Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show where we explored the stories behind the stories in the news. I'm Noah Feldman. Today we're going to talk about a book that has been getting a lot of attention and deservedly. It's about the disappearance and suspected murder of Jimmy Hoffa, a man who was at the forefront of the labor movement in America but also had close connections with the mafia.
On July thirtieth, nineteen seventy five, Jimmy Hoffa disappeared. The commonly articulated view is that Haffa was killed in a mafia related hit, and that his friend and longtime associate, indeed almost his son, Charles Chucky O'Brien, kidnapped him and drove him to the spot where he was murdered. My colleague Jack Goldsmith disputes this version of events. Jack is
a Harvard law professor. He also used to have the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice and the George W. Bush administration, and Chuckie O'Brien is, in fact his stepfather. Jack is the author of a new book called In Haffa's Shadow. A stepfather, a disappearance in Detroit, and my search for the truth. I recently had the chance to talk to him about it. Jack. I'm thrilled
that you could join us. This is a great opportunity for me to talk to you about something that's been very close to your heart, not just in the last six or seven years that you've been writing it, but in some ways your whole life. So congratulations on the book. First of all, thanks so much, and thanks for having me here. I want to start with something that might be relevant to the younger demographic of our podcast, and
that is who is Jimmy Hoffa. Other than the fact that he disappeared, which I think everybody knows, of whatever age, his great significance for American labor history, as I think in the the laws, So tell a little bit about that, right, So, people under sixty don't really have a sense of Haffa's importance in American history, but he was a very consequential
figure in American history. He was the president of the Teams Reunion from nineteen fifty seven to nineteen sixty seven, but more importantly than that, for twenty years from the forties until the sixties, he was probably the most consequential and certainly the best known American labor leader at a time when, unlike today, unions were a large force in American life. And he led what was the most powerful union in the country, and the Teamsters Union, which was
primarily or largely truckers. That's how it began. But one of Haffa's commitments was to organizing anything that boozed, as he put it, so he expanded the teamster's jurisdiction dramatically. And so he was this very consequential labor leader, and at a time when labor was starting to stagnate, the Teamsters were still growing. He was a labor organizing genius.
And he held the promise, and it was a theoretical promise, but he held the promise of taking the labor union in a very different direction from the one it went. It's basically been in decline to early sixties, late fifties. The problem with Haffa was that he was basically a moral and corrupt by any conventional definition. He did not comply with the law. He was indifferent to conventional morality.
He would do business with anyone on any terms that he thought would help him increase his power and his union's power. So he did a lot of business and made a lot of accommodations. For example, to organize crime, he paid off politicians and judges, and this ended up, among other things, ruining the promise that he might have had for the labor movement. I want to ask you
about that a moral categorization that you just suggested. I mean, it's possible to read your book and think that actually Haffa did have a morality of a sort, and it was a morality that put the union above everything, and on that view, he would break any law as long as he was doing it for his union. But there's an alternative view that says, well, his union and Jimmy Haffa, and he didn't really distinguish between those two. And I
think that also sometimes comes through in the book. Where do you actually come down on that all of the above, I think I tried to say conventional moralities what he defied. You could say that he had a moral principle and that was enhancing his power and the teamster's power, and he saw those the same thing, and in fact it was the same thing. I mean, he had he was collecting cash on the side from so many sources from the union, loans, from skims he had with employers and
the like. But he was not spending the money on himself. He was spending it to enhance his power, which he was using to enhance the teamster's power. So there's a story to tell that he was this truly principled labor leader, the principle being that he'll do anything to make his union better. He saw the state and management as basically being in bed with one another, and they were defying the laws. So he developed the view early on that law was something to be complied with when it served
her interests. You say in the book that Chucky Charles O'Brien, Chuckie O'Brien was your father from your perspective, your stepfather in technical terms about your father, right, and that Jimmy Hoffa was effectively a father figure to Chucky. Chuckie called him dad, and he referred to Chucky as his son. So in some sense, this is a book by the indirect grandson of Jimmy Hoffa, and a less likely grandson
of Jimmy Hoffa could hardly be imagined. I someone who was like the younger academic who's looked up to you in my whole career, always thought of you as mister Buttondown. You know, establishment Republican rock ribbed commitment to the rule of law. Rule of law over everything, you know, no matter what, even if your career is on the line, you've got to stand up for the rule of law. So any lineage, however, indirect to Jimmy Hoffa, is kind
of extraordinary. But that's the framework for the book, isn't it So, yes it is. I mean I never met Haffa. Haffa disappeared six weeks after my stepfather came into my life. But yes, Chucky was closer to him than anyone, and he met him when he was nine, and he was effectively Chucky's father. Chucky's never really knew his father, and Haffa became his effective father, and Chuckie revered him his
entire life. And yes, Chucky was my father, and especially during the most important developmental period of my life, which was my teenage years, in which he had an enormous influence on me. And so the book is called In Halfa's Shadow, and it's really about Chucky being in Halfa's shadow as his son and the person who supposedly drove him to his death and then my life in the shadow of both of them, and in Chuckie's shadow. There's
an important ethnic dimension to this book. I mean, it's almost like a male This book is a true melange of different American ethnicities. Are three main American ethnicities Italian Sicilian Italian particular, which is half of Chucky's heritage, and it's his mother, Sylvia's Neopolitan family, or at least Sicilian family. Then there's the Irish side, because Chucky's last name is O'Brien, right.
Then there's Haffa himself, who I think a lot of people, especially in my generation, imagine must have been Italian, just because his name ends with a vowel. Of course, off, it's not an Italian name at all. No name in Italian starts with a letter H. He was actually of a Protestant gotch Irish, I think. Yeah. So in Chucky's life, his Italians seems always to have been an important part
of his cultural identity. But he must also have felt very intensely that he wasn't fully Sicilian and therefore could never be, at least, according to Lure, a made man. So he couldn't be a made man because he was half Irish. I describe a scene in the book where when he was a young man that his mother arranged with the Detroit senior members of the Detroit family for him to have something akin to an initiation ritual. But it wasn't. He never became an official member of the Maffi.
He couldn't, as you say, because of his heritage. But even though he was half Irish and never technically a made man, he completely absorbed from a very young age his mother's identity. He listened to every word she said, and she taught him merta from the very beginning. Omerta, the Code of Silence plays a really fascinating role in your book. First, at one very basic plot level, it's the reason that Chucky won't tell you, at least not
until the very raid of the book. No spoilers here exactly what he does or doesn't know about Haffa's disappearance. But Omerta also takes on the role of a kind of code of honor for Chucky, and that I wanted to ask you about that because one of the things that you say in the book is that you show, don't just say, but show, is how you and your different vicissitudes of your life and your feelings towards Chucky, towards your dad came ultimately to have some loving respect
for his sense of honor. Now, how do you reconcile that with your own presumable non embrace of the idea of a code of silence in connection with criminal activity. I mean, if anything, your public career is all about refusing to adopt a code of absolute silence. Basically, until I started having conversations with Chucky for this book, and indeed after we started having conversations with this book, I viewed Amerta as self serving, corrupt, crime hiding and opportunistic,
and in some sense that's what it is. I mean, it is a code that is designed to ensure, among other things, that you can break the law without being discovered.
And so for Chucky this was a huge principle, and it posed a problem for writing a book for me, because I needed to know what he knew if I the main thing I set out to do, at least originally, the book became much more complicated as I wrote it, But the main thing I can't set out to do was to clear him from the charge that he basically was the person who picked up his basically father and
drote him to his death. And I didn't believe that, and I wanted to clear him, but I needed him to be honest with me, and I said this it was It was the one condition I gave when when we agreed to do the book together. I told him, you have to tell me the truth. He basically said, I'll try, and he did try, but there was this constant roadblock because every time he got to the verge of telling me certain things, his mother's visage would appear in his head or Uncle Tony would appear in his
head and he would stop. So over time he told me a lot more than I think he intended to, and maybe some things that he regretted a bit. And also over time I came to admire his commitment to America. And here's how I can explain it. This is a man who, for over forty years has been falsely accused of basically driving Haffa to his death. He lost everything
because of the Haffa di appearance. He lost his job, he lost his otherwise, every other aspect of his honor, His reputation was ruined, his physical health was ruined, He had troubles with my family. He was basically destroyed by Haffa's disappearance. He lost you and some he lost lost me for twenty years. I'm not sure how much of a lost that was, but he thought it was. From what you say in the book, it was an enormous It was an enormous loss to him and something I
didn't appreciate until later in my life. But the thing, the one thing he held onto throughout this entire period, was this principle. And for him it wasn't opportunistic and it wasn't instrumental either. It wasn't just self preservation that it wasn't something bad would have happened. If this wasn't about him worrying about something happening to him. It was because, as he said to me, I'm more than one occasion.
It's just not right. And the reason I came to admire it when I was pushing him and pushing him to tell me what he knew and I didn't. I never tried to push him too hard. We had these strange lines that we both respected. I came to see how painful it was for him to struggle to tell me what he could and then but not violate his own code or his own principles. And I saw how important it was to him, and I saw that it was the only thing that he had really held on
to successfully and they had given it. Sounds dramatic, but it's true, given his life sort of meaning and order during all of this terrible ordeal. And so at the very end, in our last conversation about half of disappearance, when I basically said to him, you know, I just really can't believe you're going to take the other things, you know, to your grave, and he basically said that was what's going to happen. And he was telling me
this not for any instrumental reason. He in some sense he had nothing instrumental to lose and everything instrumental to gain by telling me more than he told me. And I was, as I say in the book, I was in awe of what I described as his eccentric integrity. And it was again, it's not a principle that I obviously adhered to. It's not something that I would have ever thought I would come to admire, but I came
to admire his commitment to it. Let's talk a little bit about your own trajectory of feelings about him in connection to your own life, because this book is in part memoir written by someone who's probably never going to
write anything more memoiristic than that. Ever you have, it's incredibly kind of idyllic in certain respects set of high school years where you are able to develop a relationship with Chucky, even though Chucky is the target of all of this extraordinary you know, national pursuit, really right, So to understand this, when Chuckie came into my life, I was twelve years old. I had never really had a
father at that point. My mother had always been very ill, and I remember my childhood as believe it or not happy, but objectively it was not. It was not great, and I didn't have any father figure in my life, and I didn't realize any lack. I just dealt with it. But as soon as this man came into my life, Chuckie O'Brien, it was it was like Heaven sent and he showered me with attention and affection and love. We
did everything together. I basically admired everything he admired, including the team series, union, the labor movement, what with the so called mafia as as he called it, and so at the height of the Haffa disappearance, and he was just being harassed unbelievably understandably, so there were good reasons for the government to suspect him at the height of the Haffa disappearance, when he was having all sorts of troubles in his life, both with the government and with
his own job. I don't know. I don't know how he did it. He was this amazing father, and I really think that during the kind of five year period in which he was who wish we were closest when I was a teenager, and I just think it but for his intervention, my life would have taken a very
different course. Then. In the book, you talk about how you go to Washington and Lee to study, to go to college, and in a passage set of passages that I think is very meaningful to anyone who was once close with their father and then had some distancing, you really shift talk a little bit about that process of how you remake yourself from admiring the teamsters and labor unions into you know, I hope this is not this is not been a defensive way, but you know, a
kind of model young Republican who goes on to Yale Law School and then clerks for the Supreme Court and is well on his way to a career in mainstream legal academia and Republican politics. So I didn't know any of that was going to happen when I started to change, although in some sense I kind of laid the groundwork for that. I guess several things happened when I got to college. So when I was a teenager, I just had never questioned Chucky. I just sometimes a little bit,
but not really. I fundamentally didn't question, like a lot of teenagers were there. And then I get to college, and several things start happening. First, education and learning starts to become important to me, and it was something that he just didn't value at all. Second, I started reading books about the half of Disappearance, and the kind of objective reality was that Chucky had been involved in lots
of criminality throughout his life. I started to worry about whether he would have a dangerous impact on my life. And then the third thing was that I started to think about my career. I started to look forward and think about me could out from under his shadow, and even in college and before I went to law, school. I had a dim sense that being associated with the leading suspect in that Haffa disappearance would not be great, might not be great for my legal career, even before
I started thinking about going for the government. But can I can I ask it? This is this is this personal question. But it's a memoir. So there was a moment. You know, there, you are, you graduate from the late Yale law school, You've had You're getting fancy clerkships. You even spend a summer at the law firm of Millercassidy, Larrocco and Lewin, very very famous firm, which, as you point out, was three of the foreign name partners were people who had spend time actually trying to put Jimmy
Hoffa in prison. Which is why I which is why I went there. I thought at that point, let me just say, millercast day, as you said, was this. It's no longer with us. But it was a very prominent firm at the time, and it was run by people who basically put half in jail. But it was also a firm where there was some tolerance of big personalities.
You could have easily become a famous trial lawyer. You know, the association indirect or otherwise, the Hauffam might actually have given you some notoriety and you would have been a famous, let's call it, democrat leaning figure in that in that world, but you very self consciously at that point turned in the other direction. You went for government, and not for
democratic administrations but for Republican administrations. Well, I didn't I somewhere in there you became a conservative, is what I'm trying. I did. How did that happen? Yes? Okay, So I have a relationship between that in your life. So I learned about that in writing this book. So I'll tell you the story I told myself about that, and then
I'll tell you what I learned from this book. So I had always you know, Washington Lee was kind of a conservative place, and I became somewhat conservative at Washington Lee, but not terribly self consciously. So I went to Oxford. There I kind of had an allergic reaction to the anti americanism and kind of came to like Ronald Reagan there. Then I went to Yale. I was countercultural, Yes, it was countercultural big time. Then I went to Yale Law School.
And the story I had always and I didn't enjoy it Yale Law School, but I just found it intellectually and politically stifling. And I definitely grew more conservative Yel
Law school. And I'd always told myself and this is partly the reason that I was reacting to what I viewed as unpersuasive or stifling or intellectually closed minded viewpoints at the Yel Law School at that time, which were for the most part mainstream liberal, mainstream level right solow scho at that time was not it was not the far left, it wasn't, but it was definitely lockstep, mainstream, lockstep, mainstream liberal. And it was also it didn't have much
tolerance for conservatives. I mean, there wasn't really anyone conservative on the faculty, and I just never really fit in. Yeah, and I became I was drawn to conservative jursprudence at the time, just because I also found liberal jurisprudence to be too free wheeling for what my views about law were at the time. But here's what I figured out writing the book. I also figured out and this as soon as I thought about this, it became obvious as to why I made these moods. Basically, everything I was
drawn to in law school intellectual was anti Chucky. So I took a labor law class, and I was naturally drawn to the employers, and I thought the pro labor side of the arguments were unconvincing, both legally and otherwise. I was drawn to lawn economics, and a law economics view about labor unions is that they're inefficient cartels that are basically the mainstream at least, that the Chicago school of view is bad for the world. I was drawn
to conservative jurisprudence in criminal procedure. Chucky had always, you know, referred to judges and prosecutors and the Justice Department is corrupt, but I was drawn to them, and so part of my political identity at the time, I now realized was part of separating from Chucky. And I was basically doing things and trying to establish a path that was my own path, and that was as much as I could figure out the opposite of the path from Chucky. And
there's something very universal about that. I mean, you're not the first son to want to define himself very much in opposition to his father. So there you are doing that, and then comes the part where I got to know you, where you found yourself first in the Department of Defense in the post nine eleven period as an advisor to the General Council, and then subsequently, at a crucial moment in our country's legal history and in our history generally,
in the Department of Justice. You touch only briefly in the book on your experiences there, but because you've written a whole book about it, right, but just say a word for the listeners about what, to you was the most salient feature of your experience there, and then we'll bring that around to Chucky. So I had a job briefly where we met in the Department of Defense for a year, and it was a job that didn't have
a lot of responsibility, and it was fun. And I worked there for a year and I was headed back to the Academy, and then I kind of accidentally was offered the head of the Office Legal Council in the Justice Department, which was this very consequential, very prestigious, and supposedly intellectually fun place to work. When I was offered the job, I took it. I thought it was great. I thought it was going to be fun and interesting
and important work that I believed in. I was very naive when I went to work at the also Legal Council. It was two years into after nine eleven, and I had no idea what was going on in secret. Some of the controversial things the Bush administration was doing in secret, stuff that subsequently come out, the interrogation and Black Site program,
the warrantless wiretapping program known as Stellar Wind. I can't believe I can say those words, but I can now, and those two programs, especially when I got there through a very complicated set of events, I was required to address their legality, even though it had already been ruled upon and had been those rulings have been relied upon, and I could not find my way to signing off on them, and both of them. I had strong objections too,
and took steps as best I could. It was a completely unprecedented situation from start to finish in terms of removing or withdrawing opinions that have been relied on in the middle of the war intelligence operations. So knowing what the right thing to do was was very hard. It was also just impossibly stressful because basically I was being told that if I do these things, people are going
to get killed. All these people who were out in the world relying on these opinions to fight against al Qaeda, I would be undermining them. So it was a very very difficult time. And then, exercising your own version of eccentric integrity, you did what you thought you had to do as a legal matter, and then you resigned. I did. I resigned in June, basically ten months, nine and a
half months after I got there. After I had withdrawn one of the torture opinions, I resigned, which led to some of the people who had seen you as a friend and ally seeing you as somehow a critic or someone on the outside, or someone who had let them down or maybe broken their version of the code of Vomerta. I didn't think about it that way. But let's just say that I wasn't terribly I wasn't viewed well in
Bush administration circles. I was viewed as some one who it was I was viewed very unterriably, someone who was acting politically, trying to cover my own bottom. These are preposterous. Indeed, the reason I wrote The Terror Presidency. I wasn't even going to write a book about my time in the Bush administration. But when people in the Bush administration started charging me with acting in an unprincipled way and being
political and trying to cover my bottom. I decided, well, there's another side to that, and I'm gonna tell it. And every step I took I didn't I wasn't sure if I was doing the right thing or not. It
was very, very difficult. So then you emerge from this extraordinary public experience, standing on principle as you understood it, being praised by the people who were not your friends before, people to your left, who suddenly you were, that you were everybody's favorite conservative, not my favorite moment I had, not a favorite moment, and criticized by the people who you were friends and allies my favorite moment. And in just that moment, and I think this is just poetically incredible,
you decide to reconcile with Chucky. Right, not a coincidence, Not a coincidence. This whole old thing in the government. It was entirely discombobulating. It was discombobulating to my view of the world, to my view of right and wrong, to my tendency to be judgmental when I was a younger man, to my religious faith, which had redoubled and strengthened it sounds like enormously. When I was in the government, it really deepened and went on in a different path
for all these reasons. Plus, as I said earlier, I had two tiny little babies, and my affection and my love for my children and my vulnerability towards them caused me to rethink entirely what I had done to Chucky, especially since you know, basically when I was at the pinnacle, the thing that I had renounced him so that I could achieve in a way twenty years earlier, and I got to the what was supposedly the pinnacle, and I got there inside the Justice Department, this place that he
had always derided as lawbreaking, corner cutting, self serving and the like. And lo and behold, if he wasn't in some sense which he he could barely articulate, but in a very real, concrete sense, he was right. So all of these experiences led me to be much more humble and about myself and judging others, and to really deeply regret the pain I had caused him. And my mother and my brothers had always told me what extraordinary pain I had cost him, But until I have my own children,
I really didn't appreciate what that was like. And then there's this incredible, deeply Christian, though not in a doctrinal sense, but in the spiritual sense prodigal son moment in the book, which I alluded to earlier, where you go back to Chucky and you tell him that you're sorry yea and to me one of the most moving moments that I can imagine, tell me what to what he says. We were sitting watching Zeinfeld one night and complete and this was I had come down there, and it was the
first time I had seen him. It was the second time i'd seen him in twenty years, and the first time i'd been nice to him. I just wasn't very nice to him. I was not nice to him. We had a great couple of days together. He was clearly very happy that we were getting a long after so long of not talking and not getting along. And we're sitting there watching Seinfeld, and I didn't really give it a lot of thought. I knew I wanted to ask
for his forgiveness. And I turned to him and I said, I'm so sorry what I did to you and all the pain I cost you for those twenty years. I'm just terribly, terribly sorry, and I hope you forgive me. And he was not well at the time. He's not well now, but he was not well at the time, and he had had severe diabetes. And he looked at me and his face was ashen, and he looked at me with a puzzled look, and his eyes watered, and he looked both surprised and shocked, and he said to me, basically,
you don't have to ask my forgiveness. I understand why you did what you did, and I love you very much. I mean, it's it's hard to imagine a better or a rich answer that a father could give a son. It was basically what he had written me twenty five years earlier, when I blew him off. He wrote me this extraordinary letter that I reproduced in the book, in which he basically said, you've hurt me a lot, but I can take it, and you have to make your
decisions now that you're a young man. This is twenty years earlier, but I just want you to know that I love you very much. And it was basically the same thing that he said when I asked for his forgiveness, and he gave it, and he gave it without any qualification, without any I told you so, it's without any regret or rank or we just from that moment on it it was as if those twenty years didn't happen. And I think from your perspective, maybe tell me if this
is right. This book is your second response to his letter. This is a loving response to his letter. It's a book length response to his expression of love. And I read the book itself as an expression of your love for him. There's there's objectivity in it, and there's judgment, and there's an attempt to come to terms with your father in terms of who he was, and with yourself and with your indirect grandfather. So there's honesty pervading it. But I think it's also a book written from deep love.
It certainly was. I mean I I set out to write the book with the narrow goal of trying to give him a fair shake than history had given him, and hopefully to clear his name from the terrible state of having been the person who drove off. At was done, it definitely set out as that it grew to be so much more complicated in ways that I couldn't have imagined. And the reader will have to decide whether I whether it seems like an act of love. It certainly was
that to me. But at the same time, as you say, I felt like I had to be candid, incredible to try to clear him. I'm an interested observer and so i'm, you know, in times in describing him in the book, I'm tough. I'm tough on myself as well. But yes, it was an act of love and really an act of hopeful atonement. The book is extraordinary, and even if a reader had never heard of Jimmy Off, I think it would be an incredible read. And I think somebody who also knows you and looks up to you, the
book is really really profoundly moving. Thank you very much. You're very kind. Thanks huh. Jack Goldsmith's book is called in Half a Shadow, a Stepfather, A disappearance in Detroit, and My Search for the Truth. And now for our sound of the week. Those are airstrikes hitting the Syrian town of Rasslaine on the Syrian Turkish border this Wednesday.
Those are the sounds of an invasion that certainly looks like the beginning of a war in which the government of Turkey will attempt to cleanse a large swath of territory in northern Syria of Kurds who see themselves as the enemies of Turkey and whom Turkey treats as terrorists. In one way, this is just another manifestation of a historical truth over the last century in the Middle East, namely, the Kurds almost always lose big powers that surround the
areas where they live. Whether it's Turkey, Iran, Syria, Iraq, or ultimately, the United States as an outside actor, have consistently blocked the Kurds from achieving their dream of a larger and more significant country called Kurdistan. In that sense, the betrayal of the Kurds, this time by the United States government authorizing effectively the Turkish government to go in and clear the Kurds out of this part of Syria, is simply business as usual in the brutal history of
the Middle East. What makes this instance particularly nasty, however, is how recently the United States was completely dependent on these particular Kurdish militias to fight the battle against the
Islamic State. Remember, almost nobody in the region wanted to provide boots on the ground to fight isis The United States did not want to provide significant numbers of soldiers, and as a consequence of the slow process whereby other countries stepped up, it took years to eliminate the brutality of the Islamic state and reduce it to the tiny
rump organization that it is today. The Kurds bore the brunt of the fight against ISIS, and now the United States has betrayed them, and done so in a spectacularly obvious way. Does this shock the Kurds? Probably not. Does it sadden everybody who thinks that the United States should stand by its allies? Yes, it absolutely does. The question that remains is is the immorality of the betrayal of
the Kurds justified in light of real politique. That's a question that actually can't be answered with any great precision. Many people with good knowledge of the situation on the ground, including a good number of former US military generals, have taken the stance that the United States is shooting itself in the foot by siding with Turkey against the Kurds, because if we fail to stand by our allies, no one will stand up and fight with us the next time.
That's a realist argument for why the abandonment is a bad idea yet it's also inevitably the case that when it comes to finding allies in the Middle East, everyone knows the name of the game. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. The Kurds had no particular love for the United States. They did deal with the United States to fight Isis because it was in their interests. Meanwhile, the United States acted similarly in that sense. Real politique says,
betray your enemies whenever you want. You always know you can get away with it in the end. I don't think ultimately that the question of the morality of the American Act, which is unquestionably lousy, can outweigh the real politique argument in real world, hard nosed Middle Eastern politics. So we need to ask about the bigger picture consequences of this particular action by Turkey, which the United States
has effectively embraced. And here is where the real politique arguments against the Turkish invasion of northern Syria become especially strong. After all, what's Turkey doing. It's not just ridding itself
of potentially pesky Kurdish militias on its border. Turkey is also aspiring to create a substantial area that will be a haven for a couple of million Syrian Sunni Arabs who at present are stuck in Turkish refugee camps, and who, according to Turkey, will now live quasi permanently in the northern part of Syria that is not the part of the country where they traditionally lived, but is in fact
the place where Kurge traditionally lived. Put another way, what Turkey is doing is trying to effectuate an ethnic cleansing and the replacement of one Syrian population Syrian Kurds, with another Syrian population, Syrian Arabs rite along their border. The history of such population transformations in the region is a long one, and it is almost inevitably a story of failure.
Moving populations around creates new conflicts, angerish people, creates permanent resentments, creates a sense of permanent refugee status, places some people to the benefit of others, and doesn't even give all the advantages that one would hope for to the people who are in fact being settled there. It is a fake solution to the Syrian refugee crisis. That is what is pragmatically wrong with the United States government standing by and allowing the government of Turkey to engage in this
transformation of the northern part of Syria. So when you hear that the United States has betrayed the Kurds, that's true. It's morally wrong. But on its own it's not enough of an argument to say that pragmatically this was a mistake. The true mistake lies in the naive fantasy that by putting a new population in a new part of Syria, Turkey can somehow solve the Syrian refugee crisis. It can't. The consequences will be eventually renewed civil war, greater violence,
and more deaths. And that's why we should feel sad when we hear the sound of Turkish military attacks on Syria. Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Lydia Gene Coott, with engineering by Jason Gambrel and Jason Roskowski. Our showrunner is Sophie mckibbon. Our theme music is composed by Luis GERA special thanks to the Pushkin Brass, Malcolm Gladwell, Jacob Weisberg and Mia Lobel. I'm Noah Feldman. You can follow me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman.
This is Deep Background.