02/17/09 – Jason Ditz – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
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Alright, we're going to go ahead and start off the show with an interview of Jason Ditz.
He's the research editor for Antiwar.com.
Welcome to the show, Jason.
Hi, thanks for having me, Scott.
Alright, so first of all, I guess you and I both might be out of a job if we don't mention that right now is fundraising time at Antiwar.com.
And from the looks of the Homeland Security Meter on the top of the page there, we're in deep trouble here.
Yeah, I guess it's not surprising with the economy the way it is.
Yeah, and I guess it's still heading toward the bottom and nobody knows when it's going to get there too.
And on top of that, I think, I don't know what percentage of the Antiwar.com audience, I don't want to really impugn anybody, but it seems like a certain percentage of the win was taken out of our sale by the election of the Democrat.
Really, for a lot of people, antiwar means anti-Republican.
Yeah, that's true.
I've gotten quite a few emails whenever I have an Obama article about how I should give the guy a chance, and he's going to change everything.
Yeah, which, you know, there's something to be said for giving him a chance, but, I mean, what are you writing about?
It's the things that he's actually doing.
Like today, I woke up to the headline that our mutual good friend Kev Hall sent from the Ross story, Obama, not Bush, now seeking delay of Rove deposition.
Now, this isn't foreign policy stuff, but this is high-level criminality, the firing of the U.S. attorneys and Karl Rove's involvement in that.
And now Obama is taking Bush's position of executive privilege, and that Rove shouldn't have to testify.
I mean, so if you gave him a chance, it's true, it's only been a few weeks, but he's already done some things worth noting.
Yeah, especially the airstrikes in Pakistan, which a lot of people were expecting he might try to at least come to an understanding with the Pakistani government on, but he seems to be just launching them at least as much as Bush was.
Yeah, what was the headline at the ABC News blog?
It was, Bombs away, Brian Ross, Obama tells CIA, go ahead, man.
All right, anyway, so the reason I brought you on here, well, let me say, so donate, please, if you want to read what Jason's writing.
And, of course, the new summaries are just great.
They're such a great addition to the website.
A lot of these headlines, of course, at Antiwar.com nowadays, when you click on them, it's not the AP story.
It's Jason summarizing, giving you the links to the maybe five or six relevant articles in today's news cycle about whatever topic, explaining what it all means and what's the important story to catch in each one and all that.
It's just great.
I've got to tell you, you're doing such a great job on that, and I'm sure everybody in the audience knows that.
You want to keep having that to read, you want to keep having this show to listen to, then you need to go to Antiwar.com slash donate, or there's just no such thing.
I don't really know how to do public radio, you know, donate, pitch.
That's just the truth.
Either you give us your money or we no longer provide the services that we provide.
Maybe Antiwar.com was part of the bubble.
Maybe there really is a demand for continued opposition to Empire, even in an Obama economic depression era.
We'll see, but you people listening right now, you're the ones to decide.
It's up to you whether you're the demand or whether you're not.
All right, anyway, now to the point.
Jason, tell me about the Israeli elections.
It's the kind of thing that Jon Stewart is having a good time making fun of, just how complicated it is.
We had this conversation on the phone the other day where you were explaining to me just what was at stake with the vote and how it works.
You seem to really have a good handle on it, and it's a complicated enough mess.
And, of course, the players, the importance of the results, obviously not lost on anyone in the audience as well.
So I was just wondering, maybe you can give us a summary of basically where we stand now.
It's still unresolved who's going to be able to form a coalition government, whether it's going to be the Foreign Minister Zippy Livni's Kadima party or former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party.
Is that right?
Yeah, and it's looking like it's going to be very complicated for either one of them to do it right now because it's not so much the number of votes each of them got.
They've both got 27 and 28 respectively seats, which is not too bad to be the leader of a coalition, but the smaller parties are kind of divided too.
So you have Lieberman, who's a far-right-wing secularist, and you would think he would support Likud, but you've also got...
Okay, slow down there now.
Who's this, Avigor Lieberman, is that how you say it?
Yeah.
And he's the head of what's-the-name-of-his-party?
I'm probably going to mangle the pronunciation, but it's Israel Beit Ainu, and it means Israel is our home.
And they've got the third-largest number of seats in the election.
And so that's kind of a make-it-or-break-it party, but now this guy Lieberman is about as controversial as our Lieberman, isn't he?
Yeah, at least.
He wants to make everybody take loyalty oaths to the Israeli government, or lose their citizenship if they refuse.
Nice, a little kind of McCarthy-era hysteria going on over there, huh?
Yeah, and it was really popular this time around, because there was a lot of anti-Arab sentiment, because they opposed the war and the war was so popular there.
But at the same time, there are a lot of religious parties that don't like him too.
Because he's the secularist type.
See, this is an interesting thing, right?
Pretty much everybody that is of importance, really, it seems like, are right-wingers.
There's the Labor Party, but they seem to be the least discussed in all this.
It's a question of whether it's going to be the, I guess, somewhat moderate right-wingers, the Kadima Party, or the more hardcore right-wingers in Likud, and then all the splinter parties that matter, like this guy Lieberman's party, and then the other right-wing religious parties.
All the smaller groups that have a real effect, they're all right-wingers as well, only divided between secular and religious, right?
Right.
And there are some left-wing parties, but they didn't really do very well in the vote.
For instance, the Arab parties, really, neither one of them is probably going to have a chance of being in any coalition that gets formed.
They're basically going to be opposition, no matter who's in charge.
But the religious parties have a big problem with Lieberman, not so much for his foreign policy, but his no-citizenship-without-loyalty sort of slogan has rubbed a lot of them the wrong way, because a lot of them don't serve in the military, and he's implied in the past that the people that don't serve in the military aren't real Israelis.
This is a guy who has said outright, in the past at least, and correct me, I don't really know, update me as to whether he's still talking like this, but this is a guy who said we ought to just kick all the Palestinians out of Gaza and the West Bank permanently, send them to Jordan or Egypt with force, right?
Well, he's moderated a little bit on that.
Now he's talking about expelling all the Israeli Arabs.
And his website has their long-term goals, and describes the situation kind of like what's in Cyprus right now, where you have two separate governments that are kind of at each other's throats, but they're not directly fighting.
And that seems to be his ideal.
But in keeping the Palestinians divided between Hamas controlling Gaza and Fatah and the West Bank, you mean?
More like he wants a Palestinian state, but he wants to redraw the map, so to speak, so that most of the Israeli Arab population also ends up in that state.
I see.
Now Livni, from the last reports I saw, the current foreign minister of the Kadima party, Zippy Livni, she, according to the papers that I was reading, was closer to striking a deal with Lieberman, which would, I guess, give her the ability to form a coalition without Likud.
But then, I mean, she's the person who stated, I think just yesterday again, that the Israeli settlers have to get out of the West Bank and Gaza.
I mean, this is a real policy dispute here between what she says she wants and what Netanyahu says he wants.
But it seems like, how is she going to stand by that if she has to form a coalition with the nutball in order to even get the power in the first place?
Well, she's probably not going to be able to.
But even if she gets his endorsement, which right now they're talking like he might not endorse anybody, there's no guarantee she'd be able to form the government.
She might get first shot at it.
Right, and see, now this is the thing too, who gets first shot at it?
Shimon Peres, who's the president.
Now, he's a Kadima guy, right?
Or he's a Labor guy?
Labor guy.
He's a Labor guy.
And even though, well, I don't even know, I guess, because last I heard, it keeps going back and forth, whether it was Kadima or Likud got the most votes, but that is actually beside the point anyway, because Peres can give first shot at forming the coalition to whoever he wants.
I'm not exactly certain what that means, though.
Because it seems like they can form a coalition on the phone in the afternoon, whether they're given permission to or not.
That's what they're all trying to do now, is arrange a coalition that would be enough votes that they could then become prime minister or whatever, right?
Right.
They're both definitely trying to get the number of seats, but it doesn't look like either one of them is there yet.
And who gets the first shot at it might go a long way at giving them a chance to woo those other parties by offering them ministerships and certain policies that would be important to them.
Well, help me understand the difference between what they're doing now, trying to arrange kind of coalitions, versus after Shimon Peres says, you now have first crack at forming a coalition.
What difference is made by his pronouncement there?
Well, the big difference would be that there would be some strength behind the promises.
I mean, there's been so much talk of both Likud and Kadima offering Lieberman enormous concessions to join their side, but until one of them is actually picked to have the first shot at forming the government, a lot of those promises don't necessarily mean an awful lot.
Well, what a big confusing mess.
And so what happens, I guess they just keep trying to form coalitions until somebody becomes the prime minister, and then in the meantime Ehud Olmert hangs on to power now.
Right, and he could stay in power for quite a while.
I mean, even once Peres picks the first party to have a shot, they have 42 days to try to form a coalition.
And if they can't do it, then he'll pick someone else.
And that can theoretically go on for quite a while.
So Olmert might not be going anywhere for a few months.
Very interesting stuff.
All right, everybody, that's Jason Ditt.
The website is AntiWar.com.
He's our research editor there, and he's the guy that writes up all those great news summaries and your top headlines for you every day.
So support.
That's the kind of in-depth examination of what the hell is going on in the world you get at AntiWar.com, and we need your help.
Simple as that.
Thank you very much, Jason.
Appreciate it.
All right, y'all.
It's AntiWar Radio.
We'll be back.