For the typical American, it's beyond frustrating to behold the whipsaw fashion with which President Donald Trump negotiates in public with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps death cult theocrats who can't wait to get enough nukes, drones, and ballistic missiles to kill Israelis and Americans.
One day, there's a deal. The next day, there's a ceasefire. One day there's a can of whoop a*s opened up on the mullahs, and the next day, there are drones aimed at American Apache helicopters and a — wowza — follow-up announcement of a deal.
Remember when the left said that Donald Trump didn't have the temperament to be president? I wish he had less. I can't believe the unabashed nuttery this dude puts up with in these negotiations with Shiite Islamist death cult members who'd sooner nuke us as speak with us. But here we are.
Qatar and Pakistan pretend to be our friends and unbiased intermediaries bent on negotiating "peace."
Are we talking about the ISI-who-hid-bin-Laden for years in Abbottabad? Tell me more, Pakistan. Eye roll.
Yes, Qatar, our blessed friends who fund anti-Israel and American waves of propaganda to vanquish the West, we bow to your sense of equanimity. Oof.
Two Jewish negotiators, Steve Witkoff and Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, are talking with Islamists who would take a sword and cut off their heads in another setting. Together they're attempting to get a deal for peace with the moneyed Islamists who have killed or maimed hundreds of American service members, given succor to the terrorists who committed 9/11, taught Iraqis how to kill us with IEDs, and kept a nation of Persians under the threat of a bullet.
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Negotiation with these thugs ain't easy.
So how is it done?
How do you negotiate with people who pray for a pox on your house and death to your children in the burst of a mushroom cloud?
I asked a British former ambassador to Yemen, of all places — a place that the Houthis, who are another batch of Iranian proxies, occupy — how this is done.
Edmund Fitton- Brown, who is now a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), told me on the Adult in the Room Podcast that choosing the place, the time, the secure atmosphere is dangerous and fraught. These negotiations don't happen fast.
He would know. Not only was he a diplomat for the United Kingdom; he also worked with the United Nations Security Council to negotiate sanctions and threat assessment on ISIS, al-Qaeda, and the Taliban. So he's on their top ten list of "friends."
His Houthi experience, he believes, is most germane, because "one of them is now the effective de facto Houthi foreign minister, and one of them is now the de facto Houthi president. So they were they were significant guys."
And, he says, they "were very blunt." They initially had to find a way to meet, "because they wanted to see what they could get out of it, [and] I was willing to meet, because my objective was to introduce them to the United States."
But, he says, "there was a strange thing that had happened just before the British and the Americans evacuated from Sanaa [the capital of Yemen]. The British had a sort of what you might call a deconfliction channel with the Houthis, just trying to avoid misunderstandings, trying to avoid anything escalating into a firefight with our security people."
I asked if he could tell me what such a "deconfliction channel" looked like and how was it accomplished. Is it a computer, email, encrypted messaging app, text, or in person? Plus, how do the good guys make sure the bad guys don't kill you?
[T]here was no face to face with with their sort of designated personnel and on our side it would be our people who are actually keeping us safe, the security detail and if necessary involving the political chain of command as well with them.
[T]he idea was that at that time the Houthis were not threatening us physically, but they were doing all sorts of things that could have been misinterpreted like they were building presences close to our embassy walls and things like that.
So it was all very tense, but the difference was that the U.S. didn't have that [deconfliction] channel, and the U.S. did actually end up in a couple of firefights. I say firefights — that's a bit that's a little unfair on the [Americans, since they were] not trying to pick a fight with the Houthis, but the Houthis shot up a couple of U.S. embassy vehicles, and it was pure luck that no Americans were hurt in those incidents.
And so because of that, when the Americans left Sanaa they had no connection with the Houthis; weren't talking to anybody, and we knew that the next stage was going to have to be some kind of Yemeni peace process.
Fitton-Brown knew that what he must do was make "friends" with the West's enemies.
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"[A]nd they were pretty nasty," he told me.
[Y]ou know, a couple of things they said that always stayed with me afterwards just because they were very direct. You know, sometimes you expect — I mean even extremists, even terrorists will sometimes sugarcoat what they say or they'll deny doing bad things because they want to, you know, for whatever reason they deny it. But the Houthis tend not to do that.
Fitton-Brown has more stories about what terrorists told him secretly.
Oh, and to answer your question? Yes, he has ice water in his veins.
Enjoy the interview.
