Conflicts in the Middle East rarely stay contained and often spread and affect regions far beyond, analyst and former Pentagon Middle East advisor Jasmine El-Gamal says.
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00:00Sure, so it sounds like, you know, by saying what we gather he's going to say, King Abdullah
00:04tomorrow, he's going to say this idea is a recipe for radicalism that will spread chaos
00:09through the Middle East.
00:10I mean, he may try, mightn't he, to sell it to President Trump, that not just destabilizing
00:16the region and causing chaos in the region, but this could boomerang back and actually
00:20affect U.S. national security.
00:23Absolutely.
00:24I mean, we only have to look back, you know, we don't have to look back very far to look
00:28at how conflict in the region has always spread outside of the region.
00:33You can't contain violence in the Middle East.
00:35I was working at the Pentagon when the Syria conflict first started, when those peaceful
00:40protests in Syria against the Assad regime turned violent, when the state used its weapons
00:47against those peaceful protesters.
00:49We saw what happened.
00:50We saw the recruitment of fighters into the country.
00:54We saw the refugee crisis that spilled over into Europe.
00:58We saw the impact that that conflict had on countries far beyond the borders of the Middle
01:04East.
01:05Same thing happened with the Iraq war.
01:07And so it's absolute madness to think that conflict in the region that is stoked by things
01:13like displacement and terrorism and occupation and all of the things that we're seeing play
01:19out right now are going to only affect people living in the region.
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