Google Speech-to-Text API Automatic Transcription (Chirp). Treat it as a searchable index of what was broadcast, not a quotation record.
00:00:00critic you think a country by its population, it has to
00:00:03be by its action as well. in last
00:00:07of couple of years we have been looking at Narendra
00:00:09Modi's style of governance and how
00:00:13India is being branded in
00:00:16of one religion, one almost like a ethno state where
00:00:20minorities, attacks on minorities are
00:00:22highlighted. if you look at the last election in
00:00:26West Bengal of India, you have been seeing that, same
00:00:30strategy was implied and there was accudition
00:00:34of the minority voters being removed to
00:00:38secure the ruling party BJP's
00:00:42in anonymous universal victory
00:00:45there,
00:00:46of many analysts are now fearful that if
00:00:49Narendra Modi taken the
00:00:51of same strategy and it just
00:00:54prolong its own Modi's rule over the India
00:00:58by making the voter list. that only helps his
00:01:01party and shaib, very quickly, before i let
00:01:05you go,
00:01:05i have to ask you this question, if if we keep
00:01:08seeing such detentions and
00:01:11in arrests and the use of violence against
00:01:14protesters, what do you think the future holds for the
00:01:18Indian government, do you think these protests have enough
00:01:21power to bring about a change in
00:01:24India? great question, if you look
00:01:28at the cockros jon is
00:01:31evolved of this political scenario and the very first
00:01:35large protest they did just a couple of months ago where i was talking
00:01:39to your very tv platform where the gens
00:01:43frustration over the education system and the
00:01:46similar type of crackdown but at least at the end the government
00:01:50step back the minister education minister had to resign
00:01:54now it depends on how it's very early to say
00:01:58whether this protest will ' really and mudhis
00:02:02or at least shrink in the mudis role in India, we have to see it,
00:02:05but this gives us a
00:02:09symptom, kind of hope to the young generation that if you
00:02:12can continue build the
00:02:15of of momentum and can spread this movement, not only Delhi but other big cities and
00:02:19villages and towns in India, there are a huge
00:02:22possibly sh, unfortunately we are running out of
00:02:26time, I really appreciate your taking out the time and thanks very much for joining. The news
00:02:30continues here on TRT World, goodbye for
00:02:32now,
00:02:49barely two months old, the Mecca Alliance is facing its first
00:02:53test. Pothi attacks against Saudi Arabia have triggered collective
00:02:57defense measures from Turkia, Pakistan, and the... could
00:03:01of the crisis in yemen turn the alliance into the new force in middle east
00:03:04security? i'll break it all
00:03:06of down here on straight
00:03:07talk.
00:03:15a
00:03:19a
00:03:26hello and welcome to straight talk. i'm for decades the...
00:03:30has been the dominant security power in the Middle East, but its war with
00:03:34Iran is challenging that order and the fallout is already
00:03:37taking shape. two months ago, Turkia, Saudi Arabia and
00:03:41Pakistan signed new defense pact in Mecca. Under the
00:03:45agreement, attack on one member is considered attack on
00:03:48all. That commitment is being tested for the first time. The
00:03:52trigger has come in Yemen. Yemen's ansarulah Houti
00:03:56fighters have stepped up attacks on the kingdom prompting. the alliance
00:04:00to activate its collective defense measures. The Iran-back group
00:04:04controls much of Northern Yemen and has launched missiles and drones
00:04:08that targets across Saudi Arabia, from airports and military
00:04:12sites in the south to oil infrastructure further north.
00:04:16Turkey is providing Riyad with military equipment and technical
00:04:19support. The escalation comes as the regions already facing
00:04:23multiple conflicts. The US and Israel are at war with
00:04:26Iran. The straight of Hormus remains
00:04:29of effectively closed. and tensions between Turk and Israel are
00:04:33rising, so as conflict reshapes the region, could the Mecca
00:04:36Alliance signal a fundamental shift
00:04:38of in who provides security in the Middle
00:04:40East? Joining me now from
00:04:44Virginia, USA is Douglas McGregor, he's
00:04:47a retired US colonel, combat veteran, a former senior
00:04:51advisor to the US secretary of defense and an author.
00:04:55Colonel, great to have you on the show. I mean, obviously
00:04:58lots
00:04:59been happening, I... "you're closely following everything in the
00:05:02region, and I mean, I don't want to
00:05:04look back, I want to look forward in our time together, and if we look
00:05:08at the war right now in Iran, where in the timeline are we,
00:05:12are we..." near the beginning, the middle, the end, and is the US
00:05:16closer to peace or a ground invasion if those were the two ends the
00:05:19spectrum? well, I think we should address this idea of a ground
00:05:23invasion right up front. uh, we really don't have
00:05:27an army capable of invading Iran. I think that needs to be
00:05:30understood. The United States Army is rather
00:05:34small, it's a fraction of its former self. We simply
00:05:38don't have the depth in terms of soldiers, equipment, and
00:05:42it's... very difficult to move those forces right now into the region,
00:05:46so I i don't think we're talking about a ground invasion, what you might see at
00:05:50the most in the future is the use of potentially
00:05:53marine or airborne forces to
00:05:56sees islands, one or two in the Persian
00:06:00Gulf, or perhaps a toe hold on
00:06:03the on the Iranian state, another words
00:06:07chabahar, perhaps something like that, but
00:06:11but no more, I mean the idea. of flying into Iran
00:06:14in search of enriched uranium, I think has been
00:06:18tried and largely dropped, so you're talking about very, very
00:06:22limited use of airborn and amphibious infantry
00:06:26and potentially some special ops, not much more. now
00:06:30as
00:06:30far as the where are we in this thing, that's you, it's
00:06:34very hazardous to guess, because the president has made
00:06:38it clear as recently as today that he's going to stay.
00:06:42with us as long as it takes, he he's
00:06:45also begun imply that he may direct
00:06:49operations to begin sooner than the end of
00:06:52October, much depends on events in the Gulf, but I think the
00:06:55Iranians have recently demonstrated that they
00:06:59actually control access to the Persian Gulf, they've struck
00:07:03several ships that tried to slip through, and I think
00:07:06that's put the lie so to say to the claims that President Trump has
00:07:10made that the place is under our control. "and that nothing comes in or
00:07:14goes out without without us and that moreover lots of oil
00:07:17is escaping, that's simply not true, so
00:07:21at this point it's hard to tell, we have some
00:07:25constraints on us, we're constrained by the availability of
00:07:29munitions and the production of missiles and rockets and so
00:07:32forth, and we're also confronting very serious
00:07:36financial crisis, how that will play out is anybody's
00:07:40guess, but we've never confronted."
00:08:12conflict, let's let's leave it at that at this stage, yeah, it
00:08:16it it went from the four days to the four weeks, to the four months, to
00:08:20the forever, basically, yes, mean, your
00:08:23lack of uncertainty regarding where in the timeline we are, what
00:08:27type of operation could be launched, is that stemming from their not
00:08:31being clear cut objective, being uh message to
00:08:35the American public, because I mean if there's no objective
00:08:39or no one knows exactly what the objective is, "I guess for someone
00:08:43who's been in many rooms where these types of decisions are made like
00:08:46yourself, it's hard to understand what comes next. Well, there
00:08:50is no coherent strategic framework for the operation.
00:08:54I've never seen any explicit
00:08:57strategic goal that we could
00:09:01put our, put on the wall and say, this is where we want
00:09:05to go, this is how long it's going to take, and this is what has to
00:09:09happen before we stop, and to be quite frank..." "the
00:09:13entire war is an Israeli war, the United States has
00:09:17no strategic interest in the destruction of Iran, never
00:09:20has, and the notion that now we have to continue
00:09:24to attack Iran to prevent it from developing nuclear weapon
00:09:28seems ludicrous, foolish, because there is really
00:09:32nothing to stop the Iranians from developing nuclear weapon except their decision
00:09:36not to do so, and on the other hand, our goal
00:09:39has changed, I guess, our objective, if you want
00:09:41to call it." has moved from simply destroying the regime
00:09:45to destroying whatever military capabilities exist, that
00:09:49hasn't worked very well because the underground missile cities which are
00:09:53extremely difficult to reach, they're spread out across the country, widely
00:09:57dispersed, we haven't been able to utterly destroy command
00:10:01and control, and we've discovered that if you kill one set
00:10:05of leaders, you get new set of leaders, not that
00:10:09that's really news, I mean that's been everyone's experience throughout history.
00:10:13uh, if you destroy the con, you get new con, if you kill the king, you get
00:10:17new king, much more hard, why people fail, why people fail to
00:10:20realize that is is incredibly stupid to me, so I don't...
00:10:25think that's it anymore, i think now we're looking at find whatever
00:10:29capabilities you think may be there and destroy them,
00:10:31including uh nuclear enrichment capabilities if
00:10:35they can find them, and
00:10:37then i think they just want induce the disintegration and failure
00:10:41the Iranian state, so basically just degradation and
00:10:44scorched earth type of policy. what what's the middle
00:10:48east going to look like after this war is over? mean,
00:10:52we've heard the word post American middle east. will it be a post-american middle
00:10:56east? will that be a quick exit? will it be a
00:11:00gradual drawdown? will the bases uh throughout the gulf be
00:11:04rebuilt? mean a lot of questions from gulf
00:11:07countries who are who are concerned for their security futures
00:11:11rightfully? well we've demonstrated pretty conclusively that we
00:11:14cannot protect any the countries in the middle east, we can't
00:11:18protect the the gulf statelets, we can't protect
00:11:22Saudi Arabia, and I don't think we can... protect Israel, the
00:11:26Israelis of course are a little more robust, and we have
00:11:30invested more heavily there, particularly in terms of missile
00:11:33defense, but it's
00:11:35not a long-term solution, and that's the key to this whole
00:11:39thing. there's something that everybody that lives in the region needs
00:11:43to understand. we are not permanent party in
00:11:47the region, that is, we don't live in the middle east, we don't live in
00:11:50Asia, we don't live in Europe, we are preeminently a
00:11:54marathon. and aerospace power, when we move into
00:11:58area, it's inevitably temporary, we're not
00:12:01permanently there, people look back on the last 80 years in europe or the middle
00:12:05east or elsewhere, and they seem to think this is a permanent
00:12:09condition,
00:12:09it isn't, so it's not a question of will
00:12:13we ultimately withdraw, that's an absolute certainty, the
00:12:17question is how
00:12:18we do it, how quickly, how suddenly, we depend heavily on air and naval
00:12:22power, and that's what you're seeing right now, you're trying. to wage war
00:12:26against continental power of 93 million people, the place
00:12:30is almost the size of western Europe, two and a half times the size
00:12:34of Texas. it's surrounded by
00:12:37mountains that turn most the northern part the country into
00:12:41a fortress and then to the south you have impassible deserts. what
00:12:44a terrible place to fight. so then the next issue, and i got to
00:12:48answer this question for you, what does this all look like when it's over? well, the first thing
00:12:52i think we can say with almost complete.
00:13:25has the legacy the Ottoman Empire, that again is another civilizational
00:13:29state with its with its own brand of civilization, and
00:13:33then finally you have Egypt, well what lies between
00:13:36these states and countries, essentially
00:13:40region that has been molded by foreign powers,
00:13:44Great Britain, France, the United States, those old
00:13:48borders are going to vanish, most of those structures will be
00:13:51gone, and it will be up to the three powers that I just
00:13:55mentioned, primarily, I would argue Turkia and
00:13:59Iran to decide what the rest of it looks like, and I hope that
00:14:03when that time comes that those two powers will be smart enough
00:14:07to act intelligently and swiftly, to resolve
00:14:10as many differences as possible and to create new stability,
00:14:14because we will be gone. now the question is, and it's on everybody's
00:14:17mind, what happens to Israel? well, right
00:14:21now the Israeli leadership has turned this war into an...
00:14:55government with new leadership that is willing
00:14:58to see things differently and live in the region as a
00:15:02neighbor, that could be changed, but right
00:15:05now, much as your foreign minister said, i think within the last
00:15:0924 hours and i think he's correct, he said he sees no
00:15:13evidence that the election in Israel is going to change anything, certainly
00:15:17nothing in terms of foreign and defense policy, and i think he's
00:15:20correct, it looks like maybe route
00:15:24a versus route B, but X is the final
00:15:27destination still uh regarding the different Israeli candidates,
00:15:31but you painted a very interesting and pessimistic
00:15:35picture for us in the region here, I'm... No US
00:15:39presence, obviously a brand new security order, the potential for
00:15:42reorganization of borders, so that looks like very
00:15:46chaotic transition period. I mean, when there's
00:15:50these types of massive voids created in the middle east, obviously there's
00:15:54a lot of opportunists in the region, lot of non-state
00:15:57actors who have always tried to fill in these types of
00:16:00voids. I want to ask you what your thoughts about the Mecca alliance
00:16:04are, the alliance between Turkia, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. "it was formed
00:16:08almost two months ago to the day, and I
00:16:11believe this, in the next coming three to four days it'll officially be
00:16:15ratified by the parliament, so it'll officially come to
00:16:19existence. Can that be something that at least fills
00:16:23majority the void, or is that still a long way down the
00:16:27road? Well,
00:16:29there are a couple of important points that need to be made. I think the
00:16:33first one is that wherever we go,
00:16:37wherever..."
00:17:07that they once pre previously had. i am not as
00:17:11pessimistic as you. my view is that when this
00:17:15status quo essentially
00:17:17vanishes, you will have the opportunity to build new
00:17:21things, but those new things will rest on old
00:17:25foundations, which may turn out to be more
00:17:27enduring and legitimate than what we have
00:17:30now. so i i'm not pessimistic in that
00:17:34sense, but of course that depends on the leadership, and now you... brought up
00:17:37key feature of all of this, this uh mecca
00:17:41agreement, i think it's too soon to
00:17:43tell uh, we can't pass
00:17:47judgment on something that has only recently been signed
00:17:51and we don't know what's going to be implemented and how it will be
00:17:54implemented, you know again, i don't
00:17:58know what mr. erdogan really plans uh
00:18:02what he really wants, you'll have to ask him,
00:18:06he he has to sort out very... clearly and
00:18:09unambiguously what this alliance, if you want to call
00:18:13it an alliance, i think it's more like the entonces that
00:18:17brought France and Britain and ultimately Russia together before World War
00:18:21One. does does tur the Turks
00:18:24want to be locked into an automatic
00:18:27trigger to enter conflict on the
00:18:31basis of this agreement. I think World War I was a
00:18:34catastrophe largely because the people... that allied themselves
00:18:38against Germany and Austria and
00:18:40then eventually against the Ottomans did so on the basis
00:18:44of
00:18:44a of an automatic trigger. In other words, country x
00:18:48does this, that means y, z and so forth, all have to join
00:18:52it. So I think that's that's something has to be sorted
00:18:55out. There's another issue here,
00:18:59tragically, as we saw during world war one,
00:19:02Christians don't have any trouble murdering each other. I think there's a
00:19:06lot of evidence.
00:20:07small states,
00:20:09and even though Saudi Arabia
00:20:11is large a map, I consider to be a small state by
00:20:13comparison, and this is true for Lithuania, Latvia,
00:20:17Estonia, any number of small states around the world or Israel for that
00:20:20matter, they're always looking for a larger
00:20:24power that they can harness to their
00:20:28interests, that they can find who will fight their wars
00:20:32for them, and I think that's
00:20:34something that the new mecca agreement. should take into
00:20:38consideration: first of all, who is the real
00:20:41enemy? who
00:20:43is the existential threat in the region, and then
00:20:47decide if that's the case, if you were going to... identify an
00:20:50existential threat, organize against that,
00:20:54if if the yemenis are not an existential threat to the
00:20:57region, if this is in fact a local war with
00:21:01local origins, distant origins, long-term
00:21:04origins, then there needs to be local solution as
00:21:08opposed to a giant regional war that results from it.
00:21:12i don't know if that makes any sense, no it does, it makes a lot of
00:21:16sense uh, but mean the turks are very good at.
00:21:20laying out their military objectives when they enter into
00:21:24something, and I mean, from what I've seen so far over the past 24
00:21:27hours, it's been very, very clear cut that they're just going to be
00:21:31there a defensive capability and not cross the border into
00:21:35Yemen and any type of cross-border operation, but
00:21:39aside from that, how do you see the Saudi Hothi
00:21:43war uh progressing right now? I mean, obviously very difficult
00:21:46geography, you have very veteran non state actor
00:21:50unit that's basically been at war for at over decade, mean even
00:21:54much further if you go back through Yemen's history, so they're very
00:21:58war- hardened, very battle hardened and a geography
00:22:02that's kind of hard to uproot them, what is victory look like for the
00:22:06Saudis and what's the risk? the Saudi
00:22:10uh control of much of what today we call or used to call
00:22:14Yayen is fairly recent, you've got to go back into the
00:22:171930s and look at the fighting that... ensued then
00:22:21that resulted in the current borders between Saudi Arabia and
00:22:24Yemen. The point that I think is important for everybody to
00:22:28understand is
00:22:29that the war in Yemen between
00:22:32the Yeminies or the Houtis and ultimately the House of
00:22:35Squad preexisted the Mecca
00:22:39agreement. these these are conflicts that quite
00:22:42frankly have nothing to do with Saudi Arabia's
00:22:46relationship with Pakistan or Turkia. So I think
00:22:50that should be taken into consideration. Also, remember, the people in
00:22:54Yamen have been subjected to mass murder,
00:22:57starvation, thirst. I mean, the
00:23:00treatment made it out to them by the House of Squad is
00:23:04reprehensible. So I would hope that Turkia
00:23:08and Pakistan, Islamabad
00:23:11will try to persuade the house of saw to reach
00:23:15an agreement with these people in some fashion if they insist a
00:23:19ruthless war. extermination, I would certainly back
00:23:23away from it, I think that would be very bad idea, so I hope the
00:23:26if the if the turks are willing to provide some defensive
00:23:30support to cities in terms of air
00:23:33defense, that's fine, but I I would hope they would
00:23:37otherwise stay out of this, because I see no benefit to the Turks or the
00:23:40Pakistanis from participating in it. Well, it's definitely going
00:23:44to be a trial by fire for very new
00:23:47defensive uh coalition, so... we're going to have to see how uh
00:23:51it operates without much interoperability between the Pakistanis and the
00:23:55Turks, obviously, one them with domestic and American hardware, the other one
00:23:59with lot of Chinese hardware, and the Saudis
00:24:02obviously not up to the professional level of a
00:24:06NATO standard army, so it's going to be interesting to see how these
00:24:09kinks get worked out with all zero joint exercises,
00:24:13so that'll be something to follow, but bubbling beneath the
00:24:17surface of everything that we've talked about is tensions between Israel
00:24:21and now after the housting of
00:24:24Assad and effectively the removal
00:24:28of Iran's influence in Syria, I mean I I first
00:24:32thought, wow, this must be great for Israel, they got rid of Iran
00:24:36from Syria, that land bridge from Hezbulat to Tehran
00:24:40has now been broken, the Turks are
00:24:42there a NATO country, Israelis are probably indirectly benefiting
00:24:45and happy, but a couple months afterwards I began seeing this uh...
00:24:50truth is the next iran didn't take it seriously at first, then saw someone
00:24:54like naftali bendet, a former prime minister and opposition party
00:24:57leader repeat it, then I started seeing that American
00:25:01Israeli lobby cutouts uh repeating it and said,
00:25:05okay, someone's putting some money behind this message now because it's getting
00:25:09propagated, I started taking a lot more seriously, and now we're starting
00:25:12to see some type of indirect action, the bombing of base
00:25:16in Syria, uh, lot more uh... lot more
00:25:20rhetoric at the prime minister level by
00:25:22Netanyahu, where is this
00:25:25going? there were many voices behind the scenes in
00:25:29Israel, over the last 10 to 15 years
00:25:32warned consistently against the notion that somehow
00:25:36or another was in Israel's interest to drive
00:25:40Assad's government out of Syria, in other words to replace the
00:25:44Assad government with something else. It's
00:25:48happened, we joined...
00:26:32Yeah, well that's a matter for Ankara to decide, but I think
00:26:36Ankara now realizes that they have de
00:26:39facto created a shared border with Israel,
00:26:43because Turkish influence now extends down into Damascus
00:26:47and across Syria, and the
00:26:50question is, how do the Israelis and and the turks deal with
00:26:54this? The problem for Turkey and I think
00:26:58for the entire region at this point is really this greater Israel.
00:27:02project if you were dealing with an Israeli government that say
00:27:06existed 25, 30 years ago,
00:27:10whose aims were actually quite limited and was interested
00:27:14in peace and prosperity, you might have
00:27:18the opportunity to sit down and negotiate. this government doesn't
00:27:22seem to be very interested in peace and prosperity under any circumstances
00:27:26except those that they dictate. so that means that
00:27:29Israel wants its greater Israel project. "and by
00:27:33definition that means most of Syria, half of Iraq, nearly
00:27:37half of Arabia, a large portion of Egypt, and
00:27:41now we can all say that's insane, but
00:27:44unfortunately we're supporting it, we're backing
00:27:48it, and there is no pressure, none whatsoever from
00:27:52Washington on Mr. Netanyahu to do anything different, if you go
00:27:55back to 1973, which was the
00:27:59last major war between Israel, Egypt."
00:28:02Syria, there was enormous pressure brought to bear by Nixon and
00:28:06others on Israel to reach an accommodation,
00:28:10certainly with Egypt, and that paid off handsomely, and
00:28:14many of us thought, well, this is a positive development, perhaps there's a way to make this work
00:28:18in the future across the region, that opportunity doesn't
00:28:22exist, so the question is,
00:28:26do do you in Ankara sit and wait until the
00:28:29Israelis end up in Damascus? "do you
00:28:33sit and wait until you're confronted with enemies coming at you from
00:28:37Israel? uh, I don't know, or do you
00:28:40act? and then the question is, well, Turkey is still,
00:28:44Turkey is still a member of NATO, but I'm not sure NATO is terribly
00:28:48meaningful anyway, and I don't think the Turks should be too concerned about
00:28:52that, NATO or the European components of it are certainly not going
00:28:56to intervene in that mess. I i don't have any easy
00:29:00answers, what I'm trying to do though is tell you..." that what's
00:29:03changed and seems to be now a permanent fixture, at least for the
00:29:06moment, is an Israeli government that will not
00:29:09compromise, and that boads ill for the future of
00:29:13turkish influence and power in the region. Colonel Douglas McGregor,
00:29:17thank you very much for very enlightening
00:29:19conversation.
00:29:23And that's all for this edition of Straight talk with me, Yusuf arm. If you got
00:29:27any comments, please share them with us on X at
00:29:30Strat. Also, don't forget to subscribe to our youtube channel
00:29:34where you can find more exclusive content. until next time, take care and
00:29:38goodbye.
00:29:49intuitive, inclusive, informative
00:29:52trtworld.com.
00:30:09Saudi authorities say another air strike hits the international airport in Riyadh for
00:30:13second day as the Houti claim responsibility for Saturday's deadly
00:30:17strike on the same airport. Hello and welcome to
00:30:21TRT World Life from Istanbul, I'm Jafar Hustan also coming
00:30:24up. Israel expands it so-called yellow line in
00:30:28Gaza forcing dozens of Palestinian families to flee in the middle the night.
00:30:33Donald Trump says Russia and Ukraine have agreed to halt a strikes on each other's
00:30:37energy infrastructure. Vlodimir Zelensky welcomes the
00:30:40move. The Polish interior minister says the man
00:30:44who threatened and planned to attack prime minister Donald Tusk has been
00:30:48arrested.