented that the Syrians use chemical weapons multiple times. And, you know, the forensic evidence is there. We know it's there. But you see people pick at a couple of investigations and try to find fault

with some of the findings of the OPCW, this group in the Hague that investigates chemical weapons attacks. And I know this organization, I know the people that work at it, they're essentially scientists and accountants who go in and look at the evidence and try to draw conclusions based on evidence they have. And there's an international group. They're made up of people from around the world with high, you know, qualifications and degrees. And yet there's this effort to disparage them to define a small flaw or just a discrepancy that somehow disqualifies the whole endeavor and to make Assad look innocent, which seems absolutely crazy because there's overwhelming evidence that the guy is intentionally using

these horrible weapons to kill his own people. And so I defend him. It just is just crazy to me. but there's a lot of people out there who argue that. Yeah, it is really quite baffling. Last question for real this time. So, you know, we're a decade into, you know, the Syria conflict basically beginning. Just for folks who, you know, it's not in the headlines every day anymore, can you sort of describe where things are in terms of like, is the opposition able to hold territory still?

Does it seem like Assad is close to resuming control of the country? For all intents and purposes, Assad is one. He's reclaimed control of the major cities and most of the countryside. There's one enclave in the northwest, the city called Idlib, near the Syrian border, which is held by the opposition with Turkish support. And that continues to be kind of a frozen front, not much changes. And then there are Americans in the northeast and down to the southwest, southeast, rather, that we just have a small residual presence of a few hundred special forces guys,

some intelligence folks who just to make sure that the Iranian, essentially aren't causing any problems. But Assad has kind of won the day. At the same time, what does he want? He's got a pariah state that's falling apart. The economy is in free fall. It's military is shambles. It's not able to control the entire country. And nobody's, at least from the West, is going to come in and rebuild the place. So he really has a kind of an empty shell of a country. And that could lead to some hopeful developments because if things get desperate enough in Syria, maybe there's another window where a Biden team can figure out a way to end the conflict or at least figure out a way to help refugees return to their homes to give people some hope of rebuilding

their society because right now it's a pretty hopeless place and there's nothing worse in the world than a lawless, stateless, you know, province where really bad things can happen. And that's kind of what we have in parts of Syria right now. Yeah, I mean, look, it's a humanitarian catastrophe. The scope and scale of the suffering is just like, you know, unspeakable. And it's also the case, right, that if you have a completely porous border between Syria and Iraq, it's going to lead to continued instability there. So it does seem like a problem. There has to be some sort of broader diplomatic effort at some point, hopefully, that can try to,

I don't know, bring some stability around. I don't know what it would be. Yeah. By administration that really has its hands full right now with Iran and COVID and domestic issues and so many other things. But people are talking and that there's at least a ray of hope that something could change. That's good. Again, the book is Red Line, the Unraveling of Syria and America's race to destroy the most dangerous arsenal in the world. Listen, I worked in the White House. I did not know these stories. They're just incredible narratives about the people involved, the work they did, the improbable success that they had because they're incredibly brave and smart and ingenious. So thank you for doing the show. Thanks for writing the book, and everyone should check it out.

It's a lot of fun, man. Thank you. Thanks again to Joby for joining the show. Ben, you know, The other TV recommendation that came to me was from our friend Nick Shapiro, who actually worked at the CIA and Ben LaBoltz, they recommended this German spy show that's set in like the 80s. It's like sort of an East German, West German military or spy unit that's on Amazon. The name is escaping me. It's in German. It's subtitled. But it's also pretty good like SBNage story, if you're looking for that.

Oh, yeah. No, I'll check that out. I mean, I have to say I also toured through Ted Lassen in about two days. Oh, yeah. That's just a pleasant experience. Yeah, if you have any reservations, put those reservations aside, you know, just gorge. It's like a nice little happy sugar high amidst the darkness. Treat yourself.

Treat yourself. There you go. That's it for us this week. Watch Ted Lasso, and that's your homework, and we'll talk to you next week. See you. Potsave the World is a crooked media production. The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our associate producer is Jordan Waller.

It's mixed and edited by Andrew. through Chadwick. Kyle Segglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Yel Fried, Naram Elconian and Milo Kim, who film and share our episodes as videos each week.