Well, good evening. Um, they say that a week is a long time in politics, and you know, that's often true, I'm sure, but it's also a long time in when was the last war started in the Middle East these days. Uh, it's just been shocking. And when I was thinking about this, I thought it'd be good to talk about Syria, because I I feel that a lot of people have just not noticed Syria, forgotten about Syria, whatever. It hasn't got the media attention it needs in any sense, you know, including in uh Britain's involvement there, America's involvement. Um, but of course, since I was thinking about talking about my little escapades in Syria, um, there's been all sorts of other things going on in that region. So I thought we'd just broaden it out a little bit and look at what is the repetitive uh errors of uh of Western policies in that part of the world. And I suppose that brings another adage up, which is the only thing that we learn from history is that we don't learn from history, which I like to refine and say actually, the only thing we don't learn from current affairs is what happened last week in current affairs. Uh, and Syria and the Middle East is very much an example of that. And when you think about that neck of the woods, um, and you think about going from Somalia up through Yemen, up through Saudi Arabia, you know, Kuwait and Iraq, and then Syria and all the way up to Turkey, there's not a lot of peace. Uh, there's been a lot of conflict there and going further east as you go to Iran, to Afghanistan, Pakistan, India. Um, and it's just always the same story. And I've been working there a lot for the last 20 years, particularly when I got involved in it all with all my Guantanamo clients. And you think about what we've done in each of these countries, and it is just the same old story. So, Afghanistan, 2001, we invaded, the Americans invaded, with the whole UN behind them. Uh, we had an excuse, we said it was 9-11. We actually didn't come up with much evidence that uh it was the Afghans behind 9-11. In fact, the vast majority of 9-11 conspirators were Saudi, and we didn't invade Saudi Arabia. Um, but we invaded Afghanistan, we spent an incredible amount of money doing it. It depends who you listen to, but perhaps as much as six trillion dollars we spent on the invasion of Afghanistan and on various, I'm sure, in some ways, well-intentioned but incredibly misguided ways in which we could turn Afghanistan into a wonderful uh left-wing democracy. Uh, and the longest war in America's history, longer than Vietnam, five or six times longer than World War II, World War I, World War II, uh, and the Americans' involvement in both of those. And um, it all came out to the same thing. The Taliban were in power before, the Taliban were in power afterwards, and I don't think we achieved hardly anything in Afghanistan. And my last lecture on all of these subjects was about Afghanistan and how we haven't done anything terribly useful there since. Um, you look at Libya, you know, there was this grand effort to topple Gaddafi, who had for the longest time been semi-friend of Britain's. Uh, and what's happened there? Have we established a decent country where people are happily living? No. It's divided down the middle with two competing governments, it's just chaos, it's violent, it's just not achieved anything. Iraq. The Iraq War. The last time we had a million-person march on the streets of London was against the Iraq War. We were told they were involved with Al-Qaeda in weapons of mass destruction. That turned out to be bogus. Hundreds of thousands of people killed later. Iraq is not a lot better off now than it was when Saddam Hussein was in charge. Yemen, total chaos. I went there in 2003. It was not a very safe place then. Yemen's been fragmented for a long time between the north and the south and between different groups. Uh, they've been invaded by various people. The UAE got in on the act, they copied a lot of the American playbook. We had playing cards, the Americans did in Iraq. We thought that by knocking off the top 20 people on the playing cards, you know, from the ace of spades downwards, that would make a big, big difference. Well, it didn't. Um, and they did the same thing there in Yemen. The UAE had a set of playing cards. They hired a bunch of American assassins to go around assassinating people. Uh, I was involved in representing some of those folk, and that was just all madness, too. Uh, and then we come to Syria, and I've spent quite a lot of time in Syria, and we're going to talk a lot about it, but um, it hasn't been great there either. Uh, but you know, as I was getting ready to think about this, of what happens, Donald Trump uh does this madness in Iran. And so far, the the war is three or four weeks old. Uh, who knows whether it will be the longest war in American history? I don't know. Um, but certainly a lot of the same assumptions applied. We thought, the Israelis apparently thought that by assassinating a bunch of the top leaders, that was gonna bring about a whole change. No one ever thought about what the solution was, really. Uh, and it's interesting, particularly in Iran. I I've uh had a little to do with that. And who's meant to take over from Iran? I mean, there was positing the fact that the Shah's son might be the next best leader of Iran. That's crazy. Uh, there just is not a lot of alternatives, and just by knocking off a bunch of leaders doesn't necessarily mean that something wonderful springs out of it. And I guess there are a couple of principles that come out of this, which I'm going to turn to some of the people on my Spotify account to quote, Michael Franti and Spearhead. I don't know if you know this, but you should listen to it because it sort of sums it up. You can bomb the world to pieces, but you can't bomb it into peace. The idea that you can just go bomb, bomb, bomb, and somehow that's gonna make the world a better place is simply insane. Um, you look at Iran, there's doing lots of bombing there. Um, but what's gonna come out of it? We're destroying pretty much everything. If we continue to destroy the infrastructure of their oil and gas, it's not gonna be great for the people of Iran. Uh, and I suppose the other thing, uh, the other song I'd quote is from Paul Simon and Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover. Uh, what's the plan stand? You know, I wouldn't be the first person to say that there appears to be no plan about why a war is going on in Iran. But there isn't much of a plan in any of these places. There wasn't much of a plan in Afghanistan. There was no plan I could see in Libya. There wasn't a great plan in Iraq, there's no plan in Yemen. Um, and in Iran there seems to be no plan. But um the issue we'll we'll talk about for a bit today is is there a plan in Syria? And there could be a plan. It's not impossible. It's not impossible to come up with ideas about how to solve things. It's not impossible even in Gaza. Uh, but one of the things that depressed me the most about the whole torturous uh experience of the first the ridiculous and terrible uh events where Hamas just thought that killing a bunch of Israelis was a good idea. But then the idea that Benjamin Netanyahu thought that killing many, many more Palestinians was a solution to. Just crazy, crazy. And what got me was how few people were really talking about a peace plan, about a plan for Gaza, Palestine, Israel in the future. And we used to have those conversations back in the day about the one-state solution, the two-state solution, with you know, dull out Nobel Peace Prized to people who actually sought peace some of the time. Um, but there's just no conversation about that at the moment unless you count Donald Trump's plan for the Gaza Riviera. And the same's true in Syria. I don't see that we have any plan. Syria was a place, you know, this chap, um Bashir Assad, who I always used to call Mad Assad, I mean, and his dad, let's face it, Mad Assad and his dad, um, were not people who you could rely on to be democratic, decent human rights people. Um we want to think where Britain and America really stood on all of that for a long time. And I think one of the lessons that the West learned, very bad lesson, they learned the wrong lesson after the Arab Spring, was that um that actually you don't want to replace a dictator with some sort of chaotic democracy. And let's face it, democracy can be chaotic, chaotic. It's pretty chaotic in America right now. Every chance the next election in Britain's gonna be pretty chaotic. Um, but the West doesn't want that, they're keener on stability. So when that civil war was going on, we had this fragmented Syria. I spent most of the time I spent in Syria up in the yellow bit. That was the Kurdish forces. Um they call it Rajava, they call it the um AANES, um, which was about Northeast Syria trying to be more inclusive than just the Kurds. Um, but that was the yellow bit, the red bit was the bit that um Assad was clinging on to, the black bit was ISIL, the crazy, crazy people involved in that, Israel had occupied some of it, and there were various other groups. Um and it was so chaotic that I think a lot of people in Western politics secretively, they didn't really say this out loud a lot, but they sort of pined for the good old days when we had a nice dictator there who would repress his people and it would all be stable. We did the same thing back in the day in 1979. I I remember that. I remember long before that, my brother somehow had some strange correspondence with Pahlavi, uh, who was the Shah and Shah of Persia, as the British called him. And we supported him strongly, even though Savak, his secret police, were doing pretty horrible things to some of the Iranian people. Now, clearly we should have been supporting a transition towards some other form of government, but the question is how? And then, as now, we we just didn't really have a solution. We weren't really keen on the Ayatollah Humani, who was in France at the time. We didn't really understand him. We certainly, I don't think, understood that 1979 was going to rusher in 40 years or more of um of him and his buddies. Just the same as we honestly didn't understand that the Taliban was just going to walk back into Kabul. Um, the Taliban knew that, and I was uh working on a bunch of cases of people in Guantanamo who were supposedly uh part of the anti-American forces. I think they were actually just the people defending their country against an invasion. Um, but they were all pretty confident that when the Americans left, the Taliban would just walk back into power. Uh, and Donald Trump blames it all on uh on President Biden. That's just rubbish. It was always gonna happen. I I had a conversation with Imran Khan about this, and he had told me how he'd talked to the Taliban leadership about the need to construct a peace with the Americans, and the Taliban told them, no, we don't, because the moment the Americans leave, we're just gonna walk back in, and that'll be that. And they were right. Um, and we misjudged that, and Donald Trump still misjudges it. The same was sort of true of um the guy we used to call Al-Jalani and HTS. HTS was a prescribed terrorist group, and I don't think anyone in Western intelligence saw the fact that he was just gonna suddenly walk into power in Syria, that Assad would be gone off to Russia with his family and a bunch of his money, uh, and this guy would become the new president of Syria. I just don't think they had any idea that was going to happen. I dealt with them a bit, actually. I had an interesting time with them. I bet that I'm the only lawyer in the world who's ever had a roses emoji from HTS, this terrorist group. And the way it came about was this. This chap here is Bilal Abdelkarim. I love Bilal. Bilal is an African American, grew up in New York, his mom was big in the civil rights movement. He was imbued with that as a youth, but he became a stand-up comedian in New York, and he's a very funny guy. Uh, and then he sort of got tired of that and he became Muslim, and he ended up in Syria, and he set up his own little media corporation, which was called On the Ground Network, OGN, and he would broadcast the truth as he saw it from Syria when all the chaos of the Syrian civil war was going on. Um, and he would talk to everyone except for two people. He wouldn't talk to Mad Assad's people, and he wouldn't talk to ISIS, but he'd talk to everyone else, and he was involved in all of that, and he pissed a few people off. Um, he was very much hoping to set up, help set up a new Syria with a whole constitution and everything, and of rule of law and no torture and all this. And he was deeply critical of HTS torturing one of his friends, a guy called Tox, who's a British guy. And so HTS arrested him. But in the meantime, before that, the Americans had decided this guy, he's got a beard, he's Muslim, you know, he's talking to all these bad dudes who we say are terrorists. So they'd decided he was a terrorist, and they tried five times to kill him. And it is a fabulous tribute to how hopeless American intelligence is, that they missed him each time, but they owe Bilal three vehicles. They blew up three of his vehicles. Uh, and they missed him, and and and he became my client in America, where we sued under what I thought was the modest theory that um you shouldn't just be able to murder an American citizen in secret without telling him anything about it. Um and we brought a lawsuit on that, uh, and that was ongoing. And then HTS arrested Bilal because he was being irritating and he was talking about uh how HTS shouldn't torture his buddies. So I got on the phone with the HTS people, and I forget how I found out how to do it, but I did. And, you know, we start talking, and I say, look, guys, you I'm gonna give you some free legal advice here. You've got my client Dalal in prison, which means the Americans know exactly where he is, and they've got his GPS coordinates, and even the American CIA won't be able to miss him this time. Um, and so what's gonna happen is they're gonna have one of the predator drones fire a hellfire missile at your jail, and that's gonna kill old Balal, and I don't want to see that happen, but it's gonna kill a whole bunch of your people too. So I'm just giving you free advice that you should just let him go. If you want to have a trial, I'll come down there and I'll represent him. But really, if I were you, I'd just let him go. So they sent me this roses emoji and let him go, which was cool. But what it showed was that you could talk to people there in it. They wanted actually some advice about how to seem more reasonable to the West because they didn't want to be prescribed like Palestine Action, for goodness sake, some really evil people. They didn't want to be prescribed as a terrorist organization. Um, so you know that was my experience with HTS, somewhat limited, but we could have we could have done business with them if only we'd wanted to. I spent most of my time up in the northeast of Syria. I went there several times, um, and I worked with the the Kurds. And I've got to say I have incredible respect for those people. I mean, we as we will see in a minute, the British are the cause of most of their misery, but they're totally democratic. The in terms of the rights of women, they're way ahead of Britain or America. Each political position has two people, one male and one female. You know, obviously at some point they'll work out that there are other genders and so forth, and I'm sure they'll respect them too. You know, they'd abolished the death penalty in Radava, they had all sorts of good stuff. And I was working with them because they had a bunch of people in some camps there, and we were trying to work out a way to come up with some democratic um judicial processes for them. But the real problem was this that this is what the Kurdistan looked like back in the day before World War I, and it was a big part of that part of the world, stretching all the way from Turkey down to Iran and Iraq. Um, and the British did what we did best around the world. We drew stupid lines. And so you can see it just about here that Syria had a little bit of the Kurds, Turkey had quite a big bit of the Kurds, there were a bunch of Kurds in Iraq, an even bigger group of Kurds in Iran. And we did what we did between Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan with the Durand line, where we just drew it through people's houses. We did what we did in Northern Ireland, where we drew it through the front living room of some people's houses. Um here we divided Kurdistan. The British in 1916, really between 1910 and 1916, wanted to try to avoid a Kurdistan that was powerful in that part of the world for reasons that are totally historical and probably archaic. Um, so we divided them up in a way that's just been their misery ever since. And you know full well that the Turks don't like their Kurds and they've had all sorts of issues going on there. The Iraq, um, Kurdistan has actually been semi-independent for a long time. I've been to Abil many times in northern Iraq. And right now we're trying to manipulate the Kurds in northwest and north um Iran to try to rise up against the Iranian government, which again they go very well. And in Rajava, which was the part in Syria, there was another section. And this is what we did to them. We should have recognized these people, they're great allies for us. And that in a future Syria, the core of the people who could have been promoting democracy were already there, the Kurds. And they already had a seat at the table in any future government in Syria. And so instead of just arguing with ourselves about whether we could maneuver the whole country ourselves, we already had a group of people we could be supporting who needed support and deserved support. Uh, and we basically stabbed them in the back in many ways. First, these are the places I've been to. On your uh right is Camp Roj, which is the one I went to first. It's just near the border with Iraq, and it's where a lot of people you will have heard about have been held, but it's the small camp. And on the left was Camp Al Hol, which was further down towards the the battleground between the Kurds and the ISIS and the uh and the government. And we set up what I always, well, immediately once I started getting involved in it, called Guantanamo on the Euphrates. It was exactly the same as Guantanamo, but much worse. So in Guantanamo, in my favorite Caribbean resort, there were 780 detainees from 46 countries. All of them were men and no women or kids. In Guantanamo on the Euphrates, 78,000 people at one point. So a hundred times as many from 53 countries. There were some men, they weren't actually in those two camps. They were held in secret prisons. I got access to them at one point. But most of them were kids. Most of them were children in these camps. And there were many, many women. And then you had to see the other differences with Guantanamo and Cuba. You know, I was involved in the first case against Guantanamo and Cuba. We gradually built it up to 500 pro bono lawyers from all sorts of places. You know, we had habeas corpus, it was the litigation. You know, that's 360 years old. It was off in the middle of nowhere. Guantanamo is in the middle of the Caribbean. It's nowhere near any battleground that these people were supposedly captured on. I wish they weren't, but we pretended they were. And there was endless money. Right now, the US government is spending it, it was 11.8 million last time they admitted it, it's now over 15 million per prisoner in Guantanamo to hold them there. I got my clients there to write about how they would spend their 15 million. And, you know, they said they'd gold plate their cells, they'd double the income of all the guards to make them treat them better. And they were very kind and said they'd give my charity a million dollars, which I would appreciate. Now, when you go to Guantanamo on the Euphrates that we had created for the Kurds, it's just terrible. There were no pro bono lawyers. I think it's still true to say. I'm not 100% sure this is true. I think I'm the only lawyer who's ever got in there. There may be one or two others. I haven't heard of them, but um, but I've been there several times. And there's no legal process at all. I was working with the Kurds to try and set one up. The biggest obstacle to that was Britain. It wasn't even America, it was Great Britain, were against that. Um it was in the middle of a war zone. The SDF, the Kurdish Syrian Defense Force, was fighting very close to Camp Al Hall. There's no distance at all, walking distance to the battleground. Uh, and there was very little money involved. Now, this is an important point, which is when I did the Guantanamo litigation, the US were the bad guys. We all know what Britain's national sports is really, it's not football, it's bashing America. And Britain loves to do that when it's Donald Trump in power, but they like it most of the time. Uh, and Britain was eventually, not initially, but eventually totally on our side. The British were firmly in favor of closing Guantanamo down. Um, they were just uh firmly against Guantanamo because actually our original Guantanamo Bay in Britain itself was in the Civil War in the 1640s, where we locked people up on an offshore island. And that was part of the reason for the later 17th century habeas corpus act. Um, so that was the history of Guantanamo. But when it came to Guantanamo on the Euphrates, I went down there the first time to get some Americans out, easy peasy. I went there, I told the Americans I was going, I said I was taking a TV crew from America with me, and I expected America to help, or if they didn't, we were going to make them look bad. We got permission to get in from the Kurds and from the Iraqi Kurds. And just before we were going to cross the border, the US government picked up almost all of the Americans and took them home to America, which made my life so much easier. And then when Donald Trump, there are very few things one can say this about Donald Trump, but Donald Trump was right. How many times do you hear that statement? He said the US is asking Britain and other European allies to take back their citizens from Syria, because it was obviously not going to work to leave them there. And what what these camps were was 78,000 people who were being treated quite badly. There was no money, they were in tents, sometimes it was the middle of winter and it was snowing. When I was there, sometimes it was the middle of summer and it was, you know, 100 degrees. Um, and it was just going to be a breeding ground of hatred for the West. And it was. I mean, the people I met when I first went there were so glad, most of them, to be out of ISIS and away from ISIS, who they'd come to see as anathema. Um, but gradually there were certain zealots in those camps who were saying, oh, the West are hypocrites, they're all terrible kafirs and all the rest of it. Um, and gradually a lot of people in those camps came to see it that way because we forfeited any claim we might ever have had of being the progenitors of human rights. And I went back several times. One time I went, this was a great story, there was these two kids who were orphans in the camp, and one of the times I'd been there, the kids had said, Can you please get these kids out? So we tracked down their mum, who was in uh in Trinidad, um, and we flew her over. And when I say we, actually I went back from uh that trip to Syria and I ran into uh Roger Waters in London. We had lunch together, and Roger, I consider a very, very decent human being and um and a true defender of human rights. And I know people badmouth him, but I'm sorry, you're just wrong. Um he's a decent guy. And he said, Let me help you. So this I've never had this before, and you could get used to it, right? He he insisted that we fly down there on his private jet. He even asked me what white wine I liked. And um he couldn't go into Syria because, you know, when you're wealthy, your insurance company won't let you do that stuff. I don't need insurance, I can do what I want. Um, so he stayed in Iraq while I went in, got the kids out, then we brought them back to a beal, and Roger flew them home. And, you know, it was just wonderful. And we got these kids reunited with their mother and their mum stayed in touch with Roger, and Roger and his partner were trying very much to help them, which was fabulous. And this is what we, you know, I'm not saying we needed to send a private jet for everyone, but this is what we should have been doing. This woman, uh Laura Hensel, helped me immensely. She was in the camps. She'd been, her husband was a British guy, uh, a British resident, and he they'd got married and it was all very nice, but then he was a bit mad, and he ended up going to he had lots of problems. It wasn't his fault. Um, the the Dutch intelligence service was giving him trouble, and he ended up in um Turkey, and he was locked up in Turkey, he managed to get out of there and he went to Syria, and he he didn't really want to be a member of ISIS or anything, he just didn't have anywhere to go. So he went there. Um and he tried to get Laura to follow him. She didn't want to go there from Germany. She was with her parents in Germany, and she had the kids. Um, and two years of arguments later, she finally went and joined him on the promise of Nirvana in uh in Syria, discovered it was a dreadful um nightmare, and indeed discovered that her husband had married another woman who just happened to be the sister of another of the people I was representing. Uh, and Laura was horrified by all of this and was very, very glad when ISIS fell and she managed to get as far as the camps. And one of the things I love about the world, the modern world, is that my clients in cells, or in this case in tents, had cell phones. And I was able to be in touch with a lot of them a lot of the time. And Laura helped me so much in getting justice for a number of people in those camps. So finally I managed to persuade some other people to help us, and we got her and her kids out to Germany, where she's been for the last several years causing no trouble to anyone. And this is clearly what should have happened to everyone, but not if you're British. And the British genuinely are the bad people here, and it's our government, and it is despicable what our government has done, that we've stripped people of their nationality. This is Shamima Bacum, right? She was one of three 15-year-old girls who were essentially trafficked out to uh to Syria on the promise again of this fabulous nirvana. Um, she had three children by the time she was 18. All three children died of different medical causes by the time she was 19. And look, this woman has been in Camp Raj, and the idea that somehow she's a terrorist who's a threat to British national security is just pathetic. Uh, and it's just an example of people using in government the word terrorism to try to terrify people. I mean, Palestine action. You think they're terrorists? This is just madness. You think this woman's a threat to British national security, utter madness. And yet she's been stripped of her nationality and now she's got nowhere to go because the British said she can go to Bangladesh. She's never been to Bangladesh in her life, and the Bangladeshis said they would execute her if she went there. So what's going to happen to her? This is just crazy, crazy. But it just went on. This is Jack Letz. Again, we tried to vilify him in Britain, but I was there. I knew what was going on. I met Jack in prison. He was the only man, and I think I was the only lawyer who was ever allowed to meet one of the men in prison there. And Jack was an ADHD kid, and the government in Britain went after his mum and dad for one reason and one reason only. There have been lots of people who were British who went to Syria, who've come back from Syria and got on with their lives, and no one even knows about them. There's scores of those people who have caused no trouble at all. But Jack's mum and dad were middle-class white people, and the government of Britain, just to try and make it look like it wasn't all just bearded Muslims they were going after, they went after those parents. Now, when their mum and when his mum and dad first went to the police, um, John and Sally, and said, is it okay? Jack really wants out of Syria. He's been arrested three times. He had been arrested by ISIS three times for saying things that ISIS said were blasphemous, and he was quite lucky to escape being executed for that. And he wanted to get out of Syria. Now, Mum and Dad wanted to send him$3,000 that he could use to pay the people trafficker to get out of Syria and come back to Britain. Well, you could do what you want to him. If you want to prosecute him, prosecute him. Who cares? That's what that was his attitude. He'd face whatever music he had to face. Um, but the the British government said, no, you can't do that. Now, that was when Theresa May was prime minister, and I do believe I could have shamed her into allowing that to happen. Because if it was my son and he was in Syria, I would parachute into Syria. I don't care what the police and the government say, I'm going to rescue my son. And I think most of us who are parents know damn well that that's what we'd all do unless we're heartless. Um, but we couldn't publicize that at the time. I had a bunch of bishops contact um Theresa May because her dad was a minister and tell her, come on, lady, you know, for goodness sake, be a bit more civilized about this. But if we'd gone to the media, we could have won that battle. We couldn't do it because if we told the media that Jack wanted out of Syria, ISIS would have killed him. So we couldn't do it. So he ended up in prison, and he's been there for years now. And, you know, he could have gone home long ago. We could have got all the Canadians out long ago. If the British government, I I was in Northeast Syria, I even filled out passport applications for a bunch of the Canadians to get their passports. We had an agreement between Canada and the and the Kurds that worked out an MOU, it was all going to happen. And then the mother country, Britain, told Canada not to do it. And Canada, to their eternal shame, went along with that. And that's just pathetic, but it's Britain's fault. And Britain tried to run this thing through all of Europe to prevent people from getting their nationals back, which just creates a problem for the Kurds and a problem for the world. It's just disgusting. And we made that problem for the Kurds, and we've kept it for years, and it's still going on today. Actually, everyone from Camp Al Hol recently just escaped because the Kurds no longer run Al Hol. So goodness knows where they are now. And if we'd had a proper system, that would have been fine. There are still some people in Raj, Camp Raj, and we need to get them out of there. But that wasn't all we did to the Kurds. When the Turks invaded, because the Turks are paranoid about the Kurds, no one stood up. I was there when that happened, when there was a war going on, and the Turks actually invaded Rajava, and no one stood up for them. And as of today, the Kurds are being pushed back towards their capital, Khamishli. And you know what's going to happen there? What should be happening is we should be supporting them, and we should be supporting them in their work with the central government of Syria to create a single Syrian state. I think that's the only possible solution. But we get them inside the government, and then the Kurds are a tremendous power for good, who can also educate HTS, who really don't have a lot of democratic history, aren't to it to achieve something positive for the country. And HTS, I'm not against that. You know, Ahmed El-Shara is not a maniac. You know, everyone thinks that all the people I represent who have been in Guantanamo and they're terrorist maniacs, just nonsense. He wants to do a job that is almost impossible, which is to take a country that's been at war for all these years, torn apart by all these different groups, with the Israelis attacking from one side, the Turks attacking from another, with Iraq on another and Iran on another. He wants to take those groups of people and turn them into one country. And even Donald Trump seemed to like the guy. He went to Washington and met with him. Now, I'm not saying that you need to clutch him to your breast, but um I would like to work with him, and I think what we ought to be doing in Syria now is he's your only game in town, right? So we should be working very closely with him, and we should be helping him to try to build that country, and that includes helping him bring him together with the Kurds, holding the Israelis off from invading anymore from one side, and helping him build a country. And it's not going to be a little quiet town in England immediately. I mean, this is a country that's gone through a nightmare, but we can help them move the country towards something, and that would be a plan. But the one but we don't have a plan at the moment, and I'm not saying everything's cool. They've arrested my old mate Bilal again, and that's not good. Bilal said some pretty loud things, exercising his new uh free speech prerogative, and um, I'm not sure HTS fully understands the bounds of the First Amendment yet, but then neither does Britain. Um, so we need to do more, and I'm hoping I can go down there and represent Bilal. Not because we'll be fine, we'll get him out from under what he's under, but it's a good example of showing how a system can work and helping um HTSM move towards the right thing. So this is our problem. We're back to where we were at the beginning. This is the chaos that we've spawned across this area. It's getting worse right now. No one here knows what's gonna happen in Iran. No one, by and large, in Britain is thinking what's happening in Syria. And we need to. We need to not just because it's our fault that we created a bunch of this mess in the first place, that it's our fault that we've not backed the right people and we haven't helped the people who could make it better. Uh but it's just it's in our interest because if you're just one of these people who care about oil and gas, then you know that we need a peaceful Middle East, not what's going on there. Um so you know, I don't have to tell you anything about Iran. I mean, it's just totally mad to me that Donald Trump can say we're really afraid these people are gonna have nuclear bombs and might destroy the entire planet. But no, we never thought they might just blow up some tankers and destroy the oil and gas trade. You know, none of this bombing stuff works so well. It's a bad way to solve our problems. What instead we need is a lot fewer wars. I've long since advocated that we should fill our military with people who are trying to work towards peace, and instead of calling the Department of War, we call it the Department of Peace. And yeah, maybe you have to have a few wars every now and then. I think most of them are pointless. Um, but we should spend all of our time trying to achieve peace, not trying to figure out how to bomb people. But then you think already that the Americans have spent billions, estimated 16 or 20 billion dollars, on bombing Iran, um, which is just so much more than America has spent on trying to help countries become better and help their citizens um improve their life. It's just all mad. Uh I I tell my students to look around the world at ideas that you think are just mad, and that'll give you ideas for what you can do with your life to make the world a better place. Uh, and this is a very obvious one. Uh, so on that note, I shall uh leave you all to think.