 Welcome to season three, episode two of CN Live. Tonight, the Arabs bring 10 years on. I'm Joe Lauria, the editor-in-chief of Consortium News. 10 years ago in these months, the Middle East was convulsed by a series of rebellions that started out with great hope for the region. A decade later, those lofty aspirations for the people of Arab nations to finally overturn tyranny and place power in their own hands has all but been dashed. What happened? The threat of democracies breaking out around their monarchies was dire for the Gulf Arab states. The U.S.-led West adept at using rhetoric about democracy to hide hidden motives, intervene to secure its interests and to try to kill off the remnants of Nazism in the region. With us to discuss this historic decade of turmoil are Assad Abu Khalil, a professor of political science at California State University and a consortium news columnist. Joining us in the second half of the program will be Anel Shiline, a research fellow in the Middle East program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Assad, we start with you. Thank you for coming on. Thank you. Are you on? No, no, I'm ready. Do you want me to respond? I could hear you. Okay. Now, you will when I ask you the first question. Assad, 10 years ago I was in several countries in the region in the early months of 2011 and I found a real sense at the beginning at least that these were extraordinary and really genuine uprisings that took governments in the region and the West by surprise. In Beirut, I interviewed George Korm, the former finance minister, who I'm certain that you know, he was beyond enthused about what he was seeing. Before the Gulf States and the US led West intervened, I want to know if you shared the same view that at the start at least these were organic protests that held out great hope. There's no question about it, Joe, that these uprisings began in a way as a refutation of longstanding Western myth and assumptions about the Arab people, that they have a propensity to authoritarianism and autocracy, that the despots of the Middle East rule not by virtue of sheer force and Western sponsorship, but by the fact that people over there enjoy repression. The second assumption was that the region is static, that things will remain unchanging forever and that people of the region are doomed to living under autocracy. And of course, all these myths were shattered very quickly. And what is significant about that, it also revealed Western hypocrisy because as soon as the uprising erupted, the United States, Israel, as well as Gulf despots who basically run the regional order rushed immediately to take control of the situation and to prevent it from going out of hand. And they did that in a variety of ways. They did that by force. I mean, the United States, the Obama administration clearly supported the Mubarak regime when he first resorted to force against protesters. People may not remember this, but I do remember the State Department spokesperson of the Obama administration condemning protesters in Egypt. He called on them not to resort to violence even though they were peaceful protesters. The United States administration supported as well the violent campaign in Bahrain when Saudi Arabia and UAE invaded Bahrain to crush a very popular rebellion. They also supported a very corrupt transition of power in Yemen in order to keep the regime and not to change it. And in Libya, as we know, the United States took advantage of the United Nations Security Council in order to invoke international law for the sake of an invasion of the country and the overthrow of the regime. And the Libyan people are still suffering today from that miscalculation by the Obama or the actual calculation of the Obama administration. I mean, to them, it was preferable to allowing the Libyan people to settle the scores themselves and they wanted to intervene in order to set their own place. But what is significant about the events at the time is that within a couple of years, the United States, Israel, and Gulf despots organized what can be referred to as counter-revolutionary movement. I mean, they basically quickly moved in to do two things. The first one they did is to use force when it can settle the uprising and can crush it before it spreads. And they did that in Jordan. People don't remember that. They did that in Bahrain. They did that in Yemen to some degree. And they did that as well in Tunisia. The United States administration of Obama wanted to allow the dictator of Tunisia to last. But I mean, it is only when it became impossible for them to continue to support the regime when it became very clear that the people are not going to accept the continuation of the regime. That's when the Obama administration, without any courage, said, okay, we ask the leader to step out of power. The second thing they did, I mean, in addition to allowing force to be used against protesters, is that they basically, whatever there are elections in places like Lebanon and Tunisia, these are the two places where there are actual elections there, the United States and its allies intervene directly in order to spoil the results of the election and in order to achieve preferential candidate. I mean, they did that in elections in Tunisia very clearly. United Arab Emirates was a very key player. And the United Arab Emirates has become the praetorian guard of the Arab regional order. I mean, it is doing now the dirty work along with Israel in the region in order to do the bidding for the United States. So the United States has two ways of imposing its rule in the region. The first one is by direct projection of power throughout the Middle East. U.S. troops are available in most countries of the region today. And the second one is to allow the UAE or Israel and or Saudi Arabia to intervene to intervene in a variety of places to crush democratic spirits, wherever it erupts. And that's exactly what happened and that was the eulogy of the Arab uprising. Oh, I see. Well, what were they afraid of? I'm sorry, they're afraid of democracy? Exactly. I mean, they're afraid of democracy. I mean, democracy in the Middle East. I mean, I understand it. Democracy in the Middle East is extremely terrifying for the United States, for Israel. I mean, look, for example, as people are still celebrating the so-called Abraham Accords, right? I mean, the fact that there are, I mean, I saw the other day somebody was bragging, and in David Miller, former State Department official, dealing with the so-called peace process. And he was saying, it is amazing that more than half of the population of the Arab world now live under government that signed peace treaties with Israel. And my correction to that was, yes, they do, but against their will. Peace treaties have only in the Middle East been signed by tyrannical regimes. In Egypt, after 2010, when the people had the freedom, what was the first thing they did? They stormed the Israeli embassy. I mean, they were about to set it on fire and they were about to get their hands on the Mossad agent who was sequestered inside the building. And the United States directly threatened the military staff of the Egyptian armed forces and they told them there would be serious repercussions if they don't rescue them. And that's what happened. They dressed them as Egyptian, they took them out, they whisked them out. And then, of course, we know what happened. United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia arranged for the reversal of the democratic trend in Egypt and put General Sisi in power, who now enjoys support by the Biden administration, just as he did by Obama and Trump before him. So also they're afraid of, it seems, of secular rulers that don't obey the United States, that want to go their own way. Of course, thinking of Gaddafi and Assad, they have no problem with secularism because, as you point out, Sisi was put in there because he obeys. I mean, that's a good observation, Joe. I mean, it's fair to say, in the contemporary history of the Middle East, certainly since I was a boy, the United States always sided against the forces of feminism, progressiveness, leftism, Arab socialism, and all movement that wanted to nationalize oil resources and to basically have national economies and defend against Western military and political intervention. And of course, the Syrian regime is a tyrannical regime and all that, but the United States has always found it much easier to deal with Islamist oriented regimes. And the most significant part of that is after the Muslim brother came into power in Egypt, even though they came through the ballot box, the Obama administration didn't have any problem with them provided, they did not have any say in foreign policy or defense policy that was left entirely in the hand of the U.S. controlled military staff of the Egyptian armed forces. And foreign policy, as far as the Israeli peace treaty is concerned, was absolutely untouched. People's representative do not have to say, look at Iraq today. The people of Iraq, through their elected representative, decided in the early Trump administration, they want, after the assassination of General Soleimani in Iraq, they wanted the expulsion of U.S. troops. What did the administration do? They ignored that. They don't care about public opinion. Public opinion remains stubborn against Israeli and American hegemony in the Middle East. And for that reason, preferable to democracy is tyrannical rule, which has been set in with a very clear public Western support since after the Second World War. Assad, I want to go through each country in a lightning round because I know you have to leave us in about 20 minutes. So if you could be extremely concise on issues that we could spend an hour on each one of these countries, let's start with Tunisia, where this began. Do you, did you see that Ben Ali's rule, his 24-year rule, that there were sufficient weaknesses for him to be overthrown? Well, Ben Ali's rule was certainly fraught with massive corruption. And he had a very heavy-handed apparatus of intelligence and secret police that really made like breathing difficult for the Tunisian people. And yet, while the regime was so detested by the people of the country, it was hailed as an exemplary model of rule throughout the Middle East, not only by the United States, by your Western lending institutions. You can go on YouTube and find directors of IMF in the World Bank showering praise on Tunisia. You will even find the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, which basically judges governance, good governance in the whole continent of Africa. They gave a price to the Tunisian rule. I mean, basically they want rulers who are obedient to the United States and who can do a good job effectively of crushing any sentiments that are encountered to American and Israeli interests. And Ben Ali has done that quite well. What is significant about the Ben Ali, because this was the precursor of all the uprising that came later, is that revelation from WikiLeaks, and we have to salute Assange in that regard, and the entire institution of WikiLeaks, the revelation in WikiLeaks about the massive corruption, nepotism of the Ben Ali regime was really eye-opening to the people of Tunisia. I mean, they knew it was bad, but they did not know the scale. And once the information became available to them, it basically opened the doors for this popular uprising that swept Tunisia and later triggered the uprising throughout the region. WikiLeaks is certainly to be noted for that regard. And it's for good reason, Joe, right? It is for good reason that Assange remains a victim of oppression by the entire Western order, right? They knew what they're doing. That's just one reason of many. You're right. So were you surprised that this spread across the region? Do you think Tunisia would be isolated? Absolutely not. And for a simple reason, it is because for many decades, I mean, really decades to remind myself how old I am now, 61, I have been arguing against all the Western Orientalists who have been declaring in foreign affairs and foreign policy for many years that Arab nationalism is dead. And I have been maintaining against all of these generalizations that there is a pan-Arab sentiment since still alive in the region, that the people of the region still rally around the same issue and the same themes, Palestine, good rule, the right of people to be free, opposition to Israeli occupation and aggression in the region, opposition to American wars and so on. All these things, and of course, culture and music, all these things are shared in common with the people of the region. They share the same language. They share much more than members of the European Union. But the United States, since the Second World War and all Western orders, have consistently opposed all manifestation of Arab nationalism and unity. It is for that reason, they opposed Nasser and they launched so many wars against Nasser. I'm glad you mentioned it. Yeah, there's another myth that I kept hearing all the time and I still hear the US is no longer engaged in the region. I don't know what they expect them to do after an invasion in 2003 and their interventions and all these. Elizabeth has a question, but just to top off, Tunisia, what is the situation there today? There was an election and it's held up as one of the few regimes, one of the few countries that actually democratizes. Is that true? It is one of the few ones that really democratize along with Lebanon despite all the problems that are marring Lebanon's life. I think what is happening to me today is a counter-revolution happening again. The United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and certainly the West are trying to sabotage the regime because there is a president who is freely elected who spoke out against normalization with Israel and they don't like another party. They want to bring up the Ancien regime and they are trying very hard. I mean, if you look at Saudi newspapers in the last several weeks, there is an unrelenting campaign against the rule of the elected representative of Tunisia. Clearly, there is something in the off and they're planning some dirty things there. You already answered Elizabeth's question about WikiLeaks, but she has at least one other for you. Definitely. So the influence of these rebellions seemed to spread beyond the region. For instance, in what way were the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street movements related in your opinion? I mean, I think there is a relation to that, which is people are realizing people's power, that the ability of taking to the street in order to press for direct change. And because one of the problems with social media, it gives you this virtual idea of protest that if you sit on your couch and you tweet and you write post on Facebook or Instagram, that it is sufficient to bring about the downfall of regime. I think the lesson of that are surprising that it takes much more than that. I mean, social media can be extremely useful. I mean, Clubhouse now is extremely popular in the Middle East because it is yet, I mean, it is as of now, extremely free of the intrusion of the security services. I'm sure they're going to take it over very soon. But while there is freedom now, they are using it in order to publicize and articulate views against normalization with Israel because regime don't allow that in the press. So I think the idea of we can use social media to organize, but there is no alternative to going down to the street to dirty your hand, to make it very clear that you don't want the regime to continue. But now, you have to suffer a very heavy price. The ability of the regime with Western support to use lethal force has been tolerated. It has been made look what's happening in Yemen. I mean, there is now a serious threat of famine in Yemen. All these liberals who used to criticize Trump during the Trump administration, all of them are silent. Not only that, they are complicit now. They are accomplices of the war crimes happening in Yemen. The Biden administration has blood on its hand. Okay. One more question about Egypt, then I'll go to Yemen. Let's skip Egypt. I'm going to ask you about Yemen. Jamal Ben-Omar, who was the last, was a UN envoy to Yemen. He told me that he had a deal in place with the Houthis. They were going to share power in parliament. They were even going to allow 30% women in parliament. And the only thing that was left was the powers of the president. Hadi, of course, who was deposed, who was in exile in Saudi Arabia, refused and the Saudis bombed. They began the bombing. He believed that the beginning of this war in Yemen was because this peace deal was too close to being sealed and that Saudi Arabia would never tolerate a democracy in our southern border. Tell us about the origins of the Yemen crisis and where are we at now? And do you see any possibility of a peaceful solution to this? Now, the American Democrats have, because of the killing of the Washington Post columnist, puts some pressure on Saudi Arabia, but is that enough? No, it's not enough at all. And the United States has been absolutely cuddling the Saudi administration. I mean, if you read the Arabic press, this doesn't get covered in the Western press. In the Arabic press, Obama officials, especially in the Defense Department and the State Department, have been showering praise on the Saudi regime. I mean, Saudi newspaper stages are filled with conversations, statements, and interviews with various Biden officials in which they express solidarity with the Saudi regime and the security of the kingdom, as if the security of the kingdom is under attack and not the livelihood of the people of Yemen. This is something the American people are missing. And I think that those who expected the Biden administration to fulfill the pledges he made while he was running. I mean, let us remember he said that there is no redeeming quality to the crown prince. He said that Saudi Arabia is a pariah. All these statements have been discarded. And what we see instead, the Secretary of Defense is now in regular consultation with the crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, the man responsible for the murder of Khashoggi. And yet the Biden administration came up with a formula where basically they said, I mean, it's totally contradictory that Mohammed bin Salman is responsible for the murder, but we will punish everybody except the crown prince for the murder. And that's what they did, in fact. As far as Yemen is concerned, since the 1950s, Saudi Arabia treated Yemen as its appendage at its backyard. It doesn't allow its people to be free. And let us remember there was a very long protracted war in Yemen for much of the 1960s. And Nasser and the progressive movements in the region were supporting the Republican progressive leftist movements there, while the West and Saudi Arabia and Israel were all conspiring to support the most reactionary, the most straight wing, anti-enlightenment, obscurantist movement of the monarchist forces in Yemen. And they wanted to use that war at the time in order to exhaust and fatigue the Nasser's regime so that when the war with Israel comes, he will not be prepared. Something similar is happening with this war. And Joe, it is the same constellation of forces just like the 1960s, right? You have the Gulf regimes, you have Israel in the West on the one side, and then you have the people wanting to be free on the other hand. Say what you want about the Hussis, but they put out one of the most exemplary fight guerrilla warfare against a brutal assault not only by Saudi Arabia, but UAE and the Western support. And I mean, I'm not a fan of the slogans of the Hussis or their program and so on, but this war has been without a doubt instigated by Saudi Arabia, continued by Saudi Arabia. And suddenly, after some very mild pressure by the Biden administration, they came up with a peace plan. One of the elements of the peace plan they put out, I mean, I read it in the Saudi press, they said, we will allow food shipments to arrive into Kordeda airport. Imagine, I mean, Kordeda port, I'm sorry, they are admitting that they have been denying food to the people of Yemen. As we all know, Yemen is the biggest international humanitarian crisis in the world today, according to the United Nations. And now there's a danger of famine. And all that is happening while the bombs keep falling. And there's a puppet who was installed by the Saudi regime sitting in the yard claiming to speak for the people of Yemen. He has as much representativeness as the guy in Europe who is claiming to represent the people of Romania because his ancestors were monarchs in Romania. Yugoslavia has one of those, too. Of course. Listen, Libya, let's go quickly to Libya and Syria. And then Elizabeth wants to ask you about Ukraine. Libya was a showcase for this responsibility to protect R2P. The Security Council passed a resolution allowing an O-fly Russia under Medvedev did not abstain on that. Something that is a very sensitive topic for Russians. I asked a Russian diplomat about this at a cocktail party. Why did you not defeat that resolution knowing that the US would use this as a cover to overthrow the government, which is what happened, of course, and they weren't supposed to do that. And he actually dropped his glass on the ground and walked away. So this is something Russia regrets, I think. And the real motives. What are the real motives of NATO in Libya? We could talk two hours on this. There's Sarkozy's involvement there and he was a big proponent and mover of this. And Blair was involved and he went secretly to see Gaddafi before. Plus, Gaddafi had already given up his whatever WMD he had and was trying to cozy up to the West. Why did they use this opportunity to look like they were supporting a popular uprising to actually implement their own interests? And on a lie, by the way, I need to mention a parliamentary report several years later in Britain showed that there was no impending genocide in Benghazi or anywhere else. It was an absolute lie. Look, the Khazafi regime was not an exemplary regime whatsoever, but it was doing very well with the Obama administration. I mean, we know that Hillary Clinton invited the State Department, the head of the secret police, who happened to be the son of Khazafi at the time. But they thought it was too tempting for the Obama administration for the United States to get in yet again to establish a regime of its own liking, a client regime in Libya, so that it will increase the number of autocracies in the Middle East that are loyal to the United States. But it didn't go as well. Why? Because within the camp pro-U.S. clients, there was rivalry. United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia were supporting one faction and Qatar and Turkey were supporting the other faction that was aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood. So, it didn't go as well as we know. But most importantly, the victims of the bloodletting which hasn't stopped since the NATO invasion of Libya is far greater than all the suffering of Libya during the decades of Khazafi regime. I mean, if you measure it by the number of people killed or the destruction that was inflicted. As far as the United Nations Security Council is concerned that you mentioned, there is no doubt it was a wake-up call for China and Russia. And since that resolution, they have changed their attitude within the Security Council and they don't allow the United States anymore to get its way. Well, we saw that with Syria, which was the next uprising. I was in a hotel lobby in Damascus the first week of 2011 March and I saw on the on the television in the lobby, the uprising in the street of Libya. It was an Al-Arabiya and I was wondering why the regime was allowing their people to see this in Syria. Could it be that they were to secure in themselves? Why do you think what happened? And was that a genuine rebellion? Yeah, it was arrogance of power on the part of the Syrian regime. They did not think it was going to get to Syria itself. Even though the Syrian people have multiple reasons to rebel against an oppressive regime, but they're also another reason, which is they were unaware the extent to which there was foreign plots in order to go into Syria at the time by Gulf regimes, Israel and the United States, they had their own bidding. And for that reason, they underestimated that there were ripe reasons for uprising within Syria. So what happened in Syria were two simultaneous forces. On the one hand, there was a spontaneous uprising by people in Syria who were fed up with an oppressive and corrupt regime. But on the other hand, there was Gulf regimes, Israel and the United States, that were conspiring together to establish yet another client regime in Syria. But how early was that intervention by the West and the Gulf States? There's a belief among liberals in the U.S. that this was a democracy movement and it was crushed by Assad. And they never mentioned the influence of those. And when did that begin? And then as we know, they began to back some of the most vicious jihadists that the region has ever known. And we have the leak conversation of John Kerry when he was Secretary of State, when he said, we saw Assad, we saw ISIS moving towards Damascus and we were watching. And then the Russians came in and saved him. It was an admission that they were, maybe it would allow ISIS to actually go to Damascus. To be honest with you, early in the uprising, within the first few months, the Syrian regime was claiming that there were armed groups within Syria that were starting trouble within different regions of the country and so on. And I, as an opponent of the Syrian regime and of all other regimes in the Middle East, I, among other intellectuals, I mean, I had draft a petition which was signed by a variety of writers in the region and so on, in which we basically supported the right of the Syrian people to rebel. And we also, and it was my language in fact, I mocked the claim by the Syrian regime that there were armed groups in Syria. Now looking back, talking to a lot of Syrians, I believe that, as I said earlier, there was definitely a spontaneous popular uprising happening in Syria. But at the same time, and very early on, even prepared before that, there were groups that were sponsored and armed by a constellation of forces, the same counter-revolutionary groups of UAE, Saudi Arabia, Western powers, as well as Israel, that were preparing in order to bring about a regime that would be much more friendly to Israel that would sign a P3 to the Israeli. Not that the Syrian regime did any trouble with Israel. Since 1973, the borders have been very quiet, but they wanted something even more quieter, and a regime that does not support armed resistance against Israel from Lebanon. So while these uprisings all across the region may have been a surprise to the West, to some degree, and to the Gulf capitals, they quickly took advantage of it and have been maneuvered it to the point of actually killing the Arab Spring. Isn't that right, Assad? You're absolutely right. And I will now tragically say, and I wish, I mean, it would be painful for me to say it in Arabic, that if there is an uprising happening today in a country that is loyal to the United States, there is a plan afoot for the United States to intervene very quickly to crush the aspiration of the people. Yeah. If you have time for one more country we didn't touch on was Bahrain and Elizabeth. I can do that briefly, yes. Okay, thank you. So Bahrain is a Shiite majority country ruled by a Sunni elite. There was probably no other country in rebellion where Saudi Arabia played a bigger role. So the US, of course, also has its fifth fleet docked there. What happened and what is the situation today in Bahrain? You know, I think we should be very careful not to overplay the sectarian division within Bahrain. Bahrain is a very interesting country. It was one of the most open cosmopolitan countries and due to its location and its history and so on, of the entire Gulf region. And it has history of political representation of unions, political parties, leftism, communism and all that. I mean, when I was young, some of the most progressive communists have ever known where from Bahrain and they were rather secular. The Sunni Shiite division was not there. But just like in Iraq and just like in the region, there was clearly a decision made by Gulf regimes and the United States to play the Shiite sectarian card against the Shiite sectarian card in order to undermine any base of support for those groups in Lebanon who were fighting the Israeli, like Hezbollah chiefly. And they used that to a great effect. In Bahrain, however, when the uprising erupted in 2011, the people there were not sectarian minded. There were Sunnis and Shiites who took there to the streets. So the regime played up the sectarian factor so much and they dismissed these protesters. I mean, some of the people I know who were communism leftists and so on, they dismissed them as people who were influenced by Iranian theologians or people who wanted to impose the rule of Khomeini and Bahrain and all that. But all that, it doesn't matter. The rebellion was not crushed by rhetoric. It was not crushed by sectarian manipulation. It was crushed by brute force with the full support of the United States, which maintains the fifth fleet over there in Bahrain. And unfortunately, it is one of the least presented stories. Whenever people list a uprising in the today, they do not mention Bahrain. And of course, the Bahraini royal did what, how to get to the heart of Congress in the American media, right? You sign a peace treaty with Israel. I mean, if Mohammed bin Salman, which I think will happen, signs a peace treaty with Israel, all his crime will be forgotten and he will be welcomed as the hero in the halls of Congress. Thank you so much for the evening. Assad, are you leaving us? I'm leaving. Okay. Thank you very, very much for that. Yeah, Bahrain. They came over the causeway with their troops so that they could later come and drink and party. So it was great to have you, Assad. I really appreciate you. Thank you so much. All the best now. Okay, we're going to move now to Anel Shilin from the Quincy Institute. Thank you for standing by patiently, Anel, and listening to Assad, pontificate on the region. He packed a lot of information in there in that half hour. We're going to also ask you about the various countries and the role of the Gulf States and what Western intervention meant, but I just want to open it up to you now to give us your thoughts about what you've heard so far. Yeah, so to a certain extent, I think it's important to keep in mind that some, some of, I think some of what the perspective Assad was bringing perhaps puts a little bit too much emphasis on, on the US, the sort of nefariousness of the US government. And while I very much believe that the US government is not to be trusted, my perspective is actually that, that it's sort of this notion that the US has to maintain its military hegemony that leads to so many anti-democratic outcomes in the region, and that it some of it comes from this notion that the US is indispensable and that the region will fall apart if the United States doesn't maintain kind of this massive military footprint both there and in the rest of the world, that sort of the entire post-World War II order is predicated on the notion that the US has to maintain that order and without it, there's, there's this concern that, you know, chaos will ensue, you know, the, the, the enemy of the moment is China. But, but to go back for example to the, the notion that, like for example with Libya, I mean, I, I was in touch with people who were in the Obama administration at the time who, who really were concerned about the, this notion that Qaddafi was going to murder his population. And, you know, Obama was not particularly inclined to get involved, but I think it was partly Hillary Clinton being Secretary of State was part of it. Samantha Power having, you know, very much expressed concern, having observed, you know, examples like the genocide in Rwanda that she really saw that, that threat of Qaddafi potentially murdering his people. And, and so, you know, we shifted therefore from the Bush administration's sort of neoconservative agenda of trying to intervene to, to install democracy was one justification to, you know, liberate Iraq and all of the many, you know, to find the WMDs, et cetera, all the many shifting justifications the Bush administration used. Whereas under the Obama administration, it was, it was a different set of justifications, but it was predicated on this notion that without the United States intervening, these countries were going to, were going to be subjected to genocide and would fall apart. And yet what we see instead is obviously this, this massive US presence in the region continues to promote instability. And one country that we, we didn't talk about yet in the discussion is Iran and the extent to which obviously under the Trump administration and unfortunately so far under the Biden administration, they have been maintaining this maximum pressure stance against Iran. And so the concern now is that Biden maybe losing his window to, to reenter the Iran nuclear deal and that from the perspective of countries like Israel and Saudi Arabia and the UAE, they would really prefer an isolated Iran, even if it has a nuclear weapon, then necessarily a, you know, an Iran without a nuke, but that is then sort of integrated into the region. And because Iran is a large and populated and would be a wealthy country, if it were allowed to sort of function and not be subjected to sanctions, that that could really shift the balance of power in the region. And so a lot of these countries are really concerned about that. That's one, I want to bring you back to Libya for a moment. You are aware there was this parliamentary report in Britain 2015, which actually said that there was, they investigated quite thoroughly, it appears, and there was no real genuine threat of genocide. They basically made out Obama and Hillary Clinton to be liars on the scale of the WMD in Iraq. Now, Hillary Clinton, of course, had a major role in that. As you know, Robert Gates, who was the Defense Secretary at the time, was opposed to the involvement in Libya and he lost out. So what about that? I mean, can we trust the US government when they say they're going to do something for the benefit of the people when they say they're spreading democracy to the region? This is what Obama said in his Cairo speech, which maybe he was saying he was promoting democracy there. Can we believe the US when they say these things? I mean, in general, no. I think in general, we should not believe the US government when it's claiming to do things to benefit the people of the region because the US government sees their presence in the region as necessary, and that we continue to prop up despotic regimes. He would mention, I think at the top of the show, Joe, this notion that the US is moving out of the region, and clearly that is not true. The US still has a huge military footprint there, but we did see just last week, the US was moving some troops out of Saudi Arabia or moving a patriot anti-missile system and out of Saudi Arabia, and then it's unclear where else in the Gulf these troops were being moved. But the my concern is that now the shift is against China, and that presidents since George W. Bush have wanted to reduce the US military involvement in the Middle East as US oil dependence has declined steadily over time. The US overtook Saudi Arabia as the largest oil producer in the world, at least prior to COVID. I'm not quite sure what the latest oil production numbers are, but the concern is moving forward. The US is going to sort of continue to maintain this big military footprint in the Middle East and then shift towards China, and part of that is predicated on the fact that the navy doesn't want to lose out, or that the army doesn't want to lose out to the navy, that the navy is going to get a lot of money as the US tries to push back against China, but the army has enjoyed so many resources in the context of sort of occupying space in the Middle East, and so they're trying to maintain the notion that no, we really do have to keep a big military footprint to counter Russia. We have to keep a big military footprint in the region, but it will be interesting to see if Biden actually does manage to get back into the JCPOA. Right. Well, they're supposed to start talks in Vienna, I think, this week, talks through intermediaries, talks about talks, basically, how they're going to do that, but there's been already the pivot to Asia. No one sees any lessening of US involvement in the Middle East, and it's not, as you say, it's not maybe so much about oil as it was before, but certainly there are powers there that they want to maintain, and it comes down to, as Assad was talking about, trumping up the sectarian divides here. Should the US be getting involved in basically an inter-religious dispute to the extent that it is genuine? Shouldn't their role as a statesman, as a major world power, the major world power still, to try to bring Iran and Saudi Arabia together to settle differences, to accommodate one another in some way, so many problems across the region would be solved if they could do that. That's not what they're doing in the US, is it? I mean, I think the US needs to get out. I think the more that the Saudi Arabia knows, as Assad was saying, even in Yemen where the US is trying to act as a sort of so-called neutral arbiter, the US continues to advance nothing but support for Saudi Arabia and to condemn the fact that Iran continues to support the Houthis, even though in that instance, he gave the example of the war in the 1960s. At the time, the Houthis are the inheritors of that monarchist regime, so in some ways the actors have shifted around a bit, that these are the descendants of the people who were fighting against Assad and the pan-Arabist sort of revolutionary forces, and now the Houthis trying to install essentially the rule of themselves and the descendants of the Prophet Muhammad that sort of they see rule of the shut-off as sort of the divinely ordained. So in general, I'm really, speaking with friends in Yemen, I know many, many people are really concerned that the US might just kind of let the Houthis take over, and then it would be the Houthis kind of establish firm border over the former North Yemen and the STC with the help of the UAE sort of takes control of the former South Yemen because Biden just wants to wash his hands of it, you know, it doesn't look good that he's helping to maintain a blockade that is causing a famine. But to your question about shouldn't the US be trying to sort of mediate between Saudi Arabia and Iran, the point I was trying to make was the US involvement is only ever on the side of Saudi Arabia. And so I think the US needs to have a smaller footprint and less involvement. And so for example, when we saw the attacks on the uptake oil facility in Saudi Arabia by a drone and you know, whether it was Iran or the Houthis, and the Trump administration had a very muted response. And after that was when we suddenly saw Saudi Arabia quietly reaching out to Iran because they don't the Saudis don't want to actually fight a war with Iran. But as long as they think that the US is going to back them up, you know, the I think it was maybe Robert Gates who said the Saudis want to fight Iran to the last American. But but if if the Americans are no longer there backing them up, the Saudis aren't actually interested in fighting that war by themselves and we've seen the trouble they've had in Yemen. So that that's why in the future moving forward, I, although I as I said, I really fear the US transitioning to Asia. But but if there's any silver lining, I mean, it wouldn't be that I mean, in general, I think that the US government needs to listen to the American people who are just sick and tired of spending inordinate amounts of resources on these forever wars. You know, we saw, for example, with the January 6 insurrection, the sort of effects of the erosion of democracy that the war on terror has created that people don't trust the government, their conspiracy theories are rife, and people are feeling, you know, that that there's no opportunity, infrastructure's crumbling, etc, etc. Americans know all the problems in our society. And yet the US government continues to invest huge amounts of resources in in our Defense Department. And even this year with COVID, we've made sort of we maintain a flatline defense budget as opposed to cutting it, which is what needs to happen. So to get back to the Middle East, I think in general, yes, the Sunni Shia divide is is was really, you know, that became so much more salient after the United States invaded Iraq. And suddenly we saw both external powers trying to to involve themselves more obviously Iran trying to to become more involved in in Iraq and, and the majority Shia population taking power, but then behaving towards the Sunnis the way the Sunnis had long behaved towards the Shia. And, you know, there are there are tensions there, but but that it they don't have to be, you know, it's it's sort of similar to, you know, notions that Catholics and Protestants can't get along. And it's like, well, you know, if if people have what they need, and they're not feeling that these divides are being used to to sort of penalize them or they're not feeling attacked for their or their religion or they have lack of opportunity as a result of their their ethnic identity, you know, then then these identitarian divides become less salient. You think the US is exaggerating the Iranian threat, for example, in Bahrain, and in Yemen, the the Houthi are a different branch of Shias and then the Iranians and they really didn't have that close relationship. But now they've gotten closer because of the attack. So are they getting what they what they wish for the the are they drumming up the Iranian, the fear of Iran? Now, I know Israel has concerns, obviously, and that drives part of at least US policy there. But is there an exaggeration of an Iranian threat in your view? Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think, which again, is why I really hope that Biden will in fact return to the JCPOA because moving forward, I think for for the region to actually reflect, like at the moment, US power inflates the sort of importance and the the perceived power of countries from Israel itself has nukes, they are, they are fine, no one's going to attack them. But you know, countries from Saudi Arabia to the UAE to Egypt, who who continue to act more belligerently, whereas if the United States had a much smaller presence, these countries, like I said, don't they don't want to fight a war with Iran. But they see it as being in their own interest to to have the the Iranian threat, you know, to have the United States continue to see that as problematic. And and the US does that anyway, you know, people American older Americans remember the, you know, the trauma of the Islamic Revolution, a lot of America, you know, Trump would talk about this, that older Americans still feel a lot of hostility towards Iran as a result of the hostage crisis, etc. And my hope is in time, as kind of younger generations of Americans who don't necessarily remember that, there'll be less of this sort of knee-jerk, anti-Iranian fear. And that moving forward, you know, Generation Z, for example, the the the zoomers, you know, people who are in college at the moment, they when you know, polling reveals that they are really not interested in the United States maintaining this huge military footprint abroad. And you know, millennials, my generation, we also don't don't see the world through through sort of the Cold War lens or or the, you know, that we've observed the effects of what happened after 9-11. And that it's, you know, it's been a lot of government lies and and, you know, the erosion of sort of the ability to even really believe in in in America that that many of us were sort of raised to believe in. No, we have a question now from the audience that I'd like to ask you, and that's whether you believe that the United States instigated the Arab Spring. This was addressed earlier by Joe Nassad a little bit, but I'd like to hear your opinion on it. So, you know, at the time, for for about a decade or so before the Arab Spring, you know, U.S. aid funding, a lot of that had gone to civil society organizations. And so we'd seen this, for example, after the the fall of the Soviet Union. And there was a lot of American outreach to sort of Eastern European countries trying to sort of, you know, Cold War destabilize the USSR. And so there was this notion that the U.S. could help promote democracy elsewhere in in the region. And so I think that has contributed to a perception that the United States was involved. However, I don't want to undermine the agency of the individuals themselves who who carried out the the massive protests who organized who, you know, Assad was mentioning that people on social media tend to think that they're doing something when in fact they aren't. But that that was the downfall of Mubarak and Ben Ali when they when they shut off the Internet to prevent people from communicating. And then everybody, you know, just was in the street. And they had been in the street before, but then they really, really were everybody got off their computer. So, so the notion that the U.S. instigated the Arab Spring, I mean, I remember at the time Rumsfeld sort of he had had a book that had just come out and he was sort of smugly sitting there like, you know, we always said we were trying to promote democracy. And I just think that that completely erases the fact that we'll know the United States has propped up these governments for decades and continues to provide the military support. And so the notion that that the U.S. was was really instigating it. You know, the U.S. provided some money for some civil society organizations, which which are which is no longer happening. I mean, Egypt in particular CC has really, really clamped down on on any of that sort of organizing. Yeah, I wonder how serious that was. I mean, I heard those things back then that the NGOs U.S. were behind this. But why did they back Mubarak then? Why have they backed the crushing of all these democracy moves? I just don't buy I wonder why they wore some NGOs there. But I don't think they had the effect that some people think that that was a genuine uprising against Mubarak from everything that I saw there and everything I've read and heard. Absolutely. Well, and you know, I think, you know, right after 9 11, I think the Bush administration correctly identified that part of what was driving violent extremism and terrorism was, you know, that was these despotic, abusive governments. And so they they sort of, there was an acknowledgement before, you know, so it was the justification for Iraq. But I think some some people within the administration really believed that like, look, we'll have this wave of democracies that'll spread through the region, just like we saw after the USSR. But then, you know, by 2006, when Hamas won control, won the election in the Democratic election in Gaza, and then suddenly, you know, they needed to be backpedaling to say, oh, wait, no, we don't we don't want the so-called terrorists to win. But then the acknowledgement that if democracy were to come to the region, and Islamists were sort of the only political movement that had any capacity to organize because the left had been so crushed, you know, the crushing of the left was justified by the Cold War. And so there was no, you know, Arab governments were able to crush the left without any pushback or no one saying anything about human rights because of communism. But then they couldn't necessarily go after Islamists in the same way. And they saw Islamists as kind of offering the solution to the left. And they initially saw them as politically quietists. And then eventually over time, the Islamists, you know, were less interested in being politically quietist. And, you know, obviously, the Muslim Brotherhood goes back to 1928. And that was active already throughout Muslim Brotherhood and similar sort of groups inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood that that exists throughout the region. But then even the Salafis who were supposed, you know, who originally were less interested in politics, you know, even we saw, for example, during during the Egyptian elections that we had a Salafi candidate that that initially they wouldn't have, you know, their their their whole thing was that they weren't political. So in general, I think, you know, the Bush administration and the Obama administration, you know, they knew that democracy in the region would mean the Greater Empowerment of Islamist groups, which is what we saw after the Arab Spring. And so subsequently, it has been very interesting. So my research in particular focuses on this notion of so-called moderate Islam, that, you know, Egypt has very much jumped on that, that messaging to say that al-Azhar and Sisi promote so-called moderate Islam. We have the UAE doing a lot of this. Morocco does a lot of this, even Saudi Arabia, you know, Mohammed bin Salman coming forward and saying we have to return Saudi Arabia to so-called moderate Islam. And that the first person, one of the first leader Muslim leaders to actually say that was Karvez Musharraf, he was concerned about the possibility the US might shift from Afghanistan to Pakistan. And, you know, knowing that that his country was was in fact sort of involved in the ability of Afghan fighters to to sort of escape into Pakistan and then continue to come back to fight the US. And so he needed to sort of portray himself as a so-called moderate Muslim to try to to foreclose American attention, perhaps shifting to him in Pakistan. And so we've also seen that throughout the region of a lot of these governments embracing this notion that we are promoting moderate Islam because the average American or, you know, an American policymaker isn't going to distinguish between an Islamist, you know, someone who wants a larger role for Islamic politics, who, you know, this is the Muslim brotherhood, this is the Nahadan Tunisia. These are a lot of the groups that became more empowered after the Arab Spring. And a terrorist that's for for many Americans as a Muslimist and terrorist kind of becomes joined when in fact those are not at all the same thing that terrorists are a tiny, tiny minority of individuals and jihadi terrorists and thinking about Muslim individuals who create, who conduct acts of violent extremism, not to say anything to all of all the other forms of terrorism that exists. But so, you know, in general, we saw after the Arab Spring, this so this was when I was doing a lot of my fieldwork in the region was as we saw Daesh, you know, holding territory in Iraq and Syria. And a lot of the people that I was interviewing, I mean, there was very real concern that that they saw what had happened to Syria and they saw what was happening in Yemen and in Libya. And there was real fear that that that would also be what would happen to their countries. And so I think there were a lot of people who said, look, we just want to survive. We don't want violence. We just want, you know, sufficiently functioning economy to provide for our children. Like we don't even, I mean, they wanted democracy, but I think at the bare minimum, they just wanted to avoid that kind of violence. And so in many ways, I think the violence that has come out of the Arab Spring has really prevented additional democratization movements or, you know, protest pushing for democracy sense because people were really frightened that if it didn't work out, your country could really, really descend into absolute chaos and madness. That'll bring us to a final question, Anel. Do you judge the Arab Spring to have been a overall failure? And what is the way forward? You alluded to it just now, that there seems to be some hesitancy, you think, amongst people to go through with that again. What do you see going forward? What was your judgment on these 10 years and how do you see it going forward in the region now? I mean, unfortunately, I don't want to say it was a failure necessarily because, you know, people tried. But I think what's unfortunate subsequently is the extent to which a lot of these authoritarian regimes have learned how to prevent this from happening now. And, you know, for example, just the so-called alleged coup attempt that we, you know, made whatever happened in Jordan that then resulted in the former crown prince being placed under house arrest and other high-ranking members of the Jordanian government being arrested, as well as the other people. That was, to my knowledge, was precipitated just by criticizing King Abdullah. And the government's now, you know, the level of permissiveness. For example, I was living in Egypt prior to the Egyptian Revolution. And there was a certain amount of permissiveness as long as you didn't criticize Mubarak himself or the armed forces. There was a certain amount of openness. Whereas I think now CC does not allow for any of that. And so I think the takeaway a lot of these governments have, what they've learned is you can't allow any kind of opening, which is really, really tragic and unfortunate. And I think the final thing to say on that, especially this notion of promoting moderate Islam, and thereby by delegitimizing any Islamist or anyone who has any interpretation of Islam that is not the strict state-sponsored interpretation, the scary thing we're seeing now is China and Russia both buying into this notion because they fear that their Muslim minority populations could be a source of instability. And so for China, you know, the notion that the Uyghurs might have separatist inclinations and that that, you know, from China, the Communist Party of China's perspective, they're worried that, you know, that could lead to separatist movements all over the country. And so the extreme abuse of Uyghurs is sort of, you know, we've heard Saudi Arabia praising what China is doing to their Uyghur population, which is really shocking because Saudi Arabia usually purports to be the leader of the Muslim world and, you know, stands up for Muslims around the world. And Russia, you know, similar stories, especially regarding the wars in Chechnya, and that, you know, Putin is worried about the possibility that that sort of a Muslim solidarity could, we saw happen in the wars in Chechnya. But moving forward, all of these regimes use this fear of so-called terrorists, use the fear of Islamists, and instead promote this notion of so-called moderate Islam, which, you know, the Americans are only too willing to sort of praise and buy into. Yes, except when they find Islamists and even violent ones useful to their policy in the region. We're going to leave there, Anel. It was great to hear from you. I want to thank Assad Abu Khalil, who joined us in the first half hour, Anel Shiline from the Quincy Institute for her views in the second half, Elizabeth Voss, my co-host, Kathy Bogan, our producer. And I want to sign off by asking you to go to our Patreon page and help us keep these programs going. We will revisit this region, which we can talk about for hours and hours and hours. And I thank you again, Anel, for coming on for the one hour that we gave it. So for everyone here at CN Live, I want to wish you a good night.