10/17/14 – Jason Ditz – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, Scott Horton Show.
Next up on the show, it's our friend Jason Dittz back on the line.
This time, at least for starters, we've got to talk about Libya.
Welcome back to the show, Jason.
How are you doing?
I'm doing good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing real good.
Appreciate you joining us today.
And yeah, man, so I was explaining to the people at the top of the show there that if they go to news.antiwar.com, they'll know pretty much everything they need to know about what the hell is going on in the world.
All day, every day, you're writing it up over there.
And I don't know what we'd do without you.
And I don't know what I'd do without you to talk to me about Libya on the show.
There are very few reporters and even many fewer opinion columnists paying any attention to this, trying to compile the news together and give us a good narrative about what the hell is even going on over there these days.
And I was just thinking as I hit the button that, you know, I think you and I did a lot of coverage of the Libya war back in 2011 because there was that same kind of dearth of coverage back then.
We need, you know, Jason to do the summary because of the actual reporters on the ground.
There are only, you know, two or three or four to choose from.
So we run out of those pretty quick.
Thank God you're there and paying attention.
So, is it even fair to call the country Libya anymore?
Or is it the country formerly known as Libya?
Are they going back to calling it Tripolitania or whatever the hell?
Yeah, I think calling it Libya hasn't really been true for a few years now.
Even post-Qaddafi, you know, with the installation of that provisional government, they never really controlled more than a couple of cities at any given time.
And now it's at the point where they're holed up in a hotel along the Tunisian border, the parliament, and that's basically all the territory they hold.
Really?
And now there's already another parliament.
Is that in Benghazi too?
Wait, one is near Tripoli and the other is near Benghazi?
Something like that?
Is that it?
Right.
And then, so the one in Benghazi, is that the more Islamist?
And the one in Tripoli, the one in the hotel, that sounds like it must be the CIA.
General Hiftar Qudayta government there, huh?
Right.
And they're not even near Tripoli anymore.
They're more along the Tunisian border.
Well, hang on a goddang minute, man.
Let me pull up my map here.
I guess Tripoli's in the west, but it's not that far to the west.
Is that what you're saying?
Or Tunisia's completely on the other side of the country from where I'm thinking?
No, it's further along the coast, though.
It's in Zawahra.
I gotcha.
Which is just like a little coastal town.
Oh, I see.
Yeah, oh, okay.
Tripoli's what, like maybe four or five hundred miles east of the border there, huh?
Right.
I see.
All right.
I need a better picture of North Africa in my brain, so I don't have to Google it all the time while you're talking to me here.
Yeah, Tunisia's that tiny little state wedged in there between Algeria and Libya in the north there.
I was thinking for a minute, well, wait, they're not further east of Benghazi.
No, no, no.
All right.
Sorry.
Yeah, so point being, well, now wait a minute.
Doesn't General Heftar have the support of the CIA, and doesn't that imply money to buy militiamen and weapons to shoot at their enemies?
Is that even really happening at this point?
Is it completely ineffective?
Well, he has the support of the Egyptian junta, but his claims of support from the CIA haven't really amounted to much so far.
I mean, he keeps insisting that's the case, and it certainly was the case ten, twenty years ago, but it's not really clear how much the US is still in bed with him anymore.
Yeah, it's funny, because it's interesting you say that.
He keeps claiming it.
That makes it sound like it's really not true.
He just wishes it was.
I mean, it's kind of the obvious thing, right, that after a few years they realized, oops, we supported the Mujahideen against the guy with the clean-shaven chin, so that was a mistake, so let's try to hire the next Gaddafi and see if he can be a new General Sisi, a secular military dictator over the country, to try to make up for their terrible mistake.
But no, they're not even trying.
This guy's just winging it himself, you think?
Well, it's not really clear right now.
I mean, certainly Egypt's putting a lot of weight behind him, launching airstrikes on his behalf around Benghazi, but the US so far seems to be sort of on the sidelines, at least for the obvious direct aid.
Hmm.
Yeah, that's interesting.
I wonder why they're not backing him.
I guess, you know, maybe he's a real Chalabi type and they don't like him.
He's too interested in himself or some kind of thing.
Do we know very much about him, really?
Other than he lived in Virginia for a long time?
Well, right.
He was a Gaddafi general.
He got captured during one of Gaddafi's ill-conceived operations in neighboring countries.
The US more or less negotiated his release on the idea that he'd be an inside man.
Gaddafi disavowed him almost immediately, and he ended up living in...
Well, first he was living along the frontier of Libya in other countries, sort of managing a CIA-backed rebel force.
That never really amounted to much, though, and he eventually ended up in Virginia.
Hmm.
And then so they parachuted him in, not even until 2012, right?
Till after the war was over?
Right.
And he parachuted himself in, maybe.
Yeah, he sort of announced that he was going to be the new leader of the Libyan military, and he left and went to Libya.
And he never really got any formal position in the Libyan military.
They gave him some sort of token, you know, advisory position.
Yeah, I guess if they're holed up in a hotel so much for that, it's already over before it began, huh?
And then, so what does that mean?
That means, I guess, whatever warring factions in Benghazi are still fighting over the east, but what of the west?
Does anybody control Tripoli, or it's just criminal gangs running around, or who the hell's in charge in the former capital?
The militia out of Misrata actually controls most of Tripoli now.
The Misrata militia was surprisingly strong during the anti-Qaddafi war, and primarily were noted for completely exterminating the town of Africans just south of them, just completely wiping it out, chasing everyone into refugee camps in Tripoli, then attacking the refugee camps in Tripoli.
And now they control basically that little strip between Misrata and Tripoli, they control most of the capital.
And by the way, whatever happened to all that ethnic cleansing, too?
Again, back to how there's so little reporting out of Libya, I mean, there was no, I never heard of anybody stopping it, but it seemed like the Libyan KKK was running around over there doing whatever they felt like.
Right, and it never really stopped, although, sort of like what happened in Iraq during, just before the surge in Iraq, there had been enough ethnic cleansing to the point where there weren't a lot of ethnicities living near each other anymore, so there wasn't really a lot of high-profile incidents anymore.
Alright, well, what a sad place to leave it.
But yeah, man, people go back and read David Enders on some of the anti-black pogroms in Libya.
I think that probably makes Barack Obama the most racist president since Woodrow Wilson.
Anyway, we'll be right back with more with the great Jason Ditz, news.antiwar.com, right after this.
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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And yes, archive podcast listeners, the reason for the dead airspace there is because there's bumper music playing that the live audience hears that you don't hear.
That's why it sounds like there are naturally long pauses in my welcome backs from the breaks.
Makes sense now, doesn't it?
Just there was The Wizard by Black Sabbath, but you couldn't hear it.
They could.
All right, speaking of live and what's actually happening right now, I'm in the middle of a conversation with Jason Ditz, news.antiwar.com.
You want to know the latest on what all is going on everywhere, where there's something important going on that you need to know about?
Go to news.antiwar.com.
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All right, now, Jason, could you please talk to me a bit about what is going on over in Eastern, formerly known as Libya, was it Syrencia?
Is that what it used to be called back before World War II?
I don't know how to pronounce these things.
Do you?
I'm not sure.
I'd always heard it Syrenica.
Yeah, you're a thousand times closer than me.
I know that for a fact right there.
Okay, good.
So call it Jihadistan.
What's going on there in Benghazi?
Benghazi, it's not just a word for provoking knee-jerk reactions out of conservatives.
It's actually a place with people in it and things that happen there.
It's also the fake Cossus Belli that was the excuse for this war in the first place.
But anyway, update us on what's going on in Benghazi right now.
Well, Benghazi, of course, was the birthplace of the anti-Qaddafi revolution.
And after the end of that revolution and the installation of the provisional government, there was a lot of annoyance that the people that led the revolution against Qaddafi didn't get a lot of the important positions of power in the new government.
A lot of them were just sort of early on Qaddafi defectors.
And a lot of the complaints that they had about oil revenue sharing and things like that are still just as true as they ever were.
So there was still a lot of unrest there.
And eventually there have been several factions that have tried to set up their own separate governments in Benghazi.
The Shura council is the most effective of those groups and controls virtually the whole city at this point.
They're one of the more Islamist groups.
Ansar al-Sharia is a member of their council.
And they've been fighting against General Hifter and the portions of the Libyan military that he managed to recruit to his cause.
Now whatever happened to the Libyan-Islamic fighting group?
Do you know they get folded into something else?
I'm honestly not sure anymore.
So many of these groups come and go so quickly.
That was a pretty major one from, well as major as they got anyway, right?
From the war in 2011?
Right.
Yeah, I guess, I don't know who to talk to about that.
They didn't know Freitberg knows.
Yeah, everything just sort of split off.
It's the same difference as Ansar al-Sharia anyway, right?
Right.
Everything just sort of split off into its various city-based militias.
That's basically the story across Libya is like the Misrata militia.
Ansar al-Sharia is virtually confined to Benghazi as are the other militias there.
You've basically got these one city militias that are trying to extend their control over neighboring towns.
There is no central authority in Libya anymore and there hasn't been for some time.
I wonder, if it used to be three states, I wonder if it will be six now or if there will ever be states.
It will just be Westphalia is over and it's fourth generation, low-level war there from now on.
Although, somebody is going to come in and clamp down in the name of the oil at some point, right?
Or I guess the oil is kind of so far out in the middle of nowhere it doesn't matter either way?
Well, that's the other difficult thing is that a lot of the oil really is just out in the desert.
So, control over the towns doesn't necessarily mean control over the oil.
And it's really been a disaster for the Western oil companies that were supposed to be making all this money over the freed up Libyan oil after Gaddafi's era ended.
The Italian oil giant pumped just a ton of money into getting the rights to most of Libya's oil and production has been intermittent.
Sometimes it stops entirely for weeks at a time.
It's just been a disaster.
Well, back then when we covered this war in 2011, I was always predicting that it would be just like Iraq after Tripoli falls.
It was so obvious then and for nine months it took to finally get rid of the guy.
And it was obvious all along that once he goes, his whole government goes with him and it's going to be replaced by chaos.
And so, who's going to build a new government, right?
It's going to be the U.S. that's going to invade.
They're going to send however many thousand troops, train up a new army and purple-fingered elections.
Which I guess they did do the purple-fingered thing there for a minute.
But anyway, they never did do that, right?
Like they send in some trainers, but they turn around and left because, man, this sucks.
Let's get the hell out of here.
And so, I'm thankful for that, but I'm worried that at some point the U.S., the indispensable nation, is going to take it as, you know, probably even Obama will take it as, or Hillary.
Will take it as their responsibility to try to reform this nation.
I mean, Lord knows they got more than enough on their plate and they can't accomplish any of it.
But still, I just can't imagine they're going to leave the middle part of North Africa on fire indefinitely, you know?
They're going to hire one guy to have a monopoly on killing people there, like in Egypt and like Iraq used to be.
Yeah, it seems like sooner or later that's going to happen, and I'm amazed it hasn't happened so far.
Right now, it seems like the U.S. is content to just, every once in a while, launch an arrest raid against somebody in Libya.
Kidnap somebody off the coast and drag them off on a ship and say, well, he was something to do with a consulate attack, and that's about it.
Yeah, well, so thank goodness for that.
I mean, I don't mean to be giving them ideas, and I sure don't support it, but I admit I am amazed.
I guess I did not give Iraq War Syndrome enough credit for people really hate this stuff.
And in D.C., they get it, that they kind of can't do that anymore without making us all really, really hate them for it.
Of course, if they really did put in a large number of troops there to accomplish anti-terrorism and army training, they would just create an entire new army of suicide bombers against them and justify, you know, they could.
If they wanted to escalate and escalate, they could have an entire Iraq war-sized war over there pretty close for a while.
So thank goodness they're not doing it, but it does, I guess, still seem a matter of it being inevitable.
Unless they are able to give enough billions to a guy like Hiftar for him to be able to pull it off, but I guess he just doesn't have their confidence.
And I guess nobody does either.
Yeah, that's the thing.
It's not clear who you're back at this point.
Certainly Egypt's throwing its weight behind Hiftar, and obviously they just see that as a chance to install a similar military dictatorship along their border.
And the Americans support that effort of the Egyptians then, right?
Oh, certainly.
I mean, publicly they would never say it, but I don't think there's any doubt that they're fine with that.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, it doesn't seem to be working or anything like that.
And now, when Egypt sent in warplanes back, what, a month and a half ago or so, they brought who?
The Qataris with them?
I think it was the...
No, because the Qataris were the pro-Muslim Brotherhood.
Right, I think it was the United Arab Emirates.
Oh, right, right.
Yeah, see, I've got to keep these things straight in my head about who's on whose side is hard.
Although, they denied involvement, so...
Egypt never denied involvement, but the UAE did, so it's not really clear how involved they were.
And by the way, speaking of all this presumed chaos, can you be specific at all?
Do you have any kind of idea of maybe how many different militias, how many people have been killed in fighting in the last couple of years?
I mean, it's been nothing like Syria, for example, right?
No, it hasn't been anything like Syria, but it's certainly in the thousands.
Well, I guess we'll see how it goes.
I wish some more reporters would go back there and write about it.
Thanks very much for your time, Jason.
I appreciate talking to you again, as always.
Sure, thanks for having me.
All right, y'all, that's Jason Dissey at news.antiwar.com.
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