Episode 13 - Soldier Leaving Syria, Lawless London and a Christmas Adventure!

The President gets massive pushback from his decision to pull troops out of Syria.  London is looking more like the Wild West, and come along with my kids and I on a Christmas adventure!  It's December 26, 2018.  And this is the Hot Zone.

 

Hi Everybody, I'm Chuck Holton.  Hope you had a great Christmas.  When President Trump announced last week that the US would begin pulling it's troops out of Syria immediately, it caused an uproar even among some of his staunchest supporters. Secretary of Defense James Mattis even went so far as  to resign his position over the move.  And it's left a lot of people asking why...what caused the President to make this move so suddenly, and why now?  

 

Well I'll never pretend to understand the mind of Donald Trump, but he claimed on twitter that the pullout was something he'd been wanting to accomplish for a long time.  As I said last week, however, you can't end a war just by stopping it.  And ISIS is most certainly not defeated in Iraq, Syria or anywhere else.

 

In Iraq, for example, there are still attacks by ISIS fighters on an almost daily basis, according to an intel briefing I get every day from a security company based in Erbil.  Estimates in Syria are that ISIS has at least 2,000 men under arms, and some estimates range as high as 30,000.  That's because much of the southern part of Syria as well as North western Iraq are Sunni areas, and ISIS is a Sunni organization.  That means ISIS still has at least some support by the people who live in that area, and those citizens could at any time take up arms for ISIS if they felt they had a good reason to do so.  The US leaving the region might just give them that reason.

 

Without a doubt, the people who will be most hurt by this move are the Kurds.  

 

 

I was asked on Christmas eve to brief a well-known public figure who is hoping to have a meeting with President Trump soon to ask him to reconsider his move in light of the effects a pullout will have on the Kurdish people.  Here's some of what I told him based on information from my sources inside Iraq and Syria:

 

THE REASON the Kurds, Turks, Syrians, Iraqi PMU's (controlled by Iran) are fighting in the region is NOT to defeat ISIS.  They are fighting over control of that area.  Iran is very determined to assert control there in order to more easily supply Hezbollah with the arms they need to attack Israel.   If the US leaves, it creates a vacuum that WILL be filled by someone.  Ask yourself who we'd want to fill that void.  The only reasonable answer aligned with American interests is the Kurdish Peshmerga.

 

The Kurds number some 36 million people, the largest ethic group in the world without it's own state.  they've been trying to become an actual nation for over 100 years.  

 

- The Kurds are made up of dozens of disparate political parties.  The Kurdish Worker's Party (PKK) is aligned with Marxism and has been at war with Turkey since the early 80's.  They are an officially designated terror group by the US and Turkey.  They recently claimed responsibility for a car bomb in the Syrian town of Afrin which killed 4 people.  This is part of the problem, since the PKK sort of give all the Kurds a bad name with Turkey, Syria, and by proxy Russia, Iran and even the United States.

- The YPG is a more moderate arm of the Peshmerga, which are part of the Syrian Defense Forces the US troops have been supporting in the fight against ISIS.

- ISIS IS NOT DEFEATED.  There may be as many as 2,000 active fighters left in Syria, and they are trying to reconstitute in West Mosul, which was never completely pacified.  They still have broad support from the Sunni majority there.  Remember, ISIS took over Northern Iraq with 700+ fighters.  And defeated the Iraqi army in the area.

 

- The US presence there is VITAL to our interests in the region - for the sake of Israel and for the sake of whatever Christians, the Yezidis, the Druze and any other non-muslims that are left in that region.  A free Kurdistan would be the only safe place for those minorities to live.

- Kurdistan has borne much of the costs of the refugee crisis caused by the war in Syria, there are still hundreds of thousands of refugees living in Kurdistan, and every dollar spent caring for refugees there saves Europe and the US about $13.  We should support this as much as possible, because it will allow the refugees to return home quickly and easily once things calm down in Syria.

 

- A permanent US air base in Erbil would be a very good thing.   In fact, the President ought to announce that he is closing Incirlik air base in Turkey and moving it to Erbil.  That would send a strong statement.

 

- The Kurds feel very abandoned by the US now, and feel like this isn't the first time we've left them hanging.  The Obama administration abandoned them too in 2014 when ISIS first came into Iraq.  So the Kurds are suspicious of America, but remain hopeful.  They have a saying in Kurdistan:  "The Americans will always do the right thing...once they have expended all other options."

 

They are calling it "Lawless London".  The capital of Great Britain has seen a constant rise in crime and violence since the current mayor, Sadiq Khan took office in 2016. The numbers are astounding.  Two acid attacks per day, more than 40,000 knife attacks last year alone.  Murders up 12%, Violent crime up 22%.  Robberies off the charts.  Even seizures of automatic weapons are up dramatically, which is kind of strange since even the majority of police don't have guns at all, and firearms ownership by civilians is basically prohibited.  

 

The mayor blames the problem on budget cuts which have affected the police and on easy access to weapons.  In the past two years we've seen a push for age restrictions on household cleaners, a knife ban and even a push for people to file the pointy ends off of their kitchen knives.  Nothing seems to be working.

 

Sure, more police might serve as a deterrent, and of course the police need to be empowered to actually enforce the law and arrest perpetrators.  but The reality of what is causing this spike in bad behavior is much more complex.  I'd chalk the crime wave up to four main reasons.

 

 

1. A flood of cocaine - the last several years have seen major increases in the amount of cocaine flooding into the UK.  And since the vast majority of murders in that country (actually in almost every country) are somehow connected with the drug trade, more drugs means more violence, more crime, and more mental illness - which takes me to my next point.
2.  The National Health Service:  Stats out of the UK show 40% of all visits to a general practitioner in the UK had to do with mental illness.  But long wait times and poor treatment options mean many people aren't getting the help they need.  The UK is touted by the left in this country as a model for socialized medicine.  But in reality, that "free" healthcare in the UK isn't free by any means, and the care isn't that great either.  
3. Ultra-high taxes.  Did you know that the top tax bracket in the UK used to be 99 and a quarter percent?  That number has dropped since the 80's but Londoners still pay absolutely crushing levels of taxes on income, miles driven, purchases (the sales or value-added tax can be as high as 20% all by itself).  They pay taxes on property, services and just about everything else.  It's just my opinion, but I think that these kinds of tax rates amount to a kind of government-sanctioned slavery that leads to more poverty, despair, and resentment among the population.  And we are seeing it in London in the suicide rate among young men especially, who have very little hope of ever becoming upwardly mobile in a society that punished the hardest workers and rewards illegal migrants and criminals.
4. Church attendance.  Less than five percent of people in Great Britain are members of a local church.  And that indicates many people have nothing bigger than themselves to live for.  And it's been shown again and again that when you are the end-all and be-all of your own existence, it brings loneliness, bitterness and I'd say dramatically increases your chances of becoming mentally ill.  We all need other people, and social media really isn't that social.  People do much better when they are other-focused, not me-focused.  By comparison, church membership in the United States is more than ten times higher, and even that number is down sharply, which is not a good sign for American culture either. In the nineties American church membership was about ninety percent, and has declined almost every year since.  

 

I think you can learn something from everyone you meet...either learn things you want to emulate, or learn what NOT to do.  Countries can learn from each other too.  As usual when it comes to Europe, America can learn a lot about what won't work in making our streets safer.  I worry most about my last point with regards to the UK - church attendance.  American culture is awash with so many forms of media that we are in real danger of entertaining ourselves to death.  John Piper's excellent book, "Don't waste your life" makes a good case why we should be on guard against entertainment.  He submits that it cheapens our lives, and can make it harder for us to think deep thoughts, feel deep emotion and establish deep relationships.

 

That's one reason I started this podcast.  Not only to give you a concise rundown on world events and crisis, but to allow you to take a deeper role in it, rather than just being a spectator.  I want to help you make the news good for people who are affected by world events.  

 

We did this for Christmas with a young single mother from Honduras named Yuri.  She joined the caravan in November and made her way across Guatemala and into Mexico carrying her precious 2-year-old Noely Monserrat.  When I met them, little Noely was sick, dehydrated and exhausted from nearly 2 weeks on the road.  And her mother had had enough.  So I offered to give them a ride back to the Guatemalan border, where they could catch a bus back to their hometown of San Pedro Sula.  

 

Well, they made it back home, and I've kept in touch with Yuri on Social media since then.  You all pitched in, and I was able to send some money to her to buy Christmas presents for her daughter.  She sent me these photos of the clothes she bought, along with her thanks, and even asked me to be her daughter's godfather.  

 

You had a hand in that.  Perhaps we didn't change that little girl's life, but we sure as heck gave her a bright Christmas this year.  

 

I'm proud to partner with you guys in helping those less fortunate.  It's a great way to start the new year, don't you think?  So if you want to have a part in what we're doing, click on the link below this podcast and go to http://www.patreon.com/hotzone and subscribe.  For thirty six bucks a year you'll get access to a bunch of extras and your money will get put to good use when I head to Syria next month, for example.  

 

I'm planning to bring you along with me.  2019 is going to be amazing.

 

Before I leave you, I want to share a cool adventure I had with my kids this weekend.  As many of you know, we live in a volcanic crater in the mountains of Panama for much of each year.  Well a few months ago during the wet season, I was flying my drone into the mountains that ring our valley, and found a very high waterfall, which might just be the tallest in Panama.  It’s not visible from our town, and the old timers I asked about knew nothing of it.  So my kids and I decided to go find it.  Check this out:

 

That's it for the Hot Zone today.  We'll be back again tomorrow!  I hope you will be too.  Please like and share us on facebook, youtube and wherever else you find us! It will really help us out.

Thanks for being here.

 

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-46597369

 

https://www.foxnews.com/world/scandinavian-hiker-murder-suspects-arrested-may-have-ties-to-isis-danish-intelligence

 

https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2018/08/13/britain-suffers-15-acid-attacks-a-week-with-three-quarters-taking-place-in-london/

 

More than 40,000 knife attacks per year

 

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/5251268/london-stabbings-2018-clapham-shepherds-bush-crouch-hill-kingsland-hammersmith-latest/