04/04/16 – Jason Ditz – The Scott Horton Show

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Before y'all introducing Jason Ditz, he is the news editor of Antiwar.com.
That's news.antiwar.com.
Welcome back to the show, Jason.
How are you doing?
I'm doing good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing real good, man.
I appreciate you joining us on the show today.
And boy, big news out of Nagoro, Karabakh.
And I guess people might be surprised to hear that there's such a place where that big news could possibly come from it.
This is pretty big.
Top stories today on Antiwar.com.
First of all, where is Nagorno-Karabakh and what are they fighting about?
Nagorno-Karabakh is in the southern Caucasus.
It's former Soviet Union territory, sort of in the area around Georgia.
It's in Azerbaijan, both as far as it appears on a map and as far as the UN is concerned, it's part of Azerbaijan.
But for the last 22 years, it's had an autonomous government that is unrecognized by any nations, which is heavily backed by neighboring Armenia.
And Armenia and Azerbaijan have been fighting over this territory for basically the last century.
Even during the Soviet era, there was more or less constant fighting in this area over which of the Soviet socialist republics it should be a part of.
The Soviets made it an autonomous oblast within Azerbaijan to give it some measure of autonomy because it's ethnically a little more Armenian than Azeri.
That didn't really work.
They kept fighting over it.
They offered a little more autonomy.
That didn't work.
And once the Soviet Union collapsed, it just erupted into a complete all-out war for about three years, ending with a ceasefire that really didn't satisfy anybody.
Well, and I guess you could see why.
I remember being puzzled as a boy in school about, well, how come West Berlin is wholly surrounded by East Germany?
It was a weird consequence of the war that the American and British-occupied part of Berlin ended up being surrounded completely by the communist-dominated Eastern government and all of that.
And then, as you're explaining here, this is the result of a war, too, leading to a real sloppy situation.
If people can imagine a Texas city wholly inside the borders of Louisiana, never mind any ethnic differences or anything else, that would probably lead to some fighting right there.
For whatever reason, you know, no, this town claims Texas, whatever.
The Arkansas side of Texarkana tries to defect.
There'd be fights to break out.
So here we go.
And now, as you're saying, it is really, to a great degree, an ethnic and then even religious difference, unfortunately, huh?
Oh, absolutely.
The 1991-94 war was heavily religious.
Armenia is almost 100% Christian, mostly Orthodox, heavily backed by Russia.
Azerbaijan is overwhelmingly Muslim, mostly Shiite, but with a significant Sunni minority.
And during that war, they recruited Islamist groups from Chechnya to fight on their side.
The Mujahideen from Afghanistan, which had just gotten done fighting the Soviets, came to help them fight the Armenians.
And there's really less of a risk of that sort of thing this time around, unless the war gets really out of hand.
But the real danger here would be Turkey getting involved in a new war, because Turkey is a very close ally of Azerbaijan.
And of course, historically, and particularly in the modern era, Turkey doesn't care for Armenia all that much.
And Armenia is between Azerbaijan and Turkey, right?
Right.
And Armenia is constantly pushing for resolutions at the UN and around the world recognizing the Turkish genocide of Armenians during World War I, which Turkey insists didn't happen.
And that's a big part of why they don't care for Armenia.
Helps to keep tensions high.
Right.
There's just constant tension between those two countries.
All right.
Now, so what happened over the weekend here?
Well, it really sort of started on Wednesday when the Azerbaijani president was visiting Washington, D.C.
And he visited the State Department, talked with Secretary of State Kerry, who told him, This Nagorno-Karabakh thing can't just be unresolved forever.
We need to come up with an ultimate resolution soon.
And within the next 48 hours, there was fighting.
It's not entirely clear who started it.
Both sides, as is so often the case, insist the other side started it.
Azerbaijan says there was some shelling out of Nagorno-Karabakh, which killed a couple of people on the border.
Azerbaijani helicopters attacked some sites within there, killing some Armenian troops.
And it very quickly escalated into full-scale fighting over the weekend.
All right.
Now, so now I guess you're saying I think you write in the article that Kerry made it clear, at least publicly, that he meant negotiate and didn't say, hey, start a war.
But are you suspicious that actually what he did say was go ahead and start a war here?
Or they just decided, you know, maybe in a resentful kind of way, if the Americans are going to push us around and tell us to resolve the conflict, we'll resolve it.
All right.
Or we don't really know, I guess.
Well, we don't really know.
I suspect that Kerry didn't tell them to start a war, though.
I suspect he really did say, you know, negotiate.
But there isn't a good solution that's going to be negotiated out of this.
It's going to satisfy anybody.
The Soviet Union tried negotiated settlements of this situation for virtually a whole century.
And it's territory that belongs to Azerbaijan and a largely Armenian population, which would rather be part of Armenia or an independent republic.
And there isn't a middle ground that's going to placate everybody.
So I think they figured if the U.S. is going to start pushing for a resolution, that the fastest way would be to try to just take it militarily.
Yeah.
Man, that's really something, too.
You know, looking at the map that you have posted in your news stories here, that is one funky border, even if they tried to negotiate it and say, hey, we're going to, you know, cut a path through here.
Obviously, it looks small on the map, but we're talking about a large amount of land.
If they created, I don't know what you call a national easement, but something like that in order to connect Armenia to this territory, then, you know, I guess it doesn't necessarily cut off the rest of Azerbaijan, but you're talking about a very strange national border with this much of one country kind of jutting into another there, even if they could connect them.
It already kind of is.
Yeah.
It already kind of is an odd border situation because you've got Azerbaijani territory on both sides of Armenia in the first place.
Oh, yeah, I see what you're saying.
There's a bit of Azerbaijan in Armenia just as well as there's a bit of Armenia inside Azerbaijan.
Right.
I mean, they need to just dissolve their states entirely and let the people be free, and then it won't matter.
Right.
And a big recent source of tension over that, because it's been in this state of ceasefire for 22 years, but a big source of tension really has been the Syrian civil war.
There was a, I mean, not an enormous population, but a significant population of Armenians living in Syria who fled the country when the war broke out, and Armenia took them in but very quickly started settling them in Nagorno-Karabakh with an idea of, well, this is going to make it even more majority Armenian.
Azerbaijan clearly not happy with that situation, but it seems like up until now they didn't feel like they could do anything about it except for complain to the UN.
All right.
Now, as far as Russia's role in this, it's interesting.
I mean, whether deliberately or not, America, it seems, has provoked this Shiite country into attacking this Christian one, and Russia's on the side of the Christians.
The Americans are on the side of the Muslims.
Not that I think that those lines should be the dividing lines or that the USA should be on either of those.
It's just ironical to me kind of in a way the way they keep doing that, just like in Syria, just like in Iraq.
But anyway, the Russians have their own tensions with the Turks, and they've got some kind of relationship.
I wouldn't know how to describe it at all.
I guess a closer one with Armenia, but they have a relationship with Azerbaijan as well.
What can you tell us about Russia's role in this and maybe what good they could do in bringing a peace or what harm they could cause in making it worse?
I think their interest in the previous war was in preventing Armenia from getting completely overrun by Azerbaijan, which had a significantly stronger military at the time and still does to some extent.
That's not to say that Russia is an enemy of Azerbaijan.
They sell them quite a few weapons too, and they're on decent terms.
Russia's stationed about 5,000 troops in Armenia, and their thought on that is mostly to keep Turkey out.
So this has sort of been a hedge against Turkey coming across the border during one of their many, many disputes with Armenia.
But it also virtually guarantees that if this war escalates much further, Russia is going to fairly quickly find itself involved on the side of Armenia.
Let me ask you some questions about Yemen for a minute, can I?
Sure.
So Mansour Hadi, the guy that Hillary Clinton kicked out the last dictator and replaced him with this guy in the one-man election of 2012, correct?
Right, Ali Abdullah Saleh was the predecessor.
He'd been the dictator for about 30 years.
Okay, so Hillary regime changed him, skip a few, the Houthis invaded, took the capital city, the Saudis and the USA launched a war against them a year ago, and now you have this article here at, again, news.antiwar.com, the Saudi Yemen president sacks prime minister.
And this is, I guess, about what's sort of a government in exile, but I guess in exile at the coast now.
They were kicked completely out of the country.
Now they're back in the port town of Aden, and they're setting up kind of a pseudo-capital there.
Is that what this is about?
Right, and to some extent they're still in exile.
A lot of their operations are still run out of Riyadh, but they have some offices in Aden that get bombed by ISIS or al-Qaeda every once in a while.
So what's the deal with this?
Is it even meaningful about their prime ministership and presidency here, or is this just a bunch of kooks in a hotel like they have in Kenya or in Ethiopia or in Tunisia or wherever America hosts fake friends of whoever sockpuppet government somewhere?
Right, to some extent it's that.
It's just a shuffling of the leadership of a government that's largely powerless.
But the thing I found most interesting out of this was the new vice president is General Ali Mohsen Ammar, who was a major part in the Arab Spring revolt against Saleh, which led to Hadi's installation in that probably worst sham of an election probably in the history of the world.
I mean, that election was incredible.
It was one candidate.
There was no option on the ballot except to vote for him.
There wasn't even a no-vote option.
Even the Soviet Union, there was always sort of a, oh, I'm not going to vote for that guy option.
Right, three or four different members of the Communist Party to choose from.
Right.
Three or four members who ultimately didn't matter.
This was just one guy's name on a piece of paper.
Well, and it's fun to put it in Google Images too, and you can see the ballot with his little crest and his face there.
There's a place to put your check mark.
There's only one little square to check.
Right, and he somehow still only got like 98% of the vote.
I don't know how those other 2% managed to copy.
They're writing in Ron Paul at the bottom.
He was elected to a two-year term in February of 2012.
If you do some pretty quick math, you realize it's 2016, so it's over four years after that.
And he's been fully run out of the country and out of power, what, a year and a couple of months ago at least, right?
Right.
He got his party to extend his term in office one year, which would have taken him into February of 2015, but he resigned in January of 2015 after the Hooties took the Capitol and started pushing him to approve a constitution and new elections.
This would be such a great talking point for Bernie Sanders or for Donald Trump.
You could just say it in a sentence or two.
Look what she did in Libya.
She overthrew the government and led right to a terrible war.
It's kind of shorthand, but it's certainly beyond dispute.
You know what I mean?
It is.
Especially when you have the former dictator allied with the guys who rule in the capital city now.
Seems like good politics.
He was a former dictator that was closely allied to the U.S., and now Hadi is the dictator, because you certainly can't say he was a really elected president that's allied with the U.S.
And he's not in power, but the U.S. is heavily backing a war trying to reinstall him, two years after his term ended and a year after he resigned.
Right, and as bad as Saleh was, he was worse because of all the American support, is what really led up to the Arab Spring, is all the money and weapons they were giving him.
He was using to launch repeated wars against the Hooties and losing, building them up, and giving carte blanche to the CIA to bomb al-Qaeda and multiply them by factors of ten each time.
And that was really the only thing that was keeping the Saleh government active at all in these domestic wars of theirs, was U.S. aid.
Because even with all that American aid, the Yemeni military couldn't stand up to most of the tribes.
They would pick a fight with some tribal faction in the center of the country, and the tribal faction would blow up the oil pipeline and chase them out, and that would be it.
And we saw this happen time and again, but they would keep getting a little more weaponry from the U.S. and try it again, where in the absence of all that U.S. aid, I think they would just accept the fact that, well, our power doesn't extend tremendously outside of the capital city.
There you go, it's the whole damn terror war just in a nutshell.
We've got the same thing over and over again.
Tell the same story about Somalia or Libya or wherever with slight variations, but the whole thing.
Terror war writ small, I guess.
And so speaking of Libya, I wanted to ask you about that too, because I don't know if it was as funny to you anymore as it still is to me, but the thing in the New York Times, well, what was really funny was the tweet.
I don't know if you saw the tweet, but the New York Times tweeted out, they're like, oh, the unity government makes major gains in Libya, and then you click the link and they got off the boat and they went a few blocks into the capital city before they turned tail and ran away again, something like that, and they're the unity government insofar as they call themselves that, but they do not include either of the other two governments in their organization at all, so they're not really the unity of anything.
But anyway, just such hopefulness in the tweet and in the headline of the New York Times that another one of these governments in exile is really going to work this time.
So I guess the question for you then is, do you think they really are trying it, though?
I mean, pair it up with the Washington Post here, another Western intervention in Libya looms.
We know there's some special forces there.
Are they going to really try to go nation-build and install a new foreign, European, U.N., U.S.-backed government there?
I think they are.
I think they feel like they have to because they want to invade Libya to fight ISIS, and in the absence of a government with at least some semblance of legitimacy and authority over the country, they're not going to have anybody that's backing it within Libya.
So I think for them, having this government in exile that had been stuck in Tunisia for months, sneak in on a boat and hide out in a naval base and then take a few steps out one day before getting chased back into the naval base, I think that's being seen by a lot of Western nations as this is our golden opportunity.
These are the guys that we can prop up.
Man, but so that means then that they really have no one to negotiate with in the other two governments?
I mean, it seems like that would be step one, would be getting some kind of tacit agreement from the other two governments that they're willing to try to work with the new thing.
Otherwise, just on the face of it, it's a huge false start, right?
Right, but they really don't have anybody to work with in either of the other two governments.
The Tripoli-based government, well, I guess we should say the other Tripoli-based government now, the parliament there has made clear they don't want Western intervention.
They see it as a slippery slope to an occupation and something that would just bolster ISIS.
Well, the Tobruk-based parliament, which is the other UN-backed government in Libya, is very close to Egypt, and Egypt has made clear they don't want to see a Western intervention because they see that as similarly likely to help ISIS.
Yeah, well, and of course, that's right.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't, damned because you did in the first place.
Back when we warned them not to, Jason, you and me right here, you know, five years ago, saying, boy, I guess that means they're going to have to try to occupy the place and build up a government and have a war with a bunch of suicide terrorists.
The only good news is that it's taken this long to really get going.
They thought they could ignore it, but now it's too late.
Now it's time for them to start back up again, it looks like here.
And, of course, they've got politics, man.
Hillary Clinton's running, and at least they've got to say that they're fixing it, they're trying.
It's a work in progress or something instead of, boy, look at what a mess she left behind, which is not very good politics.
That probably has as much to do with this new war as anything else, is her run for office.
Hillary has continued to defend the war in Libya.
The 2011 regime change that NATO imposed in Libya is a pretty good deal.
It didn't cost a lot of money.
No U.S. troops were killed, so it wasn't that bad a thing, even though it destroyed Libya and turned it into a breeding ground for ISIS.
And no one killed, oops, except the CIA guys and their mercs and the ambassador.
Forgot about that part for a minute there.
That was a little after the war had supposedly ended.
And all the civilians who were rounded up and massacred by the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, veterans of Iraq War II, yeah, never mind their lives.
They never counted in the first place.
I'm not sure if you ever saw this one or not, but in one of these debates, and Real Clear Politics had a good write-up on this, in one of these debates she said, hey, we're still in Korea, we're still in Japan, we're still in Germany forever, and we're always going to be.
And that's the same thing with Libya.
We just need to go in there and just stay until everything is great and then keep staying.
And that was her answer to Libya, to invoke the permanent occupation of Japan and Korea.
Exactly what John McCain would have said, exactly what Max Boot says in Commentary Magazine.
The incredible thing to me is countries like Japan clearly don't even want the U.S. there.
I mean, the fight over Okinawa is ridiculous.
The U.S. bases take over a good chunk of that island.
There are always these plans to try to move the bases to less densely populated parts of the island, but they always want Japan to pay for it.
You've got major Japanese cities that are just stuck with U.S. military bases right in the middle of them.
Well, and the Okinawans are conquered people anyway.
I mean, they're not even really Japanese.
They don't consider themselves to be Japanese, but they're conquered by the Japanese before us.
That's why it's so easy for the Japanese government.
It'd be like America letting the Chinese have a base on Puerto Rico, because who cares?
Screw them.
You know what I mean?
We own their island, but that doesn't make them us, that kind of attitude.
You're right.
They can't exactly elect a new president.
Yeah, they certainly can't.
All right.
Well, listen, man, thanks for coming on to talk about all the bad news with us, Jason.
I really appreciate it, dude.
Sure.
Thanks for having me.
All right, y'all.
That's the great Jason Ditz.
All day, every day long, man, I'm telling you, news.antiwar.com on all of this stuff.
News.antiwar.com.
Hey, Al Scott Horton here to tell you about this great new e-book by long-time future freedom author Scott McPherson, Freedom and Security, the Second Amendment and the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.
This is the definitive principled case in favor of gun rights and against gun control.
America is exceptional.
Here, the people come first, and we refuse to allow the state a monopoly on firearms.
Our liberty depends on it.
Get Scott McPherson's Freedom and Security, the Second Amendment and the Right to Keep and Bear Arms on Kindle at Amazon.com today.
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