06/11/15 – Jason Ditz – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, Scott Horton Show.
I got Jason Ditz on the line.
He's the news editor at antiwar.com.
That's news.antiwar.com.
Welcome back, Jason.
How are you, man?
I'm doing good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing good.
Let me get my ear goggles on here.
All right.
Hey, man.
So yeah, good to have you on.
Listen, there's been some terrible fighting going on in Yemen lately, and not too many good reporters writing about it, and none that I can get a hold of.
But you're keeping track of all of them and what they write about this.
So really, you're the guy I should be talking to in the first place anyway.
Please catch us up.
I guess, sorry to burden you, but if you could start with basically at least the presumed reason why Saudi Arabia, with America's help, is bombing the crap out of Yemen.
What's it all about?
How bad is it?
What are the consequences?
How soon might it be over?
These kinds of things.
Well, for the last 20 years or so, Yemen has had a pretty major split with a faction of Shiites called the Houthis.
Now, the Houthis got their start when their original founder, who was a fairly powerful politician, made a power sharing deal with President Saleh.
And Saleh reneged on the promise of power sharing and basically sidelined him.
So it started a lot of protests.
He cracked down on the protests.
They formed a militia.
And the original Houthi was eventually killed.
His father took over.
He too was eventually killed by the Saleh government.
Now, the founder's younger brother is the one that's in charge of it.
And they've controlled the northern couple of provinces of Yemen for years now.
Starting in the winter, the Hadi government launched an offensive against them, trying to push them out of certain areas where there's some overlap between their Shiites and the Sunnis.
And they pretty quickly turned the tables on them, routed the military, and started advancing and ended up taking the capital city.
Not long after that, President Hadi in January resigned.
The Houthis were trying to come up with a power sharing deal and some sort of transition to actual elections.
Because what most people don't really remember is that Hadi was never actually elected.
After Saleh was ousted in the Arab Spring, the U.S. and the U.N. basically imposed Hadi on the country by saying, well, this is going to be your transitional leader.
He was one of the top heads of the military.
And they held an election in which he was the only person allowed to run and he couldn't vote no.
So he became the ruler of Yemen for a couple of years there before he resigned.
And now the Saudis have decided they want him back in power.
So they, in March, declared war and started attacking Yemen, saying they're going to continue the war until everyone agrees that Hadi is back in power.
Amazing.
All right.
So now how bad have the Saudis put the hurt on the Houthis?
Because after all, they do have a zillion dollars worth of Lockheed products in their arsenal, don't they?
Well, they've certainly hit some Houthis over the course of the war, but a lot of their airstrikes seem to be aimed at the remnants of Yemen's old military structure, military bases in the capital city.
A lot of them are missile depots and things like that, that they've bombed, setting off explosions that have killed large numbers of civilians.
And they also blew up the home slash mansion of former President Saleh, who they accuse of being pro-Houthi, even though he was the one that was fighting them for decades.
That basically brought Saleh into the war against them, too, because even though he hasn't been president for three and a half years, he was president for 30-plus years before that, and he still has the loyalty of an overwhelming majority of the military.
So he's been mustering forces to resist the Saudis.
So really, the Saudis haven't accomplished much.
And so you're saying it really is questionable whether or the degree to which Saleh is working with the Houthis.
He's got his own separate faction, is that it?
Right.
I mean, certainly they're working together now, but I think at the start of the war, the claims that he was behind the whole thing didn't really hold water.
I read that he actually is a Zaydi, is that how you say it, do you know?
Right.
From the same religious faction as the Houthis.
He's just not a member of that political faction, right?
Right, right.
And the real Houthi split with the government was originally a political dispute, anyway.
It was never really a religious thing.
And it's only become a religious thing in the last few years as governments have tried to move Sunni tribal factions of fairly Islamist leanings into the northern area to try to weaken the Houthis' power base there.
And that's really been what's fueled a lot of the sectarian fighting in the north.
Well, and it sounds like a lot of the Houthis are trying to get And that's really been what's fueled a lot of the sectarian fighting in the north.
Well, and it sounds like it has backfired tremendously.
And of course, if we go back to Saleh's attacks on the Houthis that you talked about, that was all with American money and guns that we gave him supposedly to fight Al-Qaeda with.
Oh, absolutely.
And then when he did fight them, as you said, they just turned the tables around.
All it does is eventually, in effect, all he's done is make the Houthis more powerful than they ever were by attacking them.
Now he's allied with them.
And here, America and Saudi are fighting on the side of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula against the Houthis.
And by the way, is there any other faction on the ground?
Because it doesn't seem like it's going to be Hadi, right?
He doesn't even have a faction, really.
Or does he?
But is there any other faction that can control or be accepted by, is probably a better way to put it, the Sunni majority there?
It seems like the Al-Qaeda in Iraq has got a huge piece of that population anyway.
Well, I mean, that's the key.
A lot of these factions have their own little power bases in different parts of the country.
Hadi does still have a few troops loyal to him.
There's still a pretty substantial secessionist movement in the South that has taken over a few cities.
And then you've got Al-Qaeda and a very fledgling ISIS group that are both fighting over a lot of the tribal areas.
And the secessionists, the Sunni secessionists, those are the socialists?
Right, right.
They're the remnants of the former South Yemen government and people that wish South Yemen was still independent.
Yeah.
Now, when the people, because it seemed like they had a great number of factions all come together to agree on one thing, that they want rid of Saleh, starting with the Arab Spring back in 2011.
And of course, as you mentioned, Hillary Clinton just came there, frustrated all of their aims and goals and plans by foisting Hadi on them basically in this phony one-man election, which is kind of hilarious in a tragic kind of way.
But did they have any kind of coalition that they were working on before Hillary screwed them like that?
That somebody that the different factions could agree on that presumably would disinclude Al-Qaeda in Iraq and obviously, I guess, would not include the Houthis or maybe it could, I don't know.
Well, there definitely were political factions that were forming.
It's not really clear who was going to win out there, but there was a lot of momentum behind having some semblance of a democratic election.
And it just simply never panned out.
Yeah, man.
And so, yeah, it seems really incongruent, though, that, well, you know, we're going to do, we're just going to bomb them until they put the guy we want back in power there.
And that can't happen.
And that's never happened in the history of humankind, nor will it.
So now the music's playing and you don't have time to answer.
When we get back, I'll ask you about, you know, if you think that there's, or actually, I'll probably forget.
So remember the question right now.
Is there any chance that the Saudis could achieve their goals or maybe any indication that they're changing their goals to something even within the realm of possibility?
Possible?
I don't know.
Jason Ditz, news.antiwar.com.
We'll be right back.
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All right, guys, welcome back to the show.
Unreal.
Hey, I'm on the line with Jason Ditz.
He's the news editor at antiwar.com, news.antiwar.com.
And we're talking about this horrible war in Yemen.
I don't know if he can give us a ballpark rundown on the casualties and that kind of thing.
But before the break, my question was along the lines of, you know, light at the end of the tunnel here is are the Saudis adjusting to the real world we live in here with their stated aims and goals and their actual, you know, strategy and tactics, which seems so, you know, contradictory to each other kind of thing.
So what do you say?
Well, it's not clear that the Saudis are adjusting their their tactics or their war goals.
They're still insisting that they figure they're going to win this eventually, even though they don't appear to have accomplished anything in the last two months except killing a few thousand people.
The exact numbers aren't really clear.
The remnants of the Hadi government seem to be starting to hint at openness to going back to the pre-war situation and the pre-resignation situation where they were talking with the Houthis and trying to come up with some sort of transitional government and pathway to actual elections, which was all the Houthis really wanted in the first place.
A lot of the sort of aides to Hadi are saying they're going to be in Geneva this weekend for the UN brokered peace talks to sort of try to hash out a deal with the Houthis, although Hadi himself has insisted he's not going to attend those or if he's going to attend those talks, he's not going to talk with the Houthis under any circumstance and is still insisting that he wants to be installed back in power by the Saudis unconditionally, even though it's pretty clear at this point that's not going to happen.
Yeah.
Oh, what a mess.
And I'm sorry, on the ballpark, do you know how many hundreds or thousands of people have been hurt or killed in this thing?
I would guess it's in the low thousands for killed.
I'm not really sure.
Certainly several hundred of them are civilians.
It's really hard to say, though, because we don't get a lot of good reporting out of Yemen.
It's a lot of.
Well, there's a report of an airstrike that killed 10 people in this city and report of an airstrike that killed 20 in this city, but we don't really get good numbers out of anyone there.
Right.
And now one of the other things that we do see, though, are reports, I guess, especially in terms of what they call impending humanitarian crises because of the breakdown in distribution of food and water in a country where they import 90 percent of their food, which is unreal.
Right.
And that's really the most important thing here is, like you say, Yemen does not grow a lot of food.
They don't have a great economy either.
So the fact that they've been able to have their sort of trivial little oil industry and their semi-substantial coffee exporting industry keep them importing enough food to feed their population has been something of a surprise.
But since the war began, the Saudis and their allies, Egypt, United Arab Emirates, they've got a naval blockade across the whole country, and they're being very difficult to shipping companies that are trying to bring food into the country to the point where a lot of the usual shipping companies are saying they're simply not going to go to Yemen because it's too much of a hassle to wait parked off the coast for weeks while one country searches their ship, they get a little closer to the coast, and then another country demands to search the ship too.
The Saudis are insisting that it's because they think Iran is smuggling weapons into the country, although they never seem to be able to find any of them.
And from the looks of things on the ground, the Houthis are just using weapons that they looted out of military bases.
So it doesn't appear like they're awash in Iranian weapons or anything.
But it's really keeping the food out of the country.
We've had reports in the last couple of months, the price of flour was formerly subsidized before the war, and it had gone up tenfold, and then it went up another tenfold, and then a few days later, you just couldn't buy flour anymore because it had all been sold.
All right.
I'm sorry, let me switch to Libya now.
In the time we have left here, two, three minutes, it's basically still two governments, a country divided in half at war?
Well, it's more than two now.
I mean, there's two that have any sort of international recognition.
There's the sort of Misrata slash Tripoli government in the West, and then the Tobruk government in the East, which the Eastern government is the one that's internationally recognized and backed by Egypt, but they have a lot less territory.
We also have ISIS in the country holding a pretty substantial amount of the Central Coast.
And Al-Qaeda's allies have started fighting against ISIS over some of that territory.
Yeah, well, and I guess that's really all just branding, not really a chain of command, but they're just trying to raise money and trying to figure out what to call themselves to raise the most money and get the most international support.
Is that it?
Well, that's certainly how it started.
They were smart.
They'd all call themselves Al-Qaeda so they could get that Israeli and Turkish money there.
Right.
There's this group, Jishal Islam, that back in October declared itself loyal to ISIS and declared itself part of ISIS and started calling itself ISIS.
At the time, it wasn't clear that there was any formal tie, although since then there have been reports that ISIS from Syria has actually started sending some advisors to sort of get them on the same page.
And they've really gone from just holding part of part of the city of Derna to controlling a fair amount of the coast, which, of course, is the only territory that really matters in Libya, because that's where everybody lives.
Yeah.
Oh, man, what a disaster.
And so I guess, is anybody doing a Libya body count at all?
Does anybody know how many people are dying in this crisis?
Of course you have.
You got to count all the people drowning.
And by the way, you know, I'm sorry, man, to you, Jason, everybody else.
I just haven't kept up with this nearly enough.
But it seems like all the pictures on TV of the refugees from Libya are mostly all black.
And I wonder whether that's part of the same system of anti-black pogroms that broke out right after the war in 2011, especially in Misrata and all of that.
You know, is that really why those people are refugees?
Not just because they're hungry or whatever, but because they're right now a persecuted racial minority?
Well, I'm sure that's a part of it.
That's got to be an aspect of it, because, of course, the Misrata militia now controls Tripoli.
They control a fair chunk of the western half of the country.
And they've insisted all along that the black people were all loyal to Gaddafi, so they're all automatically suspect.
So there really has been, virtually since Gaddafi was ousted, a movement to sort of chase them out of this town and chase them out of that town.
And now they're drowning in the Mediterranean Sea.
Oh, right.
That's a disaster.
All right.
Listen, thanks so much for coming back on the show, Jason.
It's always great to talk to you.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
All right, y'all, that is Jason Ditz.
He's keeping track of all the bad news, dude.
News.
Antiwar.com.
He's the managing news editor at Antiwar.com.
News.
Antiwar.com.
We'll be right back.
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