09/08/10 – Jeremy Sapienza – The Scott Horton Show

Alright y'all, it's Antiwar Radio, I'm Scott, Antiwar.com Senior Editor Jeremy Sapienza's in the place.
Hey, thanks for joining us today, let me make sure and turn you up nice and loud here.
You know, it's funny, whenever I think you always picture Chris DeLiso, because I know what he looks like.
I have a picture of him on my website from an old interview, and so whenever I think Jeremy Sapienza, I always picture Chris DeLiso.
Now I actually know what you look like in three dimensions and things.
There he is, everybody.
Well, you can't see him, but I can.
Yeah, no, I'm really happy to have you here, man, this is cool.
I'm glad you came to LA for a little while.
So let's talk about Iraq, man.
Obviously, I walk around with a chip on my shoulder all day and night over this, but just this week has driven me to the edge of sanity.
After all this, the American people have deemed the Iraq War a success, and they're proud of themselves for mongering it, and it's great.
Well, tell us about the American involvement in this, because it's very interesting to me in its own silly little smaller context that they really seem to have said across the propaganda.
It was honest at the same time it was lying all week last week.
We're leaving 50,000 troops, war's over.
They didn't lie about the 50,000 troops at all, even on TV, they're like, yeah, 50,000 troops, but the war's over.
Right.
Well, you just call them advise and assist, and not combat troops.
The same troops are holding guns, they're still walking around, they're still...
As I recently said in a piece that I wrote, because Wikipedia declared the war over, that just because they're redefined doesn't mean that they're not there.
They may nominally be backing up, quote, Iraqi troops, but come on, I mean, who are we kidding?
Iraqi troops are going to take the lead in anything?
Didn't American soldiers die in a combat mission yesterday?
Well, no, not a combat mission.
An Iraqi soldier shot them dead on base.
Oh.
Yes.
It's over.
It's over.
It's all good.
Yeah, it's amazing.
The ability to do the double-think.
I mean, there was a point, wasn't there, when the Democrats took both houses of Congress by what, like more than a dozen seats in the House or something back in 2006?
Because why?
Because the American people hated the Iraq war, and they wanted something done about it.
And they did something.
They declared it over.
Yeah, so, well, let's talk about this Wikipedia thing, because you got a piece published in the newspaper about the fight that went on at Wikipedia over whether the war was over or not, and really kind of how the technology, the platform of Wikipedia made for an entirely different set of circumstances than the kind of thing that we were reading in the newspaper last week.
Right.
What happened was that the way Wikipedia works is that there are dominant editors, so anybody can go in and edit something, but if it's being watched closely enough, a dominant editor will go in and change it back immediately.
So if you vandalize something, and it's a prominent article like Iraq War, say, then the editor's going to change it right back.
So the dominant editors allowed somebody to declare that, per Obama, the war was over, and the end date is August 19, 2010.
So immediately, this is what's great about Wikipedia, is that there's a discussion area, and people immediately started taking them to task for that, saying, the war isn't over, and even Petraeus and various other generals, one of them literally said, I even have a quote right here, I don't think anybody has declared the end of the war as far as I know.
Pentagon Press Secretary Jeff Morrell.
So people were in the discussion area talking about this and haranguing the editors until finally they changed it, and they said that August 19th was the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Right, now it's Operation New Dawn.
Now it's Operation New Dawn.
Now it's Operation, you live under the rule of the Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, and you'll like it, because we call it liberation for you, there you go.
I actually, I wrote the piece about it, and it went into print newspapers, so that's kind of static, so it doesn't allow it to be updated.
They've changed it further, actually.
Now it just says, the last US combat brigade left Iraq on August 19th.
Well, I mean, that was kind of the point that you were making in the dead tree media, was you guys got it wrong, and then it went to print.
Wikipedia got it wrong, and the people pushed back and fixed it, and that's why you're going out of business and being replaced by Wikipedia.
It ain't because the editors aren't on the side of the president, they clearly are, it's just that that doesn't help them win, or it's not enough.
And the users push back, whereas once you print something, it goes into people's minds and that's the end of it.
There's no pushback.
You know, my friend Bianca Blivian from Chaos Radio posted a thing on my Facebook page last week, it's on there right now, about some new study that came out that said the more people get their information from the internet, the less legitimacy they give government, the less benefit.
I mean, it was across the board, it was pretty, I wish I had the file in front of me here, because the numbers and the way the questions were phrased, the way the explanation was given was, you know, like, this is a crisis of legitimacy for states everywhere.
People who can see the internet are seeing right through what they would have us believe.
I mean, even from the days of when we were kids, man, you had Jennings, Rather, and Brokaw, and you know, if you're really wise, if you watch Jim Lehrer and old McNeil, whatever his first name was, right, McNeil Lehrer, that's it, that was it, and your Sunday morning shows on the same channels.
They got their pipeline straight from the Pentagon, or whoever, on whatever subject, they got the official story, and that was reported, and that was the news, period.
There were no other, I mean, maybe you could pick up a left-wing, you know, monthly or semi-annual somewhere, and get a different point of view, but that was it, and now we have literally millions of points of view, possibly billions.
Well, and look, we got antiwar.com, and you know, I mean, this is a whole part of the story.
In fact, there's a great Bill Moyers piece called Buying the War, all about the media going for the nonsense about Iraq, and then pushing it on us, and he really focuses on Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay at what was then Knight Ridders that got bought out, they now both write for McClatchy, and how, because these guys are sort of, no offense, guys, you understand the context, they're the losers of American media, right?
They're lousy, piddly, little Knight Ridders, and so there was no paper even in D.C. that published Knight Ridders' stories.
It used to be The Star, which is now gone, and so you have UPI at the Washington Times, and then you got the Washington Post, and that's it, and so their stories were not seen inside the beltway, but you know where they were?
You put them there, Jeremy.
They ran at the top of antiwar.com all through 2002.
CIA agent says, this is all a bunch of crap by Jonathan Landay, blam.
This top headline, doesn't matter if it's page 34 in even the Knight Ridder papers.
It's the top headline at antiwar.com, and that's why Chaos Radio, myself, and Shauna Kay got it right from, what, February, March 2002, when the show got going, all the way through the beginning of the war.
We had antiwar.com, and you guys were going everywhere in the world for the choice of stories and putting them in the proper order that they belong, not in the Washington Post editor's thing.
And hey, that was eight years ago.
We are the ones getting this done.
And that's what we do all day, is sit through these and decide what's going to be the most important thing, and yeah, McClatchy, and previously Knight Ridder, was one of the players.
And no question, you and Matt and Jason and Eric have good taste in what's most important.
We'll be right back, everybody.
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Hey, it's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott, and I'm hanging out with my friend, Jeremy Sapienza.
He's the senior editor at Antiwar.com.
He works all week long for you and your brain's interests.
And one thing I want to talk to you about is Somalia, because you wrote a really great piece about this.
I interviewed you about it before, and it's the kind of thing that if I had a giant mallet to beat everyone in America over the head with, it would be Somalia and what you have to say about it, Jeremy.
So why don't you tell them the story, man?
We've got 10 minutes for guess what?
Somalia existed back in 2004.
It didn't just come into existence in order that we may go to war against it last week, in fact.
Yeah.
Well, long story short on Somalia, the story beginning about 20 years ago is 1991, when the Barre regime was overthrown in the Civil War.
And it descended, as some would say, into anarchy.
And it was warring factions of clans and just strongmen in general.
And then came 93 and Black Hawk Down, which is, of course, all Americans know about Somalia, and they killed our men who were there to nominally, I mean, allegedly to bring in food aid to protect UN workers.
And, you know, it was a humanitarian intervention, and it turned into killing hundreds of Somalis.
And, you know, 13 Americans died.
And then after that, it kind of cooled off.
And the history of Somalia in the late 90s, and really the early 2000s, was one of increasing peace and prosperity.
I mean, this is, we're talking about Africa still, so it's very relative.
But they had eventually electricity again, and water, and even internet service.
And yeah, it was still pretty violent and poor society, but from what it was during the Civil War, it was much better.
And then it started to go downhill.
In 2006, the Islamic Courts Union took over because the U.S. was actually funding the warlords that had begun to be sort of marginalized by just, I guess what I would call an equilibrium of force, where there were just so many guns and so many wannabe warlords that they almost canceled each other out.
And Somalis could pretty much travel.
Yeah, sometimes you had to pay a checkpoint or whatever, but they weren't interested in fighting with you.
That's expensive.
They wanted to just make the money.
So you pay the port fee, or you pay the highway fee to the strongman running the checkpoint, and you move on with your day, and you bottle your Coca-Cola, and go on with your life.
But yeah, there might have been like four or five or seven al-Qaeda men in all of however many million strong Somalia, and the U.S. couldn't conference that.
And so it began funding warlords to root out this alleged evil terrorist presence that somehow affected the United States of America.
And what that ended up doing is destroying that equilibrium of force and bringing the same warlords back into power.
And so the Islamic Courts Union arose out of the outrage against this and smashed all the warlords, sent them running away with their tails between their legs, and took over.
And yeah, they banned movies and soccer and stuff, and that sucked, but they were not terrorists.
But the U.S. hears Islamic and flips out, and assumes that they're in league with al-Qaeda.
When really they're just a reaction, like most things around the world, to U.S. intervention.
So that held on for about six months, and then the U.S. contracted Ethiopia to go in and just smash the Islamic Courts Union.
They didn't go with a whimper.
They fought back against their hated historic enemy, the Ethiopians, who are also Christian.
It's just insane all around.
And then the transitional federal government, this is the 14th version of this little thing that the international community has tried to set up, came and rode in on their tanks, or I don't know, limos probably, or helicopters going real fast so as not to get shot down, and helicoptered down into their little headquarters, and sat there until now, basically, pretending to be the government of Somalia.
They control the road to the port or something in Mogadishu.
Now, I'm sure this is an oversimplification.
I don't know whether you can clarify this for me, or whether this is pretty much right, but no, I'm not saying what you said, I'm saying what I'm about to say is.
And that is that my understanding is that the Islamic Courts Union, upon whooping Ethiopia and driving them back out of the country, basically that Condoleezza Rice cried uncle, and made a deal with them on the way out of the bush years, and said, OK, look, Islamic Courts Union guys, you can be the government, but you've got to be the government within the shell of this bogus transitional UN created mandate, ridiculous thing we're installing in Mogadishu, and that they accepted that, they made that deal, and now you actually have, I don't know all their names or whatever to differentiate, but you have at least powerful parts of what used to be the Islamic Courts Union are now the people sitting in the shell of that transitional federal government that the US and UN and Ethiopia had attempted to install there, and now their enemies that are fighting the war are the al-Shabaab militia that never existed except in growing up to help the Islamic Courts Union kick the Ethiopians out and take their power back.
And the al-Shabaab are seeing this compromise with the international forces as something they won't go along with, because they're not the old men in the neighborhood like the ICU were, they're young and full of piss and vinegar and with machine guns in their hands, and they're saying, why would you make a compromise with Condoleezza Rice, and now they're fighting the guys that they came into existence to help regain power.
Is that right?
More or less, yeah.
They were part of backing the Islamic Courts Union movement.
But yeah, they're the younger ones, and they're always...
You'd read stories about the Islamic Courts Union whipped somebody for looking at a woman or something, and that's not the Islamic Courts Union, that's usually some crazy al-Shabaab teenager who has grown up with his country being bombed and invaded and embargoed constantly by the United States and the so-called international community.
So they've created these psycho little kids, who all they have is their...
I don't know, all they have is their trauma, really.
And their Kalashnikov.
Yeah, and their Kalashnikov, lots of them, yeah.
And when they send tons of more weapons to the open market in Somalia, too.
Right, yeah, to the government allegedly, but those will end up on the streets in a second.
Even the so-called government's troops will just take them out of the warehouse and sell them directly to whoever.
Yeah, man.
So what happened is the US is funding the Ethiopians to go in there as their proxy to root out the...throw the Courts Union out, and al-Shabaab sees the Courts Union old men just go, oh yeah, okay, well, sure, we'll join you instead.
And they're like, what?
Tons of us just died fighting them, and now you're joining them?
That set off the al-Shabaab movement, and now they run some large chunk of the country.
Yeah, well, you know, history began at the beginning of last November, and at the end of last November, Barack Obama gave his great speech where he promised that the beginning of the end of the Afghan war will be in July of 2011, and then at the very...for those of you who stayed until the end of the speech, he said, Somalia, Yemen, you're next, we're coming and we're going to kill your children.
It was something like that, I'm paraphrasing roughly, but...
Maybe we can send out a little police force.
And this has come out more and more, right?
The Washington Post did one big one, and the New York Times has done two big ones now, I believe both of them by Mark Mazzetti, or led by Mark Mazzetti, about the expansion of the covert assassination, JSOC, CIA war around the world.
We're going to use a scalpel, not a mallet, they say.
You know, like they're going to finally get it right, or whatever.
Except, of course, a drone and a cluster bomb ain't a scalpel.
But they keep, specifically, over and over and over again, they mention Yemen and Somalia, Yemen and Somalia, to make it feel inevitable to us, that eventually we're going to have to put ground troops into these countries.
Eventually it won't just be inevitable, it'll seem to most Americans that we've always been at war with Yemen and Somalia.
And so when they do finally send troops in, they'll go, look, what?
This has always been a problem, we've been telling you for a decade now.
There you go.
And, you know, here's the part, too, that always gets left out, is that this is the weakest, little, most helpless country in the whole world.
This makes Saddam Hussein look powerful.
This tiny, little, helpless country.
And, you know, according to Leslie Lefkow from Human Rights Watch, the last time I talked to her, there are a million and a half people on the brink of starving to death.
The UN has had to restrict food aid because they've got no security at all.
And the people of Mogadishu, there's a new headline today, whoever was left in Mogadishu is now fleeing on foot to starve in the countryside.
Going in, back, trying to go back in, and then leaving.
See you all tomorrow.