08/24/15 – Sonali Kolhatkar – The Scott Horton Show

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Our first guest on the show today is Sonali Kolhatkar, and I'm sorry, ma'am, for not pronouncing your name correctly.
You did it perfectly.
Oh, really?
All right.
Hey, and get this, you're on KPFK just like me.
You do the morning drive time show Uprising, huh?
That's good.
Yes, for about 12, 13 years now.
Oh, cool.
Well, I live in Texas, so I don't listen to KPFK as much as I should, but I'm on Sunday mornings.
I don't know if you ever heard of anti-war radio.
I have not.
So I'm in Southern California.
KPFK is the sister station to KPFT.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, but we're part of the same network.
Oh, yeah, no, I'm on in LA.
That's why I said KPFK.
Oh, you're on in LA.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, because I used to live out there, so I got the show out there, and then I came back to Texas, but I kept my show out there.
Ah, okay.
So Sunday mornings at 8.30, probably when you're sleeping.
Probably.
Yeah.
Anyway, Alan keeps saying he's going to give me back my...
I was on Friday nights there for a couple of years, but...
All right, anyway.
Hi, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for writing this great article that you wrote.
It was the spotlight on antiwar.com the other day.
Why are we ignoring the war on Yemen?
I'm glad that you're not.
I'm only ignoring it because I have so little opportunity to interview people about it.
So few people are writing about it.
Why don't you tell us, you know, whatever it is that you got to say.
What do you think is most important for people to understand about what's going on in Yemen?
Well, first of all, if we put it in just in terms of the power dynamics, Yemen, before the Saudi, you know, airplane started bombing it in March of this year, was the poorest country in the Persian Gulf.
That in and of itself should tell you something.
Yemen shares a border with the richest country in the Persian Gulf, which is Saudi Arabia.
And, you know, I can get into the political reasons why Saudi Arabia started bombing.
But if we think about the fact that Saudi Arabia, which has bought the majority of Middle East weapons sold by the United States and used those weapons along with U.S. advisors to bludgeon the poorest country in the Persian Gulf so much that 10 million children are at risk of starvation.
I think in a nutshell, that says it all.
And it's really shocking that the Western news media are not reporting on it as much as they should.
Now, who is calling the alarm are all the major global humanitarian organizations, Doctors Without Borders issued a major report, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, UNICEF, Save the Children.
You name the humanitarian organization, they have put out a report sounding the alarm.
And they have used words like catastrophe, on the brink of starvation.
They've used the most, you know, the strongest hyperbolic terms, because those terms, sadly, in this case, apply.
And that's why I wrote the article that I did on Tristic.
It shocked me that there was such a deep and widespread humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Yemen, that if anybody other than the U.S. and Saudi Arabia had been the perpetrator, you would have members of Congress screaming about intervention to stop this kind of disaster instead, because we're involved, there's deafening silence.
Yeah, well, we did have a guy from Oxfam come on to talk about it.
And you have links here in your article, again, it's at truthdig.com.
Why are we ignoring the war on Yemen links to all the different humanitarian organizations and their warnings.
And the big part of that, as you say, the poorest country from the get go.
But also, as Patrick Coburn first pointed out, before the war really broke out, I think, or right when it first broke out, 90% of Yemen's food comes from imports.
Pre-war, you know, all things being equal, they import 90% of their food.
So all that is completely cut off.
So now my only question is, how can people be on the brink for so long?
They must have starved to death by now.
It's four months later.
Yeah, in fact, if you look up photos of Yemen's children, it is shocking.
It reminds me of the kinds of sort of stereotypical photos of starving children that we were shown in the 1980s of children in Ethiopia, ribs sticking out, hollowed cheeks, eyes bulging out.
It gave me nightmares to think about what we have unleashed on Yemen.
And you're right in pointing out that it is importing so much of its food, because what the bombing has done and what Saudi Arabia has very deliberately gone after are those access points, the ports through which aid has come in and traditionally has come in.
Just earlier, last week, they bombed Port Hodeida, which is a very major port that prompted one aid worker to say that it really should be seen as the last straw, cutting off yet again, the meager food supplies that have been coming in from the outside.
There's such a, and Saudi Arabia has been ignoring UN requests for ceasefires, just for humanitarian grounds.
The UN has been calling and Ban Ki-moon has been very frustrated with Saudi Arabia.
Basically, they've been calling for a few days of a pause in the bombing to allow only for humanitarian purposes food to be brought in.
And Saudi Arabia has time and again violated those ceasefires or simply ignored them.
And the US has increased the number of advisors for intelligence purposes that it has given Saudi Arabia to fight this war.
So we are tremendously complicit.
Yeah, now, and that's the thing.
There's been so little reporting about, you know, much of this, you know, like you're saying here, but the part that, you know, is most compelling to me anyway, other than the just the brutality of it, of course, is the American role.
And there's been such a lack of detail.
The Wall Street Journal ran a thing that two months ago now, or maybe more than that, 10 weeks ago or something, saying that, oh, yeah, you know, America's running the whole thing, picking the targets.
The LA Times is saying, yeah, they're sending more people over to help pick targets.
But I'm only inferring, I can't, I don't think I can pin this down.
I'm only inferring that America must be running air traffic control for the entire thing.
The Saudis, I mean, I know they have AWACS, but they're not running their own air war.
That's got to be the United States at sea and in their AWACS, directing the sorties to their targets, etc, etc.
And, you know, I hate to only assume that, but I can't find much reporting, you know, even in that LA Times story, they don't really get into exactly what are they doing other than sitting at a table looking at pictures and picking targets, you know?
Yeah, I think you're absolutely right to point out the fact that the US is, you know, behind the scenes, the Saudi Arabia is dropping bombs.
And then on the ground, we have troops from the United Arab Emirates that just basically, you know, up to the ante, again, not very well reported.
The UAE does not get very involved in wars very often, particularly sending in ground troops, but they've sent in ground troops.
And if you look at who is, who are the top two weapons buyers in the Middle East from the United States, it's Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
And so we've armed these two countries that are going in.
Another important point that I think needs to be brought up is the fact that Saudi Arabia is claiming, or one of the main reasons that Saudi Arabia is giving for fighting this war is to try to undermine Iranian influence in the region because Iran, they fear are supporting the Houthi rebels on the ground in Yemen, except that President Obama has openly, of course, tried to make peace with Iran and has even said in an interview, and I reported on this mytristic piece, that the Iranians have in fact played a role that has tried to hold back the Houthis.
So why is the United States helping Saudi Arabia fight a war against Iranian influence when the United States is trying to make peace with Iran?
As usual, we have the U.S. fighting both sides of a war.
Yep, absolutely.
All right.
Now, I'm sorry, we've got to pause and take this break.
We'll be right back, y'all, with some Nali Kolhatkar from KPFK in Los Angeles with this great article, Why Are We Ignoring the War on Yemen at truthdig.com.
We'll be right back after this.
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All right, y'all, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm on with Nali Kolhatkar from KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, where sometimes they play my show and sometimes they don't.
She's got this great piece at truthdig.com, Why Are We Ignoring the War on Yemen?
And, you know, I don't know, a little bit of background, of course.
It's a bit of a regime change operation.
America eased out their old sock puppet, replaced him with the vice president, but then the people overthrew him.
Well, really the Houthi rebels from the north, the Zaydis from the north came and ran him out of town, ran him out of the country.
And then so the Saudis and I guess the whole GCC and with American coordination have been bombing the crap out of them for about four months now.
They're in a huge humanitarian crisis.
They have very little food resources of their own.
And as the guest from Oxfam was saying a couple of weeks back, even what food is produced, all the markets are bombed and destroyed and all the distribution channels are gone.
So there's just no way to distribute it.
And this is in a country where, again, they import 90% of their food on a good day.
And so it's the worst humanitarian catastrophe on earth right now, at least right up there with Syria.
Anyway, so one of the things that you brought up right there before the break there was how the excuse is that the Houthis aren't just the Houthis.
The Houthis are the Hezbollah of Yemen, and they are a front for the new Persian empire that is taking over the Middle East.
And so or at least this is a sop to the Saudis that will help them with this if they'll tolerate our nuclear deal with Iran or something like that.
But what do you think of the real politics going on here?
Why are the Saudis so insistent they got to they're willing to go through all this just to put Hadi back in power?
And is there any hope of that even with a ground invasion?
Well, I don't know how long Yemen is going to be able to stand up to Saudi pressure.
But if you look at what's happening beyond the Yemen war, a pattern emerges on certainly the Saudi Arabia is claiming that it wants Hadi back in power because he was democratically elected.
He was the person who wasn't democratically elected.
Actually, he was appointed leader.
He was vice president under Abdullah Salah, the dictator of Yemen, who was toppled by as a result of the Arab Spring, and the Arab Spring revolutions.
And there you have, I think, a real indication of why Saudi Arabia is so worried about what's happening, not just in Yemen, but in Bahraini, Egypt and other countries.
What the Saudi war in Yemen is about overall, is to squash democratic aspirations.
The Houthi rebels took over, kicked out Hadi, and we're hoping whether you agree with them or not, whether they're necessarily representative of all Yemenis, that's a debatable point.
But they wanted and they were open to some kind of power sharing in a democratic government.
The Saudis do not want the idea that one can start a rebellion and be part of a future government to spread.
They don't want that idea to spread in the Arab world.
And this is a big part of the reason why with US backing, Saudi Arabia has undermined every step that it can, everywhere that it can Arab Spring revolutions.
And so we need to look at that in the bigger perspective, we need to look at that pattern that is, you know, fairly obscured, sadly, by the mainstream media coverage here.
Well, and of course, their policy is just, you know, maybe good for them in in the short or medium term, they think, but certainly contrary to American national interests.
If you look at, for example, all the blowback from the military coup, the Saudi and more or less American sponsored military coup in Egypt there, where all they did was prove Zawahiri right, that the Muslim Brotherhood are fools for trying to participate in Western ways of democracy and all of this stuff.
And might as well fight because they never let you win, even if you did win.
And all they did was say, you know, whatever that Al Qaeda guy just said, we're going to prove it true right now.
And so now they've got, you know, just as anybody could have predicted back then.
And, you know, when they did the coup in 2013, that this is just going to prove Al Qaeda right, and lead to a whole new generation of, you know, guerrilla warfare, basically in Egypt, which has been mostly a piece this whole time.
Absolutely.
And you know, another thing we should bring up on Yemen is that Al Qaeda is still very much active in Yemen, the Saudis have had various connections to Al Qaeda over the years.
But the US, while it's supporting a Saudi war against Houthis, continues its drone war against Al Qaeda.
So well before Saudi Arabia began bombing Yemen in March, the US, since the Bush era had been intermittently bombing, so called high value targets inside Yemen with drones.
And as the Saudi war has progressed, the US has not stopped its bombing campaign and just recently killed people that they say were five suspected militants with Al Qaeda.
And all the Al Qaeda branch of Yemen, which is considered one of the most dangerous, is, you know, continuing to issue threats against the US.
And we've seen the pattern that the more the US goes after Al Qaeda, the more dangerous the world becomes for Americans, the more threats that get issued, and the more terrorism and risks of terrorism actually increase.
And so overlapping with the Saudi war on Yemen and the civilian, the impact on civilians, is the US's ongoing drone war in Yemen, which has also shown to kill civilians when it has missed the so called suspected militants.
Yeah, and amazing.
I mean, switching off from one side to the other.
First, we back Saddam, then we back the Ayatollah a little bit and back and forth and overthrow Saddam for the Ayatollah and go back and forth.
But fighting outright for both sides at the very same time on the very same day helping Al Qaeda advance on the Houthis while bombing them too, is really something else.
Yeah, and this is the problem.
I mean, if we try to disentangle US policy in the Middle East, between 9-11 and now, what you have is something that has almost no rhyme or reason, the pattern that is emerging is so, I mean, if you just even focus on Syria for a minute, the pattern that emerges is so complicated, it's so counterintuitive, that the only thing is that you can predict with any degree of certainty is that US involvement has increased chaos, increased violence, increased poverty, increased political instability and undermined democracy every step of the way.
And it's very, very sad.
And, you know, it really needs to stop.
I know that with the focus on economic inequality here in the US in light of the presidential election, Americans are paying less attention to our foreign policy.
But frankly, our foreign policy under President Obama has been one that the Republicans have been on board with.
And if, you know, if you're against anything the Republicans are for, you need to be against Obama's foreign policy.
Yeah, absolutely.
And of course, you know, if we had anybody up there, out of the 25 people running for president right now, if one of them was honest and wanted to fight about it, he could tie the rest of these guys all in knots for their various positions and just, you know, make hash out of them.
It shouldn't be any problem whatsoever.
And I don't see Bernie Sanders doing it.
I don't see Rand Paul doing it.
I don't see anybody doing it.
They're all just lining up to see who can be worse on everything.
Right.
And in fact, Norman Solomon, a longtime activist who ran for who ran for Congress, the congressional seat himself, and who is the founder of RootsAction.org, he appeared on my show last week talking about the petition that a lot of thousands of people have signed, urging Bernie Sanders to start talking about foreign policy, right?
There's a huge opening there, which, you know, any presidential candidate could make hay of the other candidates if they were to simply try to disentangle what's happening on the other side of the pond.
The one foreign policy issue that the Republicans and Democrats are disagreeing over is the issue of lifting sanctions on Iran.
In the margins, you'll find Democrats being slightly better than the Republicans.
But on the issues that matter, sadly, they're both on the same team.
Yeah.
Well, there's a slight discrepancy in Syria, whether we ought to finish overthrowing Assad for the Islamic State and al Qaeda, or whether we ought to just continue helping both sides bleed each other to death forever.
Yeah, you know, and this is this is a really important point.
Look, the U.S. has a lot of leverage over Saudi Arabia, much more so than than we'd like to admit.
The U.S. has a lot of leverage over countries like the United Arab Emirates.
It holds not only the purse strings for weapons, but it holds the export markets for oil.
It you know, the currencies of a lot of these Gulf countries are pegged to the dollar.
And if the U.S. were to actually exercise some of that leverage in the right direction in the short term, we could see something much more constructive than what we're seeing now.
In the long term, the U.S. needs to certainly give up that political power.
And we're seeing that very slowly in a world where, you know, sort of a multipolar world where you see centers of power like Russia and China emerging to challenge the United States.
But in the short term, in the Middle East, at least the U.S. reigns supreme.
And it does.
It's doing a very, very destructive job with its policy.
All right, everybody, that is Sonali Kolhatkar.
She is the founder, host and producer of KPFK's morning program Uprising 90.7 FM in L.A. and wrote this very important article at Truth Dig, Why Are We Ignoring the War on Yemen?
Thank you, Sonali.
Appreciate it.
Thank you, Scott.
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