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SHARMINI PERIES: All right, Phyllis. Let me give you the last word. He did mention that a year ago, he had come forth promising to eliminate ISIS, and today, he took credit for that and for having liberated 100% of the territory that was held by what he called "these killers." I want your response to that, and we'll have to end with that. Thank you.
PHYLLIS BENNIS: I think this goes directly to the question of consequences. It is true that, militarily, the ability of ISIS to control territory and control populations in whole cities has been largely defeated by primarily, not only, but primarily, U.S.-led forces. However, the cost of that, the cost in lives, thousands of people, thousands of civilians were killed by U.S. bombing and other bombing. The Syrian and Russian attacks on Aleppo killed numerous people as well. But if we're looking at U.S. policy, thousands of civilians were killed. Entire cities were destroyed. This was not Vietnam where the famous line was, "We had to destroy the village in order to save it." This was, we had to destroy a giant modern city of over a million people in order to "save it or liberate it."
So, this notion of ignoring consequences on real people in the real world, in the interest of claiming the great accomplishment of some political claim, in this case we've gotten rid of ISIS control of territory, is very much indicative of this kind of ability of Trump and his administration to absolutely dismiss the lives of other people, people in other countries, people of color in this country, immigrants and refugees from all countries, Muslims from all countries. All of these people can be dismissed as if they have no consequence. I think that's what we were seeing in a very raw form tonight.
SHARMINI PERIES: And that was Phyllis Bennis with the Institute for Policy Studies. We've had Max Blumenthal who's a senior editor of the Gray Zone Project, and of course, Norman Solomon, journalist with exposefacts.org. Thank you all for joining us this evening.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Thank you.
NORMAN SOLOMON: Thank you.
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