Bill Roggio
speaker
300 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 8 Aug
Bill Roggio’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
If he was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, would the American people and the American government be so willing to accede to his demands, to recognize him? Would he be welcome at the White House? Would he shake the hands of the president?
Yeah, the developments in Yemen are interesting. So the Biden administration, as we discussed before, mainly targeted weapons systems things for the Yemeni in order to try to get the Yemenis to stop attacking international shipping. It didn't work. The Trump administration has taken a different tack. It's not only targeting weapons systems. It's going after individuals. And just today, the U.S.
Central Command, which is directing the strikes, targeted a fuel depot that is being used to provide, you know, that is to basically to fuel the Yemeni military. So this is but also targeting the leadership. I've seen reports Yemeni generals and colonels are starting to be identified as being killed. We didn't see this under the Biden campaign. We are seeing this.
under the trump campaign whether it'll work battle remains to be seen i think that the you know the houthis are just a small terrorist organization it runs a government it runs a military so it's a terrorist government um And so there's a lot of work to be done, but you have a far better chance to get them to stop attacks on international shipping than you did under the Biden administration.
If you could call it a strategy of just targeting weapons systems that can be and were being replaced by both the Yemenis who manufacture them and the Iranians who supplied them.
So I think a downside is, is you could see a Libya or a Syrian situation where you have a fractured Yemeni state, which you really essentially do now. But if the Yemeni government that we support is really very toothless.
One of my concerns is that Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula can reassert control, as it has done several times in the past, or that you get a situation where Al Qaeda is all of a sudden viewed as moderate, just as it is in Syria, where you have a specially designated global terrorist who leads a foreign terrorist organization who's become president and runs the government.
So of Syria, that you can have a situation like that. The problem is that I that I see with our foreign policy, and this is not a left or right or Republican or Democrat issue, but it's a Washington issue, is that we're always looking for someone to work with.
And in places like Yemen and Libya and Syria, there are really very few good actors or the ones that are good tend to be powerless or maintain very little power. So my concern is that this if the We replace the Houthis, or if we depose the Houthis, they could be replaced with another bad actor, and we could be convinced that they're good actors. That's exactly what happened in Syria.
We exchanged one bad leader, Assad, and replaced them with a terrorist. Is the situation better in Syria today than it was a year ago? I'd argue it's just as bad. It's just a different kind of situation.
I completely agree. We absolutely should be taking out the Houthis. We should do everything. We just need to be, as you said, be pragmatic. Your case of Afghanistan is perfect. Right. When we the Taliban, we President Trump negotiated the Doha agreement with them that President Biden used to withdraw. And we're talking to the Taliban now.
We we took off the bounty, the $10 million bounty for Sir Juncker, one of the most horrible terrorists on this planet. He's responsible for the deaths and wounding of thousands of Americans in Afghanistan, tons of thousands of Afghans. He's with ties to Al Qaeda. So We may be good at deposing a regime. We just don't seem to have foresight. And you're absolutely correct.
We project our values upon people that really are our enemies. The Taliban are our friend. Ahmed al-Shara in Syria and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which he runs. They are not an ally, and yet we're treating them like one. And I hope we don't... you know, have followed similar steps in Yemen as we've done in Libya, right? Another basket case study of our failed follow through policy.
And I just hope we don't do that again.
I fall somewhere in the middle of interventionism and isolationism only because we're really bad at interventionalism, right? So... If we're going to intervene, we need to do it wisely. We need to understand our enemy. We need to understand the limitations of our allies and understand who they are as well and what their goals are.
And we shouldn't get involved like, you know, in retrospect, you know, deposing the Taliban. And then trying to prop up, as you mentioned, promote democracy in Afghanistan. That was a fool's errand. It should have been very clear from the very beginning. We should have had limited goals in Afghanistan. Instead, we had lofty goals. Same thing in Iraq.
Same thing in Syria, where we take a terrorist organization, the Turkestan People's Workers Party, which is a foreign terrorist organization responsible for killing tens of thousands of Turks and called on the Syrian Democratic Forces. Or I'm sorry, the Syrian Democratic Forces. There's nothing democratic about a Marxist terrorist organization. But again, it's another perfect case of projection.
We need to be very careful. We can't ignore the world. We get things like 9-11 because we pretend that Afghanistan was fine and that Al-Qaeda wasn't a threat.
um but you know again we just have to we need better leadership we need better expertise we need to get rid of the people in the state department in the department of defense that have these you know and it's again this isn't a left and a right issue there's a lot of ideological uh blinders on both sides of the aisle again they're project
their values and their vision of the world and in the Middle East and Africa and many places in the world, they do not share our values. And we have to be very careful when we decide to You know, when we when we're going to go into democracy and nation building.
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