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This is John Prysner, a producer of this show.

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What a week, Brian. History frequently happens not gradually, but in leaps and bounds with

dramatic changes. Nothing could be more dramatic than what has happened in the past week

when it comes to Syria.

Yeah, we have a lot to talk about. Again, we had a major discussion about this lay-in on Wednesday. It was on breakthrough news, Wednesday night. Many, many people have seen it. It came out as a podcast on Thursday morning. Again, we wanted to have a special episode of the socialist program because

there's so much to talk about. Things are happening so dramatically, so rapidly.

Syria became an independent country in 1946. Before that, it was a French colony. And Syria became,

in a way, the center of the Arab world, the center of the

pan-Arab movement, the center of Arab leftism over a long time. Of course, there's been an

erosion of that, a significant erosion, not just in Syria, but in Egypt and elsewhere. There's

all of that history that we have talked about and we'll talk about

again. But certainly one of the things about Syria is it was a principal ally of Russia, a

principal ally of Iran. During the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, there was only one Arab country

that actually stood with Iran, and that was Syria. The Syrian air defenses were

built by the USSR, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the Soviet Union. It had a very

formidable military capability, especially its air defenses. That was important because Israel

routinely was bombing Syria. At the same time, the Russians, the Soviets before and then the Russians, after the fall of the

...