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00:00:00world.com.
00:00:09You're watching TRT World. I'm Emily Angwin. Here's
00:00:12a reminder of
00:00:13of our main stories. At least 12 people have been killed and more than
00:00:16300 injured an attack on the King colored international
00:00:20airport in
00:00:22of Riad. Saudi Arabia has blamed the Anserallahuthi group in neighboring
00:00:25Yemen. They have been launching attacks on Rehand in recent weeks,
00:00:29but have yet to claim responsibility for this strike.
00:00:33Pakistan's prime minister Shibas Sharif who joined Turquia in
00:00:37signing the Mecca defense pact in August is calling it a heinous
00:00:41attack. Donald Trump is weighing up a US
00:00:44response. I think it's
00:00:48in terrible. Well you're going to find out see, but I think it's
00:00:52in
00:00:52of terrible. Well, they're
00:00:56able to defend.
00:00:57of Look, the Saudis are good fighters, but I... think the attack was
00:01:00terrible thing. a state of emergency has been
00:01:04imposed in the Pakistan province of Pakutunkwa. in the past
00:01:08hour,
00:01:09a there are also reports that the head
00:01:10of the provincial government has been arrested. the province is the
00:01:14stronghold
00:01:15of the PTI party of jailed former prime minister
00:01:17of Imran in Khan. the move comes after days of
00:01:20of marches by khan supporters who had wanted to march to the
00:01:23capital. poland's government is holding
00:01:27emergency meeting emid reports the prime minister and his deputy
00:01:31were the target of assassination attempt. Senior ministers,
00:01:34police and security officials are in discussions right now in
00:01:38Warsaw. Police say they'd received information on
00:01:41Saturday about a possible attack on Donald Tusk and his
00:01:45deputy, who's also the defense minister.
00:01:48Donald Trump says it's time for Ukraine to get new president,
00:01:52following criticism from his Ukrainium counterpart a US
00:01:56diesel deal with Russia. Voladimir Zelensky has called the move.
00:02:00and warned it will only help Russia's war. The deal is
00:02:04expected to lead to the immediate release of more than
00:02:06300,00 tons of Russian diesel with more to
00:02:10come in the months ahead. And in India, Court
00:02:14has released three cockroach genter party leaders after protests erupted in
00:02:18the capital. They were arrested on Saturday
00:02:20of along with
00:02:21of thousands of others who took to the streets calling for the resignation
00:02:24of the country's election chief. They accuse him of side-stepping
00:02:28rules and regulations and making changes to the voter
00:02:56Barely two months old, the Mecca Alliance is facing its first test.
00:03:00Hothy attacks against Saudi Arabia have triggered collective defense
00:03:03measures from Turkia,
00:03:05of Pakistan, and the Kingdom. Could
00:03:07of the crisis in Yemen turn the Alliance into the new force in Middle East
00:03:10Security? I'll break it all
00:03:12of down here on Straight
00:03:13Talk.
00:03:21a
00:03:25a
00:03:32Hello and welcome to Straight Talk, I'm Yusuf Arm. For decades, the US
00:03:36has been the dominant security power in the Middle East, but its war with
00:03:40Iran is challenging that order and the fallout is already taking
00:03:43shape. Two months ago, Turkia, Saudi Arabia and
00:03:47Pakistan signed new defense pact in Mecca. Under
00:03:51the agreement, attack on one member is considered attack on
00:03:55all. That commitment is being tested for the first time. The
00:03:58trigger has come in yet. Yemen's ansurlah huti
00:04:02fighters have stepped up attacks on the kingdom prompting the
00:04:06alliance to activate its collective defense measures. The
00:04:09Iran-backs group controls much of northern Yemen and has launched
00:04:13missiles and drones at targets across Saudi Arabia from
00:04:17airports and military sites in the south to oil infrastructure
00:04:21further north. Turkey is providing Riyad with military equipment and
00:04:25technical
00:04:29in of support. The escalation comes as the regions already facing multiple. conflicts: the US and Israel are at war with
00:04:32Iran, the straight of Hormus remains effectively closed,
00:04:36and tensions between Turk and Israel are rising. So as
00:04:40conflict reshapes the region, could the Mecca Alliance signal a
00:04:43fundamental shift
00:04:44of in who provides security in the Middle
00:04:46East. Joining me now from
00:04:50Virginia USA is Douglas McGregor. He's a retired US
00:04:54colonel, combat veteran, a former senior advisor to the U.S.
00:04:58Secretary of Defense and author, colnel, great to have
00:05:02you on the show, mean obviously lot's been happening, i
00:05:05know you're closely following everything in the region, and mean i
00:05:09don't want to look back, i want to look forward in our time. together and
00:05:13if we look at the war right
00:05:15now in Iran, where in the timeline are we, are we near the beginning,
00:05:19the middle, the end, and is the US closer to peace
00:05:23or a ground invasion if those were the two ends the spectrum? well, I
00:05:27think we should address this idea of a ground invasion right up
00:05:30front, we really don't have an army capable of
00:05:34invading Iran, I think that needs to be understood, the United
00:05:38States army is rather small, it's a fraction of its
00:05:42former we simply don't have the depth in terms of
00:05:46soldiers, equipment, and it's very difficult to move those
00:05:49forces right now into the region, so I i don't think we're talking
00:05:53about a ground invasion, what you might see at the most in
00:05:57the future is the use of potentially marine or
00:06:01airborne forces to sees islands, one or
00:06:05two in the Persian Gulf, or perhaps a toe hold
00:06:08on
00:06:10the on the Iranian state, and words
00:06:13chabahar, perhaps, something like that, but
00:06:17but no more. mean, the idea of flying into Iran
00:06:20in search of enriched uranium, i think, has been
00:06:24tried and largely dropped, so you're talking about very, very
00:06:28limited use of airborn and amphibious infantry
00:06:32and potentially some special ops, not much more. now
00:06:36as far as the where are we in this thing, that's you,
00:06:40it's very hazardous to guess. because the president has
00:06:44made it clear as recently as today that he's going to
00:06:48stay with us as long as it takes, he he's
00:06:51also begun imply that he may direct
00:06:55operations to begin sooner than the end of
00:06:58October, much depends on events in the Gulf, but I think the
00:07:01Iranians have recently demonstrated that they
00:07:05actually control access to the Persian Gulf, they've struck
00:07:09several ships that tried to slip through, and I think that...
00:07:13put the lie so to say to the claims that President Trump has made that the
00:07:17place is under our control and that nothing comes in or goes out
00:07:20without without us and that moreover lots of oil is
00:07:24escaping, that's simply not true, so at
00:07:28this point it's hard to tell, we have some
00:07:32constraints on us, we're constrained by the availability of
00:07:35munitions and the production of missiles and rockets and so
00:07:38forth, and we're also confronting very serious
00:07:42financial crisis, how that will play out is anybody's
00:07:46guess, but we've never confronted this kind
00:07:49of national sovereign debt before, and we have an enormous
00:07:53problem with our national credibility, nobody wants to
00:07:57buy our debt, that's why the bond yields are rising, and as
00:08:01they rise and inflation rises, it becomes that much more difficult
00:08:05for us to service the debt, so it's hard for me to imagine this
00:08:09dragging on for months into the future. "but
00:08:13there is no end inside at this point, and we are by no means
00:08:17at the end the conflict, let's let's leave it at that at this
00:08:20stage. it
00:08:22it it went from the four days to the four weeks to the four months,
00:08:26to the forever, basically, yes. mean, your
00:08:29lack of uncertainty regarding where in the timeline we are, what
00:08:33type of operation could be launched, is that stemming from their not
00:08:37being clearcut objective, being uh message to
00:08:41the American look, because I
00:08:43mean if there's no objective or no one knows exactly what the
00:08:47objective is, I guess for someone who's been in many rooms where these types
00:08:51of decisions are made like yourself, it's hard to understand what comes
00:08:54next. Well, there is no coherent strategic
00:08:58framework for the operation. I've never seen any
00:09:02explicit uh strategic
00:09:05goal that uh we could put
00:09:08our, put on the wall and say, this is where we want to go,
00:09:12this is... how long it's going to take, and this is what has to happen
00:09:16before we stop, and to be quite frank, the entire war
00:09:20is in Israely war, the United States has no
00:09:23strategic interest in the destruction of Iran, never
00:09:26has, and the notion that now we have to continue
00:09:30to attack Iran to prevent it from developing nuclear weapon
00:09:34seems ludicrous, foolish, because there is really
00:09:38nothing to stop the Iranians from developing nuclear weapon except their decision not
00:09:42to... do so, and on the other hand, our goal has
00:09:46changed, I guess, our objective, if you want to call it that, has moved from simply
00:09:50destroying the regime, to destroying whatever military
00:09:53capabilities exist, that hasn't worked very well because
00:09:57the underground missile cities, which are extremely difficult to reach, they're
00:10:01spread out across the country, widely dispersed, we
00:10:04haven't been able to utterly destroy command and control,
00:10:08and we've discovered that if you kill one set of leaders, "you get
00:10:12new set of leaders, not that that's really news, I mean that's been
00:10:16everyone's experience throughout history, uh, if you destroy the
00:10:20con, you get new con, if you kill the king, you get new king, much more
00:10:24hardly." fail to why people fail to realize that is
00:10:28is incredibly stupid to me, so I don't think that's it
00:10:32anymore, I think now we're looking at find whatever capabilities you
00:10:35think may be there and destroy them, including uh
00:10:39nuclear enrichment capabilities if they can find them, and
00:10:43then I think they just want induce the disintegration and
00:10:46failure the Iranian state, so basically just
00:10:50degradation and scorched earth type of policy,
00:10:53what what's the middle? going to
00:10:55look like after this war is over. I mean, we've heard the word
00:10:59post-American Middle East, will it be a post-American Middle East,
00:11:03will that be a quick exit? will it be a gradual
00:11:07drawdown? will the bases uh throughout the Gulf be rebuilt?
00:11:11mean a
00:11:11lot of questions from gulf countries who
00:11:14are concerned for their security futures rightfully? well, we've
00:11:18demonstrated pretty conclusively that we cannot protect any the
00:11:22countries in the middle east, we can't protect.
00:11:55in the middle east, we don't live in Asia, we don't live in Europe,
00:11:59we are preeminently a maritime and aerospace
00:12:02power, when we move into area, it's inevitably
00:12:06temporary, we're not permanently there, people look back on the
00:12:09last 80 years in Europe or the middle east or elsewhere, and they
00:12:13seem to think this is a permanent condition,
00:12:15it isn't, so it's not a question of will
00:12:19we ultimately withdraw, that's an absolute certainty, the
00:12:23question is how
00:12:24we do it? how quickly, how suddenly, we depend heavily on air and
00:12:28naval power, and that's what you're seeing right now, you're trying to wage
00:12:31war against continental power of 93
00:12:35million people, the place is almost the size of western Europe,
00:12:39two and a half times the size of Texas, it's surrounded by
00:12:43mountains that turn most the northern part the country into
00:12:47a fortress and
00:12:48then to the south you have impassible deserts, what a terrible place
00:12:51to fight, so then
00:12:53the next issue, and
00:12:54I got to...
00:13:25called Iran, but it's still Persia, the other is
00:13:29Turkia, and that has the legacy the Ottoman Empire,
00:13:33that again is another civilizational state with its with its
00:13:36own brand of civilization, and then finally you have
00:13:40Egypt, well, what lies between these states
00:13:44and countries, essentially region that has been
00:13:47molded by foreign powers, Great Britain,
00:13:51France, the United States, those old borders. are going to
00:13:55vanish, most of those structures will be gone, and it will
00:13:59be up to the three powers that I just mentioned, primarily
00:14:03I would argue Turkia and Iran to decide what the rest of
00:14:06it looks like, and I hope that when that time comes that those
00:14:10two powers will be smart enough to act
00:14:13intelligently and swiftly, to resolve as many
00:14:17differences as possible and to create new stability, because we will
00:14:21be gone. Now the question is, and it's on everybody's mind, what
00:14:25happens to Israel? well, right now, the Israeli
00:14:28leadership has turned this war into an all or nothing
00:14:32proposition. it's do or die for the Israeli
00:14:35leadership, which i think is terrible mistake, because it
00:14:39doesn't leave much room for Israel to exist. if they
00:14:42insist on these genocidal impulses and
00:14:46a plan that they think they can employ us to kill virtually all their
00:14:50enemies in the region, they're going to fail, and it will be very
00:14:54hard.
00:15:25policy and i think he's correct, it looks like
00:15:29maybe route a versus route b,
00:15:32but x is the final destination still regarding the
00:15:36different. candidates, but you painted a very
00:15:40interesting and pessimistic picture for us in the region here.
00:15:43mean, no US presence, obviously a brand new
00:15:47security order, the potential for reorganization of
00:15:50borders, so that looks like very chaotic
00:15:53transition period. mean, when there's these types of
00:15:57massive voids created in the middle east, obviously there's a lot of
00:16:00opportunists in the region, lot of non-state actors who
00:16:04have always tried to fill in these types of voids. "I want to ask you what
00:16:08your thoughts about the Mecca alliance are, the alliance between Turkia, Saudi
00:16:12Arabia and Pakistan. It was formed almost two months
00:16:16ago to the day, and I believe this, in the next coming three
00:16:20to four days it'll officially be ratified by the parliament, so
00:16:23it'll officially come to existence. Can that be
00:16:27something that at least fills majority the void, or is
00:16:31that still a long way down the road?
00:16:34Well, there are a couple of important points that need to be..." made,
00:16:38i think the first one is that wherever we
00:16:42go, wherever the french or the British went, we
00:16:46enter region and for a specific period of time, our
00:16:50presence, our influence distorts the normal
00:16:53dynamics, power dynamics the region, and that's
00:16:57one the reasons why our departure is going to
00:17:01reassert the old dynamics, that's why great powers
00:17:05like Turkia or Persia. and potentially
00:17:09Egypt, although not in an aggressive way, are going to have
00:17:13influence that they once previously had.
00:17:17i am not as pessimistic as you. my view is that when
00:17:21this status quo essentially
00:17:23vanishes, you will have the opportunity to build new
00:17:27things, but those new things will rest on old
00:17:31foundations, which may turn out to be more
00:17:33enduring and legitimate than what we have now.
00:17:37so I I I'm not pessimistic in that sense, but of course
00:17:41that depends on the leadership, and now you brought up key feature of all of this,
00:17:45this uh mecca agreement, I think it's too soon
00:17:49to tell uh, we can't pass
00:17:53judgment on something that has only recently been signed,
00:17:57and we don't know what's going to be implemented and how it will be
00:18:00implemented, you know, again, I,
00:18:04I don't know what Mr. Erdogan really plans. uh
00:18:08what he really wants, you'll have to ask him,
00:18:12he he has to sort out very clearly
00:18:14and unambiguously, what this alliance, if
00:18:18you want to call it an alliance,
00:18:20i think it's more like the enton that brought france and
00:18:24britain and ultimately Russia together before World War
00:18:27One, does does tur does the turks
00:18:31want to be locked into an automatic
00:18:34trigger to enter conflict on the base?
00:19:37as opposed to more conflict and war, in other words, find a settlement,
00:19:41find a way to end the fighting down in Yemen and Southern
00:19:44Arabia, because the people killing each other down
00:19:48there are Muslims, they don't really have to kill each
00:19:52other, and I think
00:19:54that the Turks in particular could have a positive role there, now as far as the
00:19:58Pakistanis are concerned, I think they're worried about
00:20:02Saudi Arabia, which has been a source of financial support for
00:20:05them, and I'm I'm sure everyone is worried about the holy
00:20:09sides, how far do you go?
00:20:12again, remember, small states and even though
00:20:16Saudi Arabia is large a map, I considered to be a small state by
00:20:19comparison, and this is true for Lithuania, Latvia,
00:20:23Estonia, any number of small states around the world or Israel for that
00:20:27matter, they're always looking for a larger
00:20:30power that they can harness to their
00:20:34interests, that they can find who will fight their... wars
00:20:38for them, and I think that's
00:20:40something that the new Mecca agreement should take into
00:20:44consideration, first of all, who is the real
00:20:47enemy? existential threat in the
00:20:51region and
00:20:53then decide if that's the case, if you were going to identify an
00:20:56existential threat, organize against that, if
00:21:00if the yemen are not an existential threat to the
00:21:04region, if this is in fact a local war with local
00:21:08origins, distant origins, long-term
00:21:10origins, then there needs to be local solution as
00:21:14opposed to a giant regional war that results from it,
00:21:18iif that makes any sense. "no, no, it does, it makes a lot of
00:21:22sense uh, but I mean, the Turks are very good at
00:21:26laying out their military objectives when they enter into
00:21:30something, and I mean, from what I've seen so far over the past 24
00:21:33hours, it's been very, very clear cut that they're just going
00:21:37to be there a defensive capability and not cross the border
00:21:41into Yemen any type of cross-border operation, but
00:21:45aside from that, how do you see the Saudi Hothi
00:21:49war uh..." progressing right now, mean obviously very difficult
00:21:53geography, you have very veteran non-state actor
00:21:56unit that's basically been at warfrat over decade, mean even
00:22:00much further if you go back through Yemen's history, so they're very
00:22:04warhard and very battleherdened and a geography
00:22:08that's kind of hard to uproot them, what does victory look like for the
00:22:12Saudis and what's the risk? the sauty
00:22:16uh control of much of what today we call or used to...
00:22:20Yaman is fairly recent, you've got to go back into the
00:22:231930s and look at the fighting that ensued then
00:22:27the resulted in the current borders between Saudi Arabia and
00:22:30Yemen. The point that I think is important for everybody to
00:22:34understand is that the war in Yemen between the Yeminies
00:22:38or the Houtis and ultimately the House of
00:22:41Sud pre-existed the Mecca
00:22:45agreement. These are these are conflicts that quite
00:22:48frankly. have nothing to do with Saudi Arabia's
00:22:52relationship with Pakistan or Turkia, so I think that
00:22:56should be taken into consideration, also remember, the people in
00:23:00Gamen have been subjected to mass murder,
00:23:03starvation, uh, thirst, I mean, the
00:23:07treatment meeted out to them by the House of Squad is
00:23:10reprehensible, so I would hope that Turkia
00:23:14and Pakistan, Islamabad
00:23:16and and Ancora will try to persuade. "the house have
00:23:20saw to reach an agreement with these people in some fashion, if they
00:23:24insist a ruthless war of extermination, I
00:23:28would certainly back away from it, I think that would be very bad idea, so I hope
00:23:32the if the if the Turks are willing to provide some
00:23:35defensive support uh to cities in terms of air
00:23:39defense, that's fine, but I I would hope they would
00:23:43otherwise stay out of this, because I see no benefit to the Turks or the
00:23:46Pakistanis from participating in it. Well, it it's definitely
00:23:50going to be a trial by fire for very new
00:23:53defensive uh coalition, so we're going to have to see how uh
00:23:57it operates without much interoperability between the Pakistanis and the
00:24:01Turks, obviously, one them with domestic and American hardware, the other one
00:24:05with lot of Chinese hardware, and the Saudis
00:24:08obviously not up to the professional level of a
00:24:12NATO standard army, so it's going to be interesting to see how these
00:24:15kinks get worked out with all zero joint exercises
00:24:19so... "that'll be something to follow, but bubbling beneath the
00:24:23surface of everything that we've talked about is tensions between Israel and
00:24:27Turkia. now after the housting of
00:24:30Assad and effectively the removal
00:24:34of Iran's influence in Syria, I mean I I first
00:24:38thought, wow, this must be great for Israel, they got rid of
00:24:41Iran from Syria, that land bridge from Hezbulat
00:24:45to Tehran has now been broken, the Turks are there a NATO
00:24:48country, israel." are probably indirectly benefiting and happy,
00:24:52but a couple months afterwards I began seeing this uh
00:24:56Turkey is the next Iran didn't take it seriously at first, then saw someone
00:25:00like Naftali bendet, a former prime minister and opposition party
00:25:03leader repeat it, then I started seeing that American Israeli
00:25:07lobby cutouts uh repeating it and said, okay,
00:25:11someone's putting some money behind this message now, because it's getting propagated,
00:25:15I started taking a lot more seriously, and now we're starting to see some
00:25:19type of... indirect action, the bombing of base in
00:25:23Syria, lot more, lot more rhetoric at the
00:25:27prime minister level by Netanyahu,
00:25:31where is this going? there were many voices behind the scenes in
00:25:35Israel, over the last 10 to 15 years
00:25:38warned consistently against the notion that somehow
00:25:42or another was in Israel's interest to drive
00:25:46Assad's government out of Syria, in other words to...
00:26:02went in and weaponized the kurds as did the
00:26:06Israelis as another means of undermining and weakening
00:26:10assad and so we have new Syria and the new
00:26:14Syria is now problematic for
00:26:16Israel. I don't know why the Israelis ever thought that a
00:26:20government that came to power after Assad,
00:26:24that was as strongly Islamist as the government has turned out to be in
00:26:27Damascus would ever be friendly to Israel.
00:26:31It it just makes no sense.
00:27:32those that they dictate, so that means that
00:27:37israel Israel project, wants its and
00:27:38greater by definition that means most of Syria, half of
00:27:42Iraq, nearly half of Arabia, a large portion
00:27:45of Egypt, and now we can all say that's
00:27:48insane, but unfortunately we're
00:27:52supporting it, we're backing it, and there is no
00:27:56pressure, none whatsoever from Washington on Mr.
00:27:59Netanyahu to do anything different, if you go back to...
00:28:04which was the last major war between Israel,
00:28:08Egypt and Syria, there was enormous pressure brought to bear by
00:28:12Nixon and others on Israel to reach an
00:28:15accommodation, certainly with Egypt, and that
00:28:19paid offensively, and many of us thought, well, this is a positive development,
00:28:22perhaps there's a way to make this work in the future across the
00:28:26region, that opportunity doesn't exist, so the
00:28:30question is, sit
00:28:33and and Ankara wait until the Israelis end up in
00:28:36Damascus, do you sit and wait until you're
00:28:40confronted with enemies coming at you from
00:28:43Israel, I don't know, or do you
00:28:46act? And then the question is, well Turkey is still, Turkey
00:28:50is still a member of NATO, but I'm not sure NATO is terribly meaningful
00:28:54anyway, and I don't think the Turks should be too concerned about
00:28:58that, NATO or the European components of it are certainly.
00:29:02interveing in that
00:29:11to be now a permanent fixture, at least for
00:29:13the moment, is an Israeli government that will not
00:29:15compromise, and that boads ill for the future of
00:29:19turkish influence and power in the region. colonel Douglas McGregor, thank
00:29:23you very much, very enlightening
00:29:25conversation.
00:30:09Warnings of a dangerous escalation after a missile strike on Saudi
00:30:13Arabia's main airport kills 12. The attack is being blamed on
00:30:17Yemen's hoothies,
00:30:19now Donald Trump is considering a US response.
00:30:23Hello and welcome to TRT World Live from Istanbul, I'm Emily
00:30:26Angwin. Also, ahead on the program, Pakistan declares
00:30:30a state of emergency a northwestern. province, roads
00:30:33blocked and the internet cut in the stronghold of jailed former prime
00:30:37minister Imran Khan. Donald Trump says Ukraine
00:30:41should get new president after securing an oil deal
00:30:45with Russia. And down, but not out. India's
00:30:49youth led Cockroach movement says they will continue protests
00:30:53demanding the election commissioner
00:30:55resigns.