Arabist

Uh, there were a number of things that were done to sort of wrongfoot the CIA and expose, uh, some of their operations, uh, in the, in the months leading up to the Six-Day War.

Uh, a-and the CIA, which was a more Arabist institution, not because of the morality of it, but because it just, by their logic and their connections to the oil industry, it made more sense to be friendly to Arabs rather than to, to Zionists.

So the CIA was pot- was a problem that the Zionists needed to manage in order to be able to pull off what they pulled off in n-1967, which was essentially, uh, an aggressive, illegal attack on, uh, on Arabs, [clears throat] that left them in command of a huge swath of territory, and they still haven't given up this territory that they illegally, uh, seized in 1967.

So a lot of work went into that, into laying the groundwork for that, and I think a lot, a, a good bit of that included disclosures and other items to, to blackmail and weaken the CIA in the run-up to this event.

So what we have here is in many ways a perfect storm.

Why? You have on one hand a British foreign office, which maybe has moved forward a bit into the 21st century, but still has a very strong Arabist tradition.

And to use a comparison that people of our generation will recall, the Sir Humphreys there, the senior civil servants there, have a certain way of looking at the world, which isn't necessarily pro-Israel.

Tony Blair, when he was prime minister, famously called the British Foreign Service the Camel Corps.

understand why America was sort of so focused on Iraq owes to this, too.

The Iran-Iraq War was the... progenitor of what became the gulf war of 1991 um if i could bring it up on my screen i'd bring up the notes from saddam's meeting with his war cabinet on the eve of war in 1980 before giving the order to go to war with uh the islamic republic of iran um basically uh everybody from, you know, these Arabists like Saddam was, these pan-Arab, you know, nationalists, to, you know, to these radically pious, you know, Salafi types, you know, like bin Laden, you know, to Zionists in Israel, to these American Cold War functionaries like Rumsfeld and Nick Cheney.

The thing they all agreed on in geostrategic terms was that the sort of natural power arrangement in the Near East is a struggle between Turkey and Iran for regional supremacy.

That's what's precedented for a millennia.

I was born and grew up in Beirut, Lebanon, and English was the third language in the school that I attended.

Having said that, and I'm sure Arabist listeners would understand exactly what I'm about to say, Though I have the ability to read Arabic literature with ease, I always rely on dictionaries and lexicons when I'm reading texts to look up difficult words and appreciate the subtleties and meanings in the text.

Arabic is not just a language, it's a lifetime commitment.

Obviously, you learned English along the way as well.