TRASHFUTURE - PREVIEW: Confedera-CIA of Dunces

Episode Date: December 20, 2019

Look, maybe we just needed a break. Maybe there's nothing particularly good to talk about politically in this moment of elected dictatorship. However, in this preview of the week's bonus, we talk about trash culture and the cult of super-smart drones, and as such we've reviewed the 2008 Ridley Scott film 'Body of Lies,' which is bad. Why does Leo DiCaprio dress like a podcaster? Why are there basically zero Arab actors in major roles in this film? Why is Russell Crowe such a weird Foghorn Leghorn ass guy? Listen to hear our takes on this, and much more. If you want to hear the full episode, get it here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/32498458

Given that we're tired of all of that, we've instead watched one of the worst yellow filter for the Middle East blue filter for America movies ever made in history. That's right. Ridley Scott's 2008 thriller based on a novel, Body of Lies. Please cue in the Black Hawk Down music here. It's a two hour long. It's own brand, Siriana. I was going to say that it's basically Siriana meets the Hurt Locker. But also with some really, the Hurt Locker was nothing if not like a masteratory exercise in

location shooting. And this film is hilarious in the sense that its Middle East location shooting is quite good, but it's everywhere else. Location shooting is ridiculous because as we learn in this episode goes on, both Manchester and Amsterdam are actually in Baltimore. My favorite part of that is something only I would notice and that in the Amsterdam scene, they literally have just an American firetruck that they've painted the stripes that Dutch fire trucks have on. Yo, yo, I grew up in Little Manchester, Baltimore. Oh, it's too many accents. No more.

So it's a two hour long divorce fantasy. Oh, it isn't ever two fucking hours long. Based on a fiction novel by NatSek Neocon. Crypto Spook. Crypto Spook, quote unquote, journalist David Ignatius. So we're just going to review the author a little bit first. Ignatius moved to wash. By the way, can we get a sound effect for when we're

certain that this guy is just a member of the CIA? Yeah, Ignatius was a monk-like scholar. Can we have a clip of like Pete Buttigieg saying something? Ignatius moved to Washington as a journalist for the Wall Street Journal, where he covered the Justice Department, the CIA, and the Senate. He was then sent to the Middle East. David Ignatius. Ignatius.

Sorry. I didn't connect the dots from your pronunciation, so I know the name. Yeah, David Ignatius. So Ignatius moved to Washington as a journalist for the Wall, he has the guy from Conspiracy of Dunces. Moved to Washington as a journalist for the Wall Street Journal, recovered the Justice Department, CIA, and the Senate. And Ignatius was the journal's Middle East correspondent from 1980 to 1983,

during which time he covered the wars in Lebanon and Iraq before returning to Washington in 84, becoming chief diplomatic correspondent. So just connect the dots here. You professionally cover the CIA in Washington, and then you get sent to the Middle East to hawkishly cover places where America desperately wants to intervene. I'm sure you have never, you know, joined that particular organization. And then write a bunch of spy thrillers.

Yeah, no, it's great. So in fact, I was just reading a little more about him. Most of the coverage of Ignatius's coverage of the CIA has been criticized as being always defensive and positive. So, one 42-year CIA veteran in Johns Hopkins professor said Ignatius, as called Ignatius, the quote, mainstream media's apologist for the CIA, citing as examples his criticism of the Obama administration

for investigating the CIA's role in the use of torture and his charitable defense of the agency's motivations for outsourcing such activities to private contractors. Awesome. It sounds cool. I love it when they privatize the CIA. Do you think the torturers were on zero-hours contracts? You get a text from your boss saying, yeah, we're going to need you in at one today.

Waterboarding brought to you by G4S. Yeah, they're all getting earned in income tax credits. It's great. They all are getting... What do you know what it is? They have to go and extract confessions from someone who went to an underprivileged university and is starting a business in...

They get paid by the confession. So, I also have a little snippet of one of his articles. Alice and I spent last night looking for some of these. This is from his article from 2014, how ISIS spread in the Middle East. And it's going to really inform, I think, how we watch the film. He starts his article in a fucking Gladwellian sense.

It is perfectly true, as the philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards, but they forget the other proposition that it must be lived forwards. This observation was made in 1843 by the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard at a journal entry, but it might have been written

about the contemporary Middle East. Shortly before he said, we must put the Muslims in special caps to teach them how to be Danish. Thanks, David. Yeah. The other thing I came across reading through his back catalogue,

well, there were two things. One thing was a weak apart two columns. One, in protecting the Kurds, score one for American democracy, and then a week later, Trump's betrayal of the Kurds is an outrage. But the other thing that I found is that he calls everything a sputnik moment.

That's his favorite thing. China using AI as a sputnik moment. China launching a submarine is a sputnik moment. He, yeah, it's great. Submarine is like the opposite of a satellite, though. No, not if you're a philosopher, warrior, monk, definitely not CIA agent David Ignatius. I can't believe we're doing Thucydides trap house.

Thucydides zoo. He goes on. Art of the Pelopelusian War. Isis is mysterious, in part because it is so many things at once. Wow. It's a spoon and a fork. The sport, the spork of terrorists.

It truly does slice and dice. It combines Islamic piety and reverence for the profit and his companions with modern social media platforms and encryption schemes. Is this a new tech startup? It's videos blend the raw pornographic violence of a snuff film with the pious chanting of religious warriors. The group has the discipline of a prison gang,

but he's just doing like film, Twitter shit, but for Isis for heading videos. He kind of is. He's like fucking like movie Bob, but for beheading videos. Okay. I've watched the latest Isis video. And to be honest, it's going to take me a few hours to take it all in.

But can I say, first of all, film of the year. Yeah. Release the Snyder cut of the Isis video. Directors cut. I like Frank Darabog script. It's better, yeah. But also the tactical subtlety and capacity for deception of the most skilled members

of Saddam Hussein's intelligence service. The story of Isis teaches the same basic lesson that emerges. Yeah. I wonder why they work. I wonder if you know anything about the fucking, all of these organizations they were talking about. The most skilled members of the Iraqi intelligence service,

which are just like six identical guys with identical mustaches. And the only things they know how to do is pull fingernails out of curds. Awesome. Three of them always tell the truth. Three of them always lie. Yeah.

Wow. I for one am really confused why people with this kind of skill set would suddenly be involved in terrorist organizations. Surely it has nothing to do with the fact that the United States invaded Iraq with the help from the British. And then decided, you know what we should do?

Fire everyone in the state security services and the military. Deep classification. Amazing. And now Paul Bremer is a ski instructor in Colorado. So. Yeah. Why not?

Yeah. The Americans had their own fingernail guys. They didn't need these Iraqi fingernail guys, you know, coming in and undercutting their American labor. Look, it was a private equity decision. It was McKenzie. That's what Mayor Pete was doing. Fuck.

That's exactly what Mayor Pete was doing. He was like firing all the people that went and joined ISIS. The shitty thing is. They were busting out like Jimmy Hoffa, like they had union, union fingernail pulling guys. This is Michael Moore as like people's history of the United States stuff. But it really must be galling to have been a Barthes guy

and have been trained by the CIA, to have been installed by the CIA, to have spent years pulling fingernails down of people for the CIA, and then to get fired by the CIA. Like that just sucks. Especially by Pete too. Oh, God.

They send this guy from regional and it's this guy flies in. The story of ISIS teaches the same basic lesson that emerged from America's other failures in the Middle East over the last decade. Attempts by the United States or Islamist rebels to topple authoritarian regimes in Iraq, Libya, and now Syria create power vacuums. The empty political space will be filled by extremists,

which again, that's right. Everything up there in that paragraph is right. Nobody could have predicted that aside from everyone on the left. There's a thing. This empty political space will be filled by extremists. We could have ended the sentence there and it would have been correct. But because this is an article written in the Atlantic

by a crypto spook, he doesn't end the article there. He says, we fill by extremists unless the United States and its allies build strong local forces that can suppress terrorist groups and warlords both. You love it. Oh, we're going to get into this with the plot of the actual movie. We just need to build Iraq, Pinochet. You know, just like the guy we removed.

Oh, fuck me. Yeah, my logo. If we release this mongoose to catch the snakes that we release, then we'll be fine. And then if the mongoose gets out of hand, we can release these wild dogs. Until eventually we just have to release, you know, a foghorn Maximus to go and like bust some fingers in the area.

Eventually we have to release the 2007 John Travolta film, Wild Hawks. So later on in this 10,000 word dog turd of an article that I had to read for all of you people he discusses. He's like Friedman, but somehow more malicious. Like Friedman is just like, the Arab street, I saw a billboard and I think that's good. And there's nice and you can play golf and fucking Tehran now.

Whereas this guy is just, it's the same aesthetic, but for, no, we have to have a friendly blood dripping torturer instead. Yeah, well that and also quoting fucking like undergrad level philosophy at the outset. So he says, because of the disorganization of the opposition and the sectarian character of Syrian society, the civil war got nastier after 2011. Inevitably, very nasty war.

Syrian exercise didn't have a sectarian character. Sorry, Ignatius is a stupidity. He's breaking out. Like, yeah, not to go full Rania Khalek, right? Like not everybody was holding hands in a multicultural state before the Arab Spring, right? But a large part of why the then Syrian Democratic forces and the Free Syrian Army and all of that became a collection

of Islamist militias is the United States and its allies, training and funding and equipping a lot of the worst people in the country. Oh, Ignatius has a point about that, Alice. Oh, please. Inevitably, the opposition became more Sunni and proto-Jihadist. And in 2012, I traveled. Inevitably, the passive voice occurred. And there was an officer involved shooting.

I traveled, yeah, there was a CIA-involved bombing. I traveled inside the country for two days with the help of the Free Syrian Army and came to the basic conclusion that absence, U.S. training and assistance, the moderate opposition, these problems would only get worse. You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to understand why Assad allows ISIS to put down roots. He needed a threat to show the West why his regime's survival mattered. He needed to demonstrate that there was a worse Syrian face than his own, that of al-Baghdadi, ISIS's leader.

And if you are a conspiracy theorist, you would also note the strong intelligence connections that develop between the Syrian muqabarat and al-Qaeda in Iraq during the Zarkawi days. You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to work here, but it helps. So the end of his article is, what if Assad actually did ISIS and America has to get way more involved? Yeah, what if al-Baghdadi was just Bashar al-Assad, but with a fake beard? Like, we don't know.

Oh, it's like the prestige. Yeah, you disguised that neck. You couldn't recognize Assad. I mean, you do realize that, I mean, just as a detail, as a slight, slight detail, that Abu Musab al-Zarkawi was from Syria, and a number of people in his organization were Syrians. And even a larger number of those people got put in prison because they got arrested by the Syrian security services during the,

you know, the worst part of the Iraq civil war. Guess what happened when the Syrian civil war kicked off? Al-Zi, do you know this answer? You probably do, right? Yeah, they, um... Bashar al-Assad released all of them. Yeah. All, he was like, have fun, guys.

Get the fuck out of the, you know, army-held areas. And they went back to doing what they were doing in 2006, 2007, which is terrorism, a lot of it. Being the subject for excellent film, basically. Funnily enough, he never bothered to release any of his other bet-noir, which was like anyone who possibly might have flirted with anything to the left of, like, democratic socialism. Like, Tadmah prison was like half-and-half Islamist and suspected communist.

And one half got released and the other half did not. Damn. Well, I mean, Bashar al-Assad, or as I call him, war crimes, Mr. Bean. I think he could only really have been capable of doing ISIS if the Americans had been helping him. So if that's what the guy's copping to here, I'd be very interested to hear it. So it's exactly the kind of insane project that a CIA guy would come up with,

like, what if we get Assad to make ISIS? And then we oppose ISIS and Assad. And it's the same kind of project that he writes into what becomes this fucking movie. Because I've got to be honest with you, people that I know that spent a lot of time in Iraq said that people, you know, the media perception, the cultural perception, these are two distinct things. But basically, after Zarkawi was killed in 2006,

like, the remnants of what his organization was, those people are ISIS. Like, that mentality, that thought process, the philosophy they approached towards, you know, the way they did business. That's all ISIS. Never really ended. It started with the US invasion of Iraq. And it got formulated to the point where they basically wore out their welcome in the Sunni areas of Iraq because they did so much killing and terrorism. But that same organization basically became ISIS.

So it's safe to say that when people talk through this thing, as though it just like, it spawned like fucking Uruk-hai getting dug out of the earth, they're omitting the fact that so much of this owes to what happened post invasion and also the fact that quite frankly, this organization has been far more contiguous than people want to put it out to be. They want ISIS to be this new unbelievable thing. But like, if you look at what was happening under al-Qaeda and Mesopotamia, like, it's no different than ISIS.

Well, like, for instance, every Syrian war take that's like, oh, well, ISIS are fighting against al-Qaeda. And I'm like, well, yes, it's sort of in that narrow sense, but that doesn't mean that there's not overlap and that people don't move between those. Yeah, because AQI was never really a formal al-Qaeda organization. And like, it's way more complicated than that. The Lib Dems come out in support of al-Qaeda because we have to stand against al-Qaeda, ISIS. Look, all I'm saying is, if we're out of the EU, we have to join something

and it may as well be Hayat Ter-Rashan. Lib Dems winning in Raqqa. Anyway, Ignatius's policy recommendation towards the end of the article is that the US go into Syria with force, quote, unquote, negotiate a political transition with Assad, to have a moderate pro-western government where, yeah, like, Milo, you got it right, Syrian Pinochet. I mean, the funny thing is that pretty much his exact prescription

is what Russia did successfully. Yeah, basically. Anyway, he's absolutely not a CIA guy. No, sir. I just love the idea that there is a guy in Russia just reading the Atlantic and being like, yeah, that's a pretty good idea. Just do that. I feel like Russia, the CIA is like the kid with very conscientious parents

who won't let it do all this really irresponsible stuff as like a child. And then Russia is like the kid whose parents are like alcoholics and just let it do whatever. So it seems really cool at the time, but it's just going to grow up to be just horrendous. You've almost got it right. I think the CIA kid is the very prim and proper Harvard educated person, but who definitely still just spends weekends torturing small animals.

Can we talk about this film and the film's most incongruous plot point, which is, do you really think that anybody who works for the CIA would be some like hayseed from North Carolina? Well, let's introduce the film and introduce our characters, shall we? I know G hottest boy, I'm a rusa. Colonel Sanders of the CIA as I live and breathe. Let's talk movie, Nate. You're right.

We've done sort of dithering for too long. I don't want to. It was a bad movie.