Violence in Syria continues to escalate, with
government forces reportedly shelling the city of Homs. Andrew Tabler of
the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and the Wilson Center's
Aaron David Miller talk about who the key players are within Syria and
what they want.
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© 2012 National Public Radio®. For personal, noncommercial use only.
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NEAL CONAN, HOST:
This
is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan in Washington. Violence in Syria
continues to spiral with no end in sight. A U.N.-sponsored ceasefire
plan lays in tatters with no clear alternative. The government shows no
signs of giving in, and while the Syrian National Council elected a new
leader over the weekend, opposition exiles remain weak and divided, and
any number of groups operate inside the country, organizing everything
from protests to attacks on government forces.
To
add to the confusion, there's Syria's neighbors and its enemies and its
allies. As the crisis continues to boil, today a look at the players
inside and outside and how their roles are changing. If you have a
question about who's who in Syria, give us a call, 800-989-8255. Email
us, talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation at our website.
That's at npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION.
Later
in the program, on The Opinion Page, the advent of the fetal genome
prompts Ross Douthat to consider parents' choices. But first who's who
in Syria. Andrew Tabler, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for
Near East Policy and author of the book "In the Lion's Den: An
Eyewitness Account of Washington's Battle with Syria," he joins us from
our bureau in New York, nice to have you with us today.
ANDREW TABLER: Good morning.
CONAN:
And let's begin with the biggest player in Syria, of course that's the
government. And we'll get to Alawites and other divisions first, but
this is the Baath Party, the same party as Saddam Hussein.
TABLER:
That's right, and not only that, but it's the same kind of regime. In
Iraq, you had the Sunnis, a minority in that country, using Baathism to
rule over the majority Shia population and the Kurds, as well. In Syria,
instead of Sunnis, you have Alawites, who are about 12 percent of the
population, ruling over the majority Sunni population, which is about 75
percent. And so very similar things, similar brutality and also
extremely difficult regimes to displace when the time comes to do so.
CONAN: We remember in Iraq circles of security forces and countersecurity forces, everybody spying on everybody else.
TABLER:
Exactly. Living in Syria is like living, for example, there are many
movies out there which I think, you know, sort of depict life in the
Eastern bloc. "The Lives of Others," if you've ever seen it, comes to
mind. That's what living in Syria is like.
The
Mukhabarat, which we call security services, really in Arabic just
means informers. So if you're there, and you're working there, it's not
just the secret police, the guys in black jackets who show up in leather
jackets, but it's many times your friends and your colleagues who
report on you, and that's how Syrian society has been ruled for decades.
CONAN:
And Alawites, the ruling family, the Assads, who have been in power now
for 40 years, they are Alawites, the leadership of the country. What's
an Alawite?
TABLER: An Alawite is a heterodox
offshoot of Shia Islam. The mainline Shia, like those in Iran and
Hezbollah, are what they call twelvers, waiting for the 12th imam.
Alawites are eleveners. They - it - they primarily come from the Syrian
coast. They have been regarded by many Muslims, including Sunnis, as
apostates and were treated horribly under Ottoman rule.
And
so since the 1960s, when Hafez al-Assad finally came to power, Bashar
al-Assad's father, in 1970, they've run roughshod over Syria. And so
that's what makes the current insurgency, civil unarmed insurgency
against the Assad regime, take on a very sectarian nature. You have
Sunnis trying to displace an Alawite regime.
CONAN:
And if one were to think Alawites, the ruling party, the ruling family
may want to leave and go somewhere else, there's not an awful lot of
places for them to go.
TABLER: No there
isn't. They could - and I think this is the current thinking is that as
the regime degrades that the Assad regime's forces will withdraw to the
Syrian coast. When Syria was a mandate, after the First World War until
1936, actually there was a separate republic on the state, the Republic
of Latakia, and that's where Alawites come from. They come from the
coastal mountains. We think that they would retreat there, and that
would of course allow them to continue their links with Hezbollah in
Lebanon, as well.
CONAN: So those are the -
some of the divisions. But we also look to - no party could rule without
some political support. The Alawites, a very small fraction in terms of
the population, but they must have support from some within the
country.
TABLER: Absolutely. Traditionally,
other minorities gathered around the Alawites, and for example, Saddam
Hussein's regime, you know, Sunnis were about 25 percent of the
population. They didn't need so much cooptation. In Syria, they need
much more.
So they have Christians, which are
about 10 percent of the population, Druze and other small sects
gathered around them. And so collectively, minorities are about 25
percent. But that really wasn't enough to rule the country, and Hafez
al-Assad stabilized the system by bringing in other Sunnis, the
(unintelligible) bourgeoisie and also the tribal Sunnis of eastern Syria
and the settled tribal Sunnis of the Haran region south of Damascus.
And
that gave the regime a sort of Sunni - what I call a Sunni veneer. The
problem that Assad has now is that that Sunni veneer is - has rapidly
come off the regime, and the system now is destabilized. It doesn't mean
it's going to fall over tomorrow, but there are large parts of the
country in which the opposition in the Free Syrian Army now, you know,
can control the different areas for extensive periods of time.
And we expect that this - that the degradation of the regime will continue in the weeks and the months to come.
CONAN:
We're talking with Andrew Tabler, a senior fellow at the Washington
Institute for Near East Policy. We're trying to figure out who are the
players and the stakes in Syria, 800-989-8255. Email us, talk@npr.org.
And John's(ph) on the line with us from St. Louis.
JOHN:
Hi, yes, my question is - I heard you mention that the Alawites are a
small percentage. What approximate percentage of the population are
they?
TABLER: Approximately 12 percent of the population are Alawites.
JOHN: OK, OK, well, thank you very much.
CONAN:
All right, John, thanks very much for the call. Let's see if we can go
next to - this is Daniel(ph), Daniel with us from St. Paul.
DANIEL: Yes, well, thanks for being on the show. Thanks for taking my call.
CONAN: Sure.
DANIEL:
I heard a year ago, say, give or take, from someone with similar
expertise that there were, like, 11 secret service police or agencies in
the country, and so there could be theoretically 11 simultaneous
investigations into the same family, none of the agencies necessarily
sharing information. Does that make sense to you, as an expert?
TABLER:
That's absolutely right. I have a very good friend of mine whose father
disappeared in the Hama massacre of 1982, in which between 10,000 and
30,000 people died. And the reason why we don't know how many people
died that day, the regime shelled the fourth-largest city, Hama, is that
so many people disappeared. They were just arrested.
His
father was arrested, and they never heard from him again. And still to
this day, members of different branches of the Secret Service will come
to their house looking for my friend's father. And of course their
response is, well, we haven't seen him since February of 1982. We were
hoping you could tell us where he is.
And the
officer, who probably wasn't even born in 1982, just looks at them and
says oh my God, I'm so sorry they never told you what happened to him.
And they said no. And they said, well, we don't know what happened to
him, either. This is very similar to Nazi Germany and a lot of other
authoritarian systems in the Eastern bloc.
Syria's
Mukhabarat was the secret service. They were trained by the East
Germans, the Stasi. They're very good at what they do, and they're very
good at spreading fear.
CONAN: Thanks very much for the call.
DANIEL: OK, thank you.
CONAN:
Bye-bye. As we think about this, again using the example of Iraq, what
we found was that various families, various tribes played all sides
against the middle. They would have some members of their family in
government pay and others with the opposition in various parts of the
opposition. Is that also happening in Syria?
TABLER:
That's right. The - traditionally the Assad regime has been able to
divide and rule the country. Syria is a collection of different sects
and ethnicities and, you know, different religions. Also, you know, a
sizable chunk of the Sunni population is Kurdish. So what the Assad
regime is able to do - and Hafez al-Assad was very good at doing this -
was able to, you know, play off one community against another.
So
the community that the Assad regime hates traditionally are the Sunnis
who lived closest to the Syrian coast, where the Alawites are from. This
is in the northwestern part of the country, around Hama, Idlib and
Homs. And so what they did is they organized other Sunnis, from Damascus
and Aleppo in eastern Syria, in the Haran region, against those Sunnis.
And
they successfully did this, until, of course, the outbreak of the
current uprising in March of 2011, when the regime decided to use - to
use a lot of live fire on protesters in the Haran Region, one of their
area of support, after people went out in the streets, because the
regime had arrested a group of children for scrawling on a wall the
people want the fall of the regime.
That's
what set it off, and they've been losing that Sunni veneer ever since,
and not only that, but even members of the different minorities in Syria
have also been, you know, walking away from the regime but I think much
more silently. They're starting to understand that Bashar al-Assad
can't really hold on in the long-term.
CONAN:
You mentioned the Hama massacre back in 1982, again the father of the
current President Assad. But that was the Muslim Brotherhood, who had
been exerting more and more power in that town. Are they a factor today?
TABLER:
They are. They are primarily a factor in exile from Turkey. They make
up a sizable part of what's called the Syrian National Council and just
elected a new leader recently. They're trying to overhaul the
organization. They are one of the most organized exile groups, and
Turkey supports them substantially.
Inside of
the country, though, it's unclear about their prominence. I think in
the northwestern part of the country, where people traditionally, you
know, their traditional base around Idlib, Hama and I think even Aleppo.
I think that they have some traction elsewhere; it's hard to say.
They'll be a factor in a post-Assad Syria, but it's unclear whether
they'll actually dominate it.
CONAN: And the opposition largely Sunni, exclusively Sunni?
TABLER: It's largely Sunni, but it's not only. There are Christians and Druze and...
CONAN: Druze another offshoot of Shia Islam.
TABLER:
That's right and which has gone even further away from Shia Islam than
Alawites. The - and so they're also part of the opposition. And so - but
increasingly, you have this Alawite-versus-Sunni dynamic going on, and
this is what we've seen in the massacres in the last few days in Homs,
in Hama province.
CONAN: We're talking about
who's who in Syria. If you have questions, 800-989-8255. Email us,
talk@npr.org. Up next, the many players maneuvering outside of Syria's
borders, all of them with interests and all of them with allies. Aaron
David Miller will join us. I'm Neal Conan. Stay with us. It's the TALK
OF THE NATION from NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
CONAN:
This is TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. I'm Neal Conan. Kofi Annan,
the former United Nations secretary-general, said today he was gravely
concerned about ongoing violence in Syria. Fighters for and against the
government now blatantly ignore his ceasefire plan, and many fear the
situation may rapidly deteriorate into civil war, if it's not already
there.
We're focused today on the players,
who's who in Syria, and what they want. If you have questions for our
guest, give us a call, 800-989-8255. Email talk@npr.org. You can also
join the conversation on our website. That's at npr.org. Click on TALK
OF THE NATION.
Our guest is Andrew Tabler,
senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, author
of "In the Lion's Den: An Eyewitness Account of Washington's Battle With
Syria." And joining us here in Studio 3A is Aaron David Miller, who
served for two decades at the State Department as an advisor to six
secretaries of state. He is now a distinguished scholar in the Middle
East Program at the Wilson Center. And Aaron David Miller, nice to have
you back on TALK OF THE NATION.
AARON DAVID MILLER: Pleasure to be here, Neal.
CONAN:
And in addition to that stew of groups inside and outside in terms of
the Syrian exiles, there is any number of Syria's neighbors who are
vitally concerned with what's going on, and Andrew Tabler mentioned
Turkey a little while ago, at one point probably Syria's most important
commercial ally, more and more a political ally until tables were
turned.
MILLER: Right, and in fact Erdogan
and the Turks were determined to maintain a relationship with the
Syrians and the Iranians and to pursue a policy of no hostility toward
any group. The Turks are now in a real bind. They have to watch and are
affected by refugee flow, 70, 80 thousand. They see their Sunni
compatriots being killed across the border, and yet they're very
reluctant to lead.
They're very reluctant to
basically force the issue of military intervention or even take a
primary role in creating safe zones because I think they really are
afraid of several things: undermining their soft power - we want to be
liked by everyone.
They don't want to get in a
tussle in the Iranians. And they have their own minority groups, the
Alavis and others, who might be opposed to intervention. So the Turks
like so many of Syria's neighbors and the external players, are not all
talking or speaking or acting from the same page, and that's the real
problem.
You have a coalition, but it is a
coalition of the unwilling, the opposed and the disabled, and the
problem is, unlike Libya or any of the Iraq ventures that we
participated in, you have outside parties that are working at
cross-purposes with no unified strategy to either stop the killing or
effect the political transition that will be more stable or better than
the Assads.
CONAN: Another neighbor or set of
neighbors, and that is Qatar and Saudi Arabia, who appear to be
supplying weapons at this point to the opposition in Syria.
MILLER:
Right, and I think the Saudi view goes to the broader game, which is a
Shia-Sunni game and their fear of Iran and their fear of a so-called
Shia Crescent. The Saudis are determined...
CONAN: Shia Crescent running from Iran, through Iraq, through Syria, into Lebanon.
MILLER:
And Lebanon. And of course the Saudis perceive and ascribe(ph) to a
conspiratorial view of these matters as well. So Bahrain becomes a sort
of Achilles heel, if you will. How deeply the Iranians are involved on
that is a matter of speculation, but from the Saudi perspective, there
is this problem with encirclement.
And the
question is how to prevent at all costs the emergence of a Sunni regime,
those extremists in character, from taking over in Syria. So for the
Saudis the stakes, it seems to me, are very high. And yet again it's
virtually impossible for the Saudis and anyone else to have the kind of
leverage or the kind of allies on the ground to effect real change, stop
the killing and create a political transition of consequence.
CONAN:
Well, moving a little further afield, you turn to the great powers.
Russia, in the guise of the Soviet Union, several, many decades ago,
well, Syria was one of its important client states in the Middle East.
MILLER:
Very important, probably the last remaining relatively reliable Russian
ally. But again, here the Russians are driven more by fears than by
hopes. I think the - I think Putin really understands that Assad, and I
think Andrew is right - of course we've been saying this now for the
last seven months, it's only a matter of time, it's only a matter of
time, and yet Assad still continues and survives.
But
I think the Russians understand that there will be a transition. It's
just they do not want to see that transition occur without their hand
being very influential. And they do not want to see another ally fall at
the urging of the United States.
Think about
it from their perspective. Saddam is gone, a former ally. Gadhafi is
gone, a former ally. Both as a consequence of American, Western
initiatives. They want us to put pressure - want them to put pressure on
Iran, another Russian ally. So I think they're clearly in a position
where they don't want to see Assad fall as a consequence of some
external military pressure, and they want to preserve their own assets -
warm-water ports at Tartus, their stake in Syrian.
The
debt problem has been resolved. But again, Putin believes that Russia
is still a great power, and great powers have influence are looked to to
provide help with problems, and that's where he wants to be.
CONAN:
Andrew Tabler, we read from time to time of Russian freighters docking
in Tartus with shiploads of weapons. How important is Russia?
TABLER:
They're vital for the Assad regime to survive. They - it's more than
just the provision of weapons, which they've given throughout the
uprising, and, you know, they're an old, you know, Soviet client state.
It's also the political protection at the U.N.
Time
and time again - remember, like, you know, now what's hailed as
progress at the U.N. is when the U.N. issues a press statement, when you
can actually get everyone to agree on something on Syria. And this
would seem to be progress if the situation wasn't deteriorating so
badly.
And in the case of the Annan plan, the
six-point plan, which was put forward a few months ago, the - we had a
situation where President Assad didn't even implement the plan. He
didn't implement the plan to withdraw forces on April 10 or to a
ceasefire on April 12.
And then after that we
didn't do anything because the Russians would block any move that we
would try and make, and that kind of paralysis at the U.N. level has
exacerbated the situation and I think made it worse, considering the
current situation.
CONAN: You also have then
reluctant Europeans - for example, the new president of France, Francois
Hollande, saying that he will do nothing without a United Nations
Security Council resolution, which is clearly not forthcoming, Aaron
David Miller.
MILLER: Yeah, I mean, yeah,
he's just not Sarkozy. I mean, he's focused elsewhere. He doesn't have
Sarkozy's relatively inflated or exaggerated notion of France's
self-importance as Sarkozy drove the situation in Libya. And so you're
not going to get action from the Europeans. The U.N. is only as strong
as the five permanent members of the Security Council.
The
Russians fear a post-Assad Sunni extremist regime, and I think they
really do blame the Saudis for this. They don't trust the Saudis for
their support of so-called Wahhabists in Chechnya. That's very much on
Putin's mind: What comes the day after Assad?
And
that leaves, of course, the greatest great power of all. And here
again, I think - and I empathize and sympathize with the president on
this one. I think his cardinal objective between now and November, I
call him the not-now president, is to avoid any military action, either
in Iran, or in the case of the Israelis, have the Israelis do it, or a
unilateral, risky, half-measure military initiative in Syria that
essentially makes him vulnerable.
Americans
are not focused on foreign policy. Romney cannot touch him on foreign
policy. The only thing that could hurt him is a stumble. And Iran and
Syria are both places where the United States has demonstrated in the
past and can continue to demonstrate real ineptitude. He has to be very
careful and think through the consequences, even at the expense of
watching this horrific killing, what America should do.
CONAN: Let's get another caller in, and this is Michael, Michael with us from Beaufort in North Carolina.
MICHAEL:
...Syrian (unintelligible) about the Druze population across the
borders. And I'm wondering whether - what - where Israel is, especially
they've got the Golan Heights and they've got Druze population. I wonder
how that population is reacting to what's going on in Syria, and if you
could just discuss Israel's stance about just watching or being active
or preparing or whatever.
CONAN: Andrew
Tabler, you would at first blush think the Israelis say this is one of
our most implacable enemies and has been for many years - bye-bye,
Assad, we will cheer as you leave Damascus.
TABLER:
Yeah, the Israelis have no love for Bashar al-Assad. It's - this goes
way back. It has, actually, nothing to do with the uprising. Bashar
al-Assad had flown by every red line that was ever put down for his
father, Hafez al-Assad, whether it's provision of Scud missiles to
Hezbollah. I mean, his track record was terrible, and despite a lot of
real efforts to engage him.
I think the
Israelis are looking very carefully at what's going on around them. They
also realize - they don't want into play in Assad's rhetoric. Assad's
tried to spin this as an American Zionist conspiracy. But I think
they're also kind of realistic in that they realize that really what's
going on in Syria, the hurricane that is building there, and it is, it's
absolutely a hurricane, and I don't see it going away anytime soon,
doesn't have a whole lot to do with them.
It
does have a lot to do with them, though, if Syria's chemical and
biological weapons stockpile gets loose. They have one of the largest
stockpiles in the Middle East, and this is not a fantasy or even
something up for debate, like Saddam Hussein's program.
There's
- there are real concerns about what happens as - if the state
degrades, and if those weapons get loose, what happens? And that's a
major factor in their thinking.
CONAN: And
Aaron David Miller, they also have to be at least thinking about the
contingency that a cornered President Assad may say, well, let's
complicate matters a little more and get the Israelis involved.
MILLER:
Well, at this stage, I used to believe that in fact that was an option
for the Syrians. I'm not sure it is anymore. I think it's the issue of a
degraded non-state that concerns more. And think about it again from
their perspective. Lebanon is a non-state to their north. The
Palestinians a non-state in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority. Their
relationship with the Egyptians is only going to get worse even if the
treaty survives. The Golan agreement signed June 1, 1974 has provided
the quietest space in the Middle East for the longest period of time.
It's
actually quite remarkable. Not that that's in jeopardy. It might be in
the event the Syrian state actually collapses and it fragments. So
that's a concern. But again, their involvement I'm sure is clandestine.
I'm sure they have people on the ground. I'm sure they're up doing a
whole lot of things we don't know about. But on the overt side, they're
watching and waiting.
CONAN: On the overt side, they are more concerned about Iran and would consider anything involving Syria a distraction.
MILLER:
A distraction but potentially a wedge, a weakening lever to pull in the
event the Syrian-Iranian relationship collapses. But again, with
collapse, with the end of authoritarianism, with the evolution of
centrality comes chaos and additional problems.
CONAN: Let's see if we go next to Hamad(ph), and Hamad's on the line from Houston.
HAMAD:
Yes, sir. I was wondering about how can we back the backers of the
opposition like mainly Qatar and Saudi Arabia and, you know, as far as
the human(ph) rights, there's no human rights in those countries at all.
They have thousands and thousands of political prisoners
(unintelligible) in Bahrain, Saudi, they're killing(ph) them. How can we
get involved with that kind of situation?
CONAN:
Well, those are some of the people who are very involved in Syria,
Andrew Tabler, and yes, indeed, they are American allies.
TABLER:
They are. I think that it's important, you know, consistency is
important in foreign policy, but in the end we want to achieve our
foreign policy objectives, right? And we have a couple in Syria. It's
the stated policy of the United States by President Obama that President
Assad should step aside. Now, how that happens, you know, is up for
debate. Anyone who wants to join in that struggle, I think the U.S.
would listen to them, with the exception of extremist groups, like
al-Qaida and affiliates, you know.
Now, it's
true that those Gulf countries are also authoritarian, but they're also
allies, or allies by remote, to the U.S. It's possible to work in
concert with them in the short term in terms of bringing down the
regime, but the real question about what comes after Assad is the
problem. And it's there that I don't think they share our long-term
objectives, and it would depend also whether you're talking about the
governments of those countries and the individuals in those countries.
Many of those individuals are privately supporting the opposition, and
they have different goals as well, so you know, a confusing picture.
CONAN:
Andrew Tabler, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near
East Policy; his book "In the Lion's Den: An Eyewitness Account of
Washington's Battle with Syria." Also with us, Aaron David Miller, who's
with the Wilson Center as a distinguished scholar in the Middle East
program. Of course he served in - as a senior member of the State
Department under Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush. You're listening
to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.
And
that brings us, Andrew Tabler, to some of the forces that are involved -
the Syrian army. We mentioned the stockpiles of chemical weapons, but
this is a - well, it's certainly - we think about the Libya example, a
much more formidable force than Libya. And there's also these militia
groups, the shabihas. We heard you talking about those on ALL THINGS
CONSIDERED as - describing the word as ghosts, former gangs of smugglers
and outlaws who've taken their black Mercedes and now put them at the
services of the government as an arm of the armed forces of Syria.
TABLER:
That's absolutely right. What's happened is that the regime's response
has gone from just using security forces and army to then - and that was
not effective. The opposition didn't go away, and that was the civil
opposition. Then people started taking up arms. They - so then the
regime began using shelling both by security services and by the army.
People still didn't go away. The regime goes into areas and tries to
clear and hold them. But the problem the regime has is that it doesn't
have enough forces.
They have only certain
numbers of forces that they can - Alawite divisions that they can rely
on. So they go in, in a game, what they call whack-a-mole in policy
circles. They go in and try - like the carnival game and try and whack
the mole's head, but then the mole goes back down the hole and pops up
somewhere else. And this process is degrading the regime slowly, and
it's one of the things that, what the Saudis call the killing machine,
that is driving forces across the border.
And
the latest rendition, what has happened is as this approach has not
worked, now what they do is they shell an area to sort of soften the
beach, so to speak, in military terms, and then they now send in the
shabiha, these Alawite gangs, to terrorize the populations and many
times execute people. This is a way to reinstitute the fear factor. The
only problem the Assad regime has yet again is it's not working.
CONAN:
And we seemed to be encountering - Syria did not suffer the same kind
of sectarian violence as Lebanon did, certainly not as its other
neighbor, Iraq, did, yet as people line up one side or the other, if you
are on the government side now, it is going to be impossible to make
your amends with the opposition should they come into power, and vice
versa.
TABLER: Absolutely. This is the
problem about - I just had a discussion with a senior policymaker about
this. The question is, you know - you know, is - I think the genie is
now fully out of the bottle. I don't really think that that it's
possible for this to settle down anytime soon. And even if Assad - would
Assad going be enough, you know, the - what they call the Yemen
solution for Syria, it sounds great but it - I really don't know how
just the Assad family would go, who would take over afterwards.
And
even if that was possible, let's say a rump Alawite regime did try to
do - negotiate an exit, and then a - here's the question: With whom in
the opposition could they negotiate to clear the streets? We don't - you
know, the Syrian opposition is - it's not leaderless, but it's
headless, because if it had a head, Assad would try and chop it off, and
they're not going to give him the pleasure. So it's unclear with whom
he could do the deal, or a rump Alawite state without Assad could do the
deal, to sort of handle this transition and move towards election. So I
think that's one of the reasons why we're headed towards increased
chaos here in the summer before the U.S. election.
CONAN: Andrew Tabler, thanks very much for your time today.
TABLER: Thank you.
CONAN:
As we mentioned, Andrew Tabler, a senior fellow at the Washington
Institute for Near East Policy. Aaron David Miller, always nice to have
you on the program.
MILLER: Pleasure, Neal.
CONAN: Aaron David Miller joined us here in Studio 3A. He's a distinguished scholar at the Wilson Center.
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