Shawn Ryan

into Syria.

They wanted us to do the heavy lifting so that they could eventually get their goal of taking out Assad, who was supporting Hezbollah and Hamas, and then also taking out Iran.

So that's why they supported the war in Iraq.

The prime minister at the time, Ariel Sharon, initially said, no, I don't support this.

I want America to focus on taking out Iran first.

But then eventually he got on board.

So you basically had both major political parties inside of Israel pushing for the war in Iraq.

The Israelis also wanted access to Iraq's oil supply so that they could get a pipeline of oil coming out of Iraq and directly into Israel, circumventing Syria because they didn't want to go through Syria because Assad was supporting the Iranians and supporting Hamas and Hezbollah.

So once we got into Iraq and got into that quagmire, we, the US government, screwed things up so badly that we basically handed over Iraq, as you know, to Iranian-backed Shias that were there.

So by the time we were done in Iraq, Iran pretty much controlled Iraq through their proxies, helped them circumvent sanctions.

made Iran even stronger.

So then you had the Shia Crescent.

You basically had a unification of Tehran, Baghdad, and Damascus forming that crescent, that land bridge, Iranian supplies, going right into Israel's backyard.

So the Israelis at the end of the Iraq War were like, no, no, this is not gonna work at all.

We have to break this up.

We have to go to war in Syria.

We have to take down Assad.

Arab Spring happened.

There was some energy from the people.

I think it was somewhat organic.