Pod Save the World - Understanding the Syrian Civil War

Episode Date: April 10, 2017

Tommy and Middle East expert Colin Kahl discuss the Syrian civil war from when the protests first erupted in 2011 to President Trump’s cruise missile strike last week. They cover the roots of the conflict, Syria’s chemical weapons, Obama’s red line and Trump’s policy options going forward.

Welcome back to Pod Save the World. This is a special bonus episode. Later this week on the normal time, I'm going to release an interview with Senator Mark Warner, who is the vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. We're going to talk about what the committee does, the Russia investigation, and a lot of the issues around Chairman Nunez, you've been reading about in Trump's alleged ties and connections with Russia. But in addition to that, I wanted to talk about what happened in Syria last week, not just Trump's military strikes, but the evolution. of the crisis from 2001 until today. So I got on the phone earlier with Colin Kahl, who was a Middle East expert. He was Vice President Biden's national security advisor, and it was a Middle East expert at the Pentagon. And we talked through how we got here today, all the background, all the context. So I think you guys will appreciate it. It is a thoughtful, mostly nonpartisan look at a very, very challenging situation in Syria. With me today is Colin Kahl, who from October of 2014 to January 2017 was deputy assistant to the president and national security advisor to the vice president. And from February 2009 to December 2011, Colin was the deputy assistant secretary

defense for the Middle East at the Pentagon. So there are very few people with more experience in working the problem of Syria and the broader challenges in the region than Colin. He is now a professor at Georgetown University's Edmund A. Wall School of Foreign Service. So Colin, thank you so much. Welcome to the pod. It is great to have you. Great to be with you, Tommy. All right. So let's talk Syria. I think everyone is focused on President Trump's decision to launch this cruise missile attack last week.

But I was hoping to start where, closer to the beginning, the origins of the Syrian Civil War, because I think understanding how we got here is important to understanding what he did. So most people point to December 2010 as the origin of the broader Arab Spring. That was one of a Tunisian fruit vendor who had been humiliated by the police lit himself on fire in protest literally. And that self-immolation led to protests across Tunisia and across the region. The protests in Syria started in March of 2011 when some teenagers in the city of Dara who had spray-painted slogans on a school wall were arrested and tortured. Demonstrators took to the streets to protest their treatment. Government forces shot at them.

This led to more protests than calls for Assad to step down. So, Colin, initially, I think people were hopeful about these protests. Syria is very different from Egypt. but there was hope that Assad might be deposed in a popular uprising like Mubarak. And even at the time when the conflict dragged on, there were times when it seemed like the momentum was firmly against Assad. Do you think that without intervention of outside forces, Assad might have been gone today? Did you share optimism at the beginning of this civil war? Yeah, no, your leading is totally right.

You know, the protest started in mid-March. It was in the context, you know, against the backdrop of demonstrations across. the entire Arab world. You know, you had Tunisia and Egypt, like you mentioned, but, you know, in mid-March, you were also seeing uprisings in Libya. You were seeing protests in Yemen and Bahrain and elsewhere. And because the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt have been largely peaceful, I do think there was hope that basically other dictators could be pushed aside. And that was certainly, I think, the hope of a lot of us in the Obama administration at the outset of the uprisings in Syria. But that said, it got dark pretty early. I mean, as you mentioned,

you know, this kid, these kids, you know, spray paint, graffiti, and Dara, it sets off these protesters, there's violence right off the bat. I think Assad, you know, seeing what happened to Mubarak and seeing what happened in Tunisia was pretty dead set against it happening in Syria. And so he escalated to violence a lot earlier than a lot of the other leaders in the region. And it started in motion this kind of vicious cycle in which there'd be protests, then the regime would engage in violence, and the protesters would shift their demands from reform to regime change. The regime would engage in more violence, and it just kind of spiraled.

And by the summer, we were starting to see the early signs of an insurgency. Yeah. And one thing you hear a lot about when people are talking about Syria is sectarian violence or fighting between Sunnis and Shiites. Before the Syrian Civil War in 2011, the country was 60 percent, New Arabs, 12% Alawites, and then I think 9% Kurds, 9% Christians. The ruling class in Syria, including Assad and his top cronies and military aides, or Alawites who are basically Shiites. Can you talk a bit about how sectarianism has contributed to the war in the many ways it has led Syria

to become a proxy war? Yeah, it's a great question. Because, you know, initially, the demonstrations were not oriented around a sectarian motivation. There were folks from all different phases. who came out. You'll recall, you know, in the summer of 2011 August, in particular, that's when Obama calls for Assad to go, basically saying for the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for Assad to step aside. At the time, you know, Obama wasn't really calling for forceful regime change. Certainly wasn't saying the United States should impose it. But I think he was sharing the hope that a lot of us had, which would be that the regime would basically, you know, be pushed aside by this uprising that really had a nationalist character, not a sectarian one.

But as the violence got worse and worse, it really took on a sectarian dimension. And as you know, Assad and his family are from the Alawite minority in Syria, which is basically an offshoot of Shia Islam. But most of Syria's population are actually Sunni Arabs. There's also a sizable number of Kurds in northern Syria. But anyway, the Alawites, you know, have basically stuck by the regime, and as the kind of tit-for-tat cycle between the regime and protesters in the regime and rebels and insurgents went on and on,

Alloites basically clung to the regime out of a sense of security, that if the regime fell and Sunni Arabs took over, that there would be reprisals, retribution, kind of genocide against Alawites, basically. And so, you know, as we see in a lot of these conflicts, even if you kind of start out with a with a with a with a country that sees itself all as one people. Once the violence starts, it can descend into pretty nasty sectarianism pretty quickly. And that's that's certainly what happened in Syria. Yeah.

So, okay. So Syria spirals into this awful civil war, as you noted, in August of 2011, Obama and a number of European leaders said publicly that Assad has to go. It didn't take long for Washington and in the world, really, to start talking about ways to intervene, particularly how the U.S. could intervene. One thing you heard about a lot was that we should have armed the moderate opposition. Could you talk a little bit about what that entails and what some of the risks and challenges are inherent in that course of action? Sure. I mean, I think we should, you know, from the outset, Syria was kind of an environment in which a lot of external actors were involved.

Obviously, the Iranians had a lot of stake because they were allies with Assad and counted on a relationship with Syria to basically be a conduit for Iran to provide weapons to have. Hezbollah, the Saudis knowing how important Assad was to the Iranians, you know, poured weapons in. The Qatari's and the Turks did the same thing. The Russians had a lot involved at stake here because of their military equities in Syria. So I say all of that because from the very beginning, external actors were heavily involved in the Syrian civil war. And so the question really was for President Obama, especially starting in 2012, is whether, you know, the United States,

whether the administration should itself provide, you know, weapons to the Syrian opposition to encourage regime change. I wasn't, I wasn't, you know, privy to that debate. I had left the DOD by that time, but obviously there's lots of accounts of how, you know, people like CIA Director Petraeus and Hillary Clinton, who was Secretary of State at the time, were pushing for arming the rebels. I will say that, you know, during that debate and the debate about the opposition after 2012, Obama, you know, worried about the fact that we didn't really know who these guys are. I think for your listeners to keep in mind, a lot of our intelligence focused on Syria prior to the Arab Spring was understandably focused at the Syrian regime and the Syrian military because those who are who our adversaries were.

We didn't actually know a lot about a lot of the folks who ended up being the armed opposition in Syria. And Obama was, was afraid that if we, you know, dumped a bunch of weapons into the hands of groups, we didn't have a lot of confidence in. they would inevitably find their way into the hands of extremists, like al-Qaeda or the group that became known as the Islamic State. And proof of that was that when the Saudis, the Turks, the Qatari's and others dumped a bunch of weapons on the opposition, a lot of those weapons did find their hands their way into the hands of extremists.

So it was quite risky. I think the other thing that the president didn't really understand from, you know, as it related to those who were advocating for aiding the opposition, was exactly what their theory of the case was. I mean, everyone agreed that you couldn't provide so much assistance to the opposition that you led to the military defeat of the regime, because if you did that, then you'd kind of have Iraq 2003 or Libya, 2011, all over again. You'd create this vacuum that extremist groups like al-Qaeda would fill. So you didn't want to provide so much assistance that you led to the military defeat of the regime, which meant you had to just dial it up. You had to calibrate it, you know, incrementally escalate. And then the president would ask, okay, well, tell me, how do I I get Assad to step aside, given that Assad is, you know, for him to step aside, that's an existential decision. How do you get a guy to make an existential decision based on incremental escalation? It just didn't, it just didn't make any sense. So there was really kind of no theory

of victory. And I think Obama worried that it would just be pouring a lot of weapons into an environment in which everybody else was already pouring more weapons and escalate the conflict. And the last thing I would say is all of that said, it's actually a myth that Obama never helped the opposition. I mean, I think that debate has to be able to, I mean, I think that debate has a happened in 2012. But by 2013, you know, just look at the press reporting. The United States is pretty actively helping the opposition in Syria. So you know what? It hasn't actually proved all that effective. Yeah, that's a very good point and something that I think does get lost in this sometimes. So in one, you know, good example of how complicated it would be if the regime were to fall or if there

were to be a military defeat is the stockpile of chemical weapons that Assad had. Just a quick snapshot. I mean, we estimated that Assad had 1,300 metric tons of chemical weapons distributed. across 45 sites in Syria, which constituted the third largest stockpile in the world. Can you talk a bit about why chemical weapons are treated differently than normal weapons by the international community, why they're so dangerous and why we, you know, you've seen both Obama and now Trump talk about taking military action to deal with chemical weapons, even though there's a broader and much more costly in terms of the deaths of civilians, a conventional war going on in the backdrop?

Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, yeah, as you noted, Syria had something like 1,300 tons. I think that's on the order of like 10 times as many chemical weapons as Saddam Hussein was accused by the Bush administration of having before the Iraq War. So it was a huge stockpile. I mean, really, this goes back to, you know, World War I and the horrendous effects of chemical weapons during that war and the efforts through the Chemical Weapons Convention to outlaw these most barbaric of weapons. And I think, you know, the kind of the customary and formal laws of armed conflict

that have emerged over, you know, the centuries recognized that all war is hell, but try to put certain constraints on the most hellish forms of warfare and chemical weapons are right up there. And obviously, you know, they're lumped in with nuclear and biological weapons as weapons of mass destruction. And there are a lot of, you know, analysts who believe that they, that, you know, chemical weapons are nearly as bad as biological and nuclear weapons. weapons, but nevertheless, they're quite devastating. And, you know, you saw that with thousands of people gassed by Saddam Hussein. In the 1990s, you saw it in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq war when thousands of Iranians were gassed by Saddam Hussein. So these are brutal weapons. And I think

one of the things that, you know, Barack Obama and Donald Trump are very different people in almost every way. But I think they both recognize that it would be a very, it would be a much more dangerous world if we sent the signal that it was acceptable for countries to use these weapons and warfare. Yeah. And so that's a great sort of helpful explainer about why we got to this question of the red line. So in August of 2013, Obama first articulated the red line. I think the quote was, we have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also do other players on the ground that a red line for us as we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized, that would change my calculus. I was on the NSC at that point. I was in the briefing room that

day. And I think there's a couple things that people don't remember about that comment, which the first was we had intelligence that led us to believe that a chemical weapons attack could be imminent. And that comment was intended as a deterrent. The other thing that gets lost is the moving around part of the statement. The concern wasn't just that Assad would gas his own people. It was that he might give chemical weapons to terrorist groups like al-Qaeda or more likely Hezbollah to attack Israel or U.S. personnel in the region, et cetera. So I'm sorry, the red line comment was August of 2012, not 2013, because then in August of 2013, the Syrian military launched a chemical weapons attack on a rebel-controlled neighborhood near Damascus, and that killed approximately

1,500 civilians, including more than 400 kids. So this brings us to this whole debate about what to do. Obama reportedly received a series of options to respond militarily. You weren't in the government at the time, which hopefully means you can speak a little more freely about this than those who were. But can you talk about what kind of options he might have been able to consider to respond? Yeah, it's a great laydown, Tommy. And I mean, as you said, this really started a year before that attack in the summer of 2012 when Obama made that redline statement in the context of the intelligence that you pointed to. You actually get some small uses of chemical weapons in the spring of 2013, and that leads Obama to approve in mid-June doing more to help the Syrian

opposition. But yeah, I mean, the big kind of turning point for the president was that August 21st attack outside of Damascus to kill all those people and all those kids. And, you know, the president huddled with his NSC three days after that to review the intelligence and some of the options. And at least according to the reporting, you know, basically, you know, what he said was, quote, when I raised the issue of chemical weapons last summer, that is during the red line comment, this is what I was talking about. So, you know, immediately the president and authorized the Pentagon moving, putting together kind of target packages and moving five Aegis destroyers into the eastern Mediterranean to be positioned to launch Tomahawk cruise missiles

into Syrian air bases. I think it's important, though, for your listeners to recognize that the strike that Obama was contemplating was considerably larger than the one that we saw last week that the Trump administration initiated. It probably contemplated dozens of targets, a combination of air bases and regime command and control. And the idea was actually not to go after the chemical weapons because there was a lot of concerns about collateral damage if you blew up these kind of plumes of chemical weapons or that you could, you know, make the chemicals more prone to being stolen. There were a lot of reasons why you wouldn't go after the chemicals themselves. But what the administration thought was you could go after the regime's ability

to deliver those chemical weapons, you know, through the U.S. of their aircraft and their air bases. So it was really a pretty wide spectrum attack that was being considered. And frankly, Obama was primed to pull the trigger until the kind of rug got pulled out from under him when the British Parliament voted against joining the United States in the attack on August 29th. And that really left, frankly, Obama kind of on a political island, where this attack would have been seen as unilateral in many respects, and it wasn't authorized by the U.N. there was no authorization for the use of military force by Congress. And this is a president who really believed that past presidents, frankly, had been too keen to move forward without kind of the informed consent of the American people.

And so he decided against the advice of a lot of his a lot of his aides, frankly, to take the issue to Congress. And I think that's pretty telling because even though a lot of Republicans in Congress have been clamoring, demanding that Obama make sure that he go to Congress for permission, is going to go after Assad, in this context, they didn't want anything to do with it. And the calls were coming in kind of 100 to 1 in congressional offices against, you know, approving an attack on Syria. So, look, it left the president in a difficult position. I mean, fortunately, the Russians basically came forward with a proposal in early, the second week of September, I think, of 2013. And we negotiated an arrangement with them, whereby they put pressure on Assad to declare his chemical stockpiles and hand them all over for destruction. And I know a lot of Obama's critics basically

say, look, that guy was feckless. He didn't really, you know, he didn't really intend to strike Assad. But I think the Russians took him seriously, which is why they looked for a face-saving way out to get rid of all these weapons. And as you said, we ended up destroying about 1,300 tons. He clearly had a small residual stockpile left over because he used it to gas some of his own people on April 4th of this year. But the situation would be far worse. if he had that enormous stockpiles still laying around. You're listening to Pod Save the World. Stick around.

There's more great show coming your way. Bringing us to what happened last week, Trump launched 59 Tomahawk missiles at a Syrian air base that had been used to launch this chemical weapons attack. Now that the dust has settled a bit, we're hearing more about what the targets were that were hit. It sounds like they may have damaged or destroyed some planes. They didn't take the runway out of commission.

But the military options you described that Obama was considering, where we hit dozens of sites and took out the command and control of those aircraft, took out his ability to use CW or probably a lot of conventional weapons, seems like a lot more significant in terms of pure military impact, right? Yes, it would have been. I think the biggest difference between now and then is that there are now thousands of Russians crawling all over Assad's air bases all over Syria. So I think, you know, from the reporting, Secretary Mattis, the Secretary of Defense and

HR McMaster, Trump's national security advisor, basically presented them with two options. One, which would have looked very much like the Obama strike. In fact, given how fast they made the decision, it was less than three days between the attack and when the Tomahawk missiles were launched into that base in west central Syria, you know, they had to basically take Obama's plan off the shelf. And that was presented to Trump, and it was viewed basically as too risky because you'd end up killing a lot of Russians, and that could take you down a very dark path as it relates to escalation. And so they chose a kind of more limited proportional response to go after the one base that they launched these attacks from. And as you mentioned, they did

so even then they didn't destroy the whole base. They didn't destroy the runways. And they didn't go after the parts of the base where there were about 100 Russian forces there. They went after the other part of the base. They also gave the Russians about 90 minutes of warning to get out of the way. So they took, I think, smartly they took steps to limit escalation, but I think it really does speak to the dangers going forward, which is maybe something we can talk about, but some of the dangers going forward if they choose to take the next step, that is if Assad challenges them again, and they feel like they have to go the next step up the escalation ladder, things could get really quite tricky very quickly.

So getting us today into this strike, and I think the day after questions are what I think Obama wrestled with the most with respect to Syria, which is to say, you already have the Russians and the Syrians ramping up attacks on the same neighborhoods, the same civilians from the same bases. So was this attack designed to only deter chemical weapons use? Like, will there have to be another attack if they do that again? Are we going to intervene more? I mean, I guess my question is, you wrote this sobering piece in the Washington. posts about the worst case scenarios, which is a war with Russia. I'm wondering what your take is on what happened last week, and if you could walk us through, you know, some of the slippery slope arguments that are inherent in any action like this. Yeah, well, look, I mean, first of all, at the very least, what the Trump administration did was try to send a signal to Assad that he shouldn't fire off any more chemical weapons. Right. It's unclear whether, you know, that deterrent message will sink in. Maybe it will. Maybe it won't. But I, I, I, tell you that the Trump administration has been incredibly confusing about the degree to which their

objectives go beyond that. I mean, you know, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Nikki Haley, you know, said the other day that the purpose was actually to create pressure on Assad for regime change. And then on the same day, Tillerson, the Secretary of State, comes out and says, no, no, no, no, no, it was just about chemical weapons and nothing else as it relates to our posture, you know, toward the Syrian regime has changed. And then H.R. McMaster, the National Security Advisor, comes out and suggests that it's a mix of both, that it's about chemical weapons, but it's also about putting political pressure. And of course, just for your listeners to remember, five days before Assad's use of chemical weapons, both Tillerson and Haley had said that the United States was not

going to focus on Assad at all, so that we could just focus on ISIS. So it's not at all clear to me that if the purpose of this strike is to send a message, the question is, what is the message? and it's pretty murky. And meanwhile, you have all of these voices, you know, all of this pent-up demand for the United States to jump in to the war in Syria. You hear, you know, hawks in Congress people like Senator John McCain and Marco Rubio, who have already come out calling for Trump to do more airstrikes, impose no-fly zones, send more aid to the opposition. You hear voices inside Syria saying, we're glad that you struck Assad, but it's not. nearly enough. You have to do more. You have regional allies like Turkey who have long dreamed of dragging us into a war with Assad saying that the strike was insufficient and that we need to do

more with no fly zones, more strikes, et cetera. So the demand to do more is going to be pretty significant. And it's one of the things, frankly, that Obama worried about as it relates to, you know, kind of stepping on the slippery slope into this quagmire. But the stakes of doing that are pretty high. Because think about what the Trump administration just did. They basically said, we didn't want to do a big attack because I would kill a bunch of Russians. So we did a little attack, but maybe that signals to Assad and Russia that they're actually not willing to do a bigger attack. And if that's the case, maybe they won't be deterred. And maybe they poke and they prod and they test. And they do another thing that provokes Trump and challenges his manhood. And suddenly the political pressure,

grows again for him to take the next step. And he does do something that kills a bunch of Russians or he puts a no-fly zone over Syria that creates incidents between American and Russian planes. And suddenly you're in the thick of it with a nuclear armed power. So things that get very dangerous very quickly, which is I think one of the reasons why Obama was so reticent about going down this road. You're geeking out with me on POTSave the World. More on the Way. I think the people who have worked on this as closely as you have, I hear sympathy in your voice for President Trump because this is a really hard problem and a really tough set of decisions. And I think the now what questions. I mean, you have people talking about increasing

arming of the rebels, creating a humanitarian corridor to protect civilians, imposing a no-fly zone over Syria. These are big, heavy military footprint, some of them, policy options. I'm wondering, like, what do you think is the path forward here? Can you help us understand why some of these are so difficult, these options? Yeah, I mean, I think there, look, let's kind of think about the options that would directly go after Assad's capability to, you know, use his Air Force. You can either do standoff strikes, you know, a lot more Tomahawk missiles into a lot more bases.

The risk there is you're going to kill a bunch of Russians. You could also impose a no-fly zone over parts of northern or southern Syria. That could also produce incidents not only with the Syrian Air Force, but with the Russian Air Force, But even if it didn't, you'd have a lot of demands from the Pentagon where I worked to basically start by, you know, destroying all of serious air defense network so that our planes can fly around safely. And even if we didn't decide to do that, the Russians and Assad, once we declared a no-fly zone could start orienting their radars. And, you know, they have some of the most advanced air defense systems in the world, especially the Russians. In Syria, they could start painting our aircraft, which would create incentives for us to blow those. radars up, and you could get incidents. And then there's just the opportunity costs. Even if you

could avoid escalation somehow, there's an enormous opportunity cost. Keep in mind, we are already fighting a war in Syria. We're fighting a war against the Islamic State. And the Pentagon would always tell us, if you want to enforce a no-fly zone, you're talking about hundreds of aircraft. And every one of those aircraft policing the no-fly zone is an aircraft that can't be bombing the Islamic State. Every, you know, intelligence surveillance, and reconnaissance drone that we put over the no-fly zone is one we can't put over Raqa, you know, ISIS's capital in Syria. And if the Russians and Assad orient their air defenses in a way that make it riskier for our pilots to fly in northern Syria,

then that also complicates the counter-ISIS campaign. So it's not just the risks of escalation. It's also that, you know, I think the Trump administration has said, defeating ISIS is the wolf closest to the shed. Well, there's all sorts of ways in which expanding this war, against Assad could make that more difficult. So I am sympathetic to the conundrum that they're in. And I just think, you know, my experience in the Middle East is it's a lot easier to get into these things than to get out of them. Yeah, it seems like that would be the lesson of the Iraq war

that Washington would learn. But we haven't. Although, look, I mean, I don't want to sound glib. Like anybody who's worked on Syria, who worked in the Obama administration and foreign policy is doing a lot of soul searching and will probably will for a very long time about how we got to a place where hundreds of thousand people have died. There is just untold the amounts of human suffering that are just beyond belief. What do you think the international community can do to come together, to try to get to a political resolution in Syria, to try to help people who are suffering? If people are listening, is there anything they can do? Yeah, well, first, I mean, there's all sorts of charities that

work to provide humanitarian assistance. And people can do, can and should do that if, you know, they have it within their means. Look, I do think there's some things the Trump administration can and should do. For one thing, you know, Trump said he was basically convinced to do those missile strikes into Syria because of the images of all those dead kids. Well, guess what? There are thousands and thousands and thousands of other kids just like that who are trying to flee Syria, the same types of refugees that Trump is trying to block from coming into this country. The countries like Canada have so generously led in and that the Obama administration was trying to increase the number of Syrian refugees that could

get into this country. So instead of creating this phony security rationale for the travel ban and the refugee ban, you know, Trump could be, you know, a human being and a compassionate one and let these folks in. That's one thing he could do. The other thing he could do is not make proposals to slash the budgets of the State Department and USAID by a third, which will make it much more difficult for us to address humanitarian issues like this, not only in Syria, but in Africa and a whole bunch of other places. The very last point is, I do think they have a diplomatic opportunity this week. You know, Rex Tillerson gets on a plane tomorrow to head to Moscow for meetings on Wednesday, and they have a moment where this strike provides a little bit of leverage.

But what they have to have is a strategy and a plan to figure out if there's a diplomatic path forward that Russia can live with and they can get Assad to accept. And if they're not willing to go all the way to pressuring Assad to the brink of defeat, which I do not think that they are willing to do, then they are probably going to have to look for a face-saving way out. And maybe that means basically taking the facts on the ground in Syria now, where the country is kind of broken up into about half a dozen different segments that have the influence of certain opposition groups and external actors, trying to use that as a foundation for a ceasefire that's enforced by all the external parties, and then maybe driving to a political solution that doesn't

immediately remove Assad, but at least diffuses power away from Damascus and gives people in opposition areas a lot more control over their fate. Even that might not work, but I think that's the type of creative solutions they should be thinking about right now. Colin, I really wish you were still in government working on this stuff. Thank you for that very sobering, honest, nonpartisan take on what happened how we got here and what could be done moving forward. Man, I really appreciate it. And everyone should read your op-ad in the Washington Post. I'll tweet out the link later today because it was really a thoughtful explanation of all the risks involved here. Sure. Good to be with you.

All right. Thanks, buddy. Talk to you soon.