For Pacifica Radio, January 6th, 2019.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right y'all, welcome to the show, it is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the author of the book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the editorial director of Antiwar.com.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 4,800 interviews now, going back to 2003, at scotthorton.org.
And on the line, I've got Gareth Porter, the great.
My good friend and investigative historian and journalist.
Welcome back to the show.
Gareth, how are you doing, sir?
I'm doing fine, Scott.
Thanks for having me back again.
Very happy to have you here.
So we have a couple of articles to talk about.
Most importantly, first and foremost, here at Antiwar.com, is the end of the brutal war in Yemen finally at hand?
And then we have to talk, of course, about the announced, at least, plans to withdraw troops from Syria and Afghanistan as well.
But first of all, we are going on just right around four years of the American-Saudi-UAE and lesser coalition allies—oh, I should mention the UK—in the war going on against the Houthi government that seized power in the capital city, right around this time, four years ago, in early 2015, end of 2014, early 2015.
And it's been absolutely a brutal war.
Right around 100,000 children are reported to have died of deprivation already, along with another very high tens of thousands, at least 80,000-something people who have been killed in airstrikes, primarily—that is, direct violence in the war.
And the numbers are sure to be much higher than that when it's all said and done, and the excess death rates are counted and so forth.
This is absolutely the worst of America's wars, at least in this decade, the worst thing since Iraq and Syria and Afghanistan.
It's really bad.
It's worse than Libya, way worse, about as bad as the war in Somalia across the way.
I know it's hard to keep track of which of these wars is bad, but this one's a really, really bad one.
Now, you're telling me that you think that there's real reason for optimism here.
And why is that?
Well, you know, what my story says, Scott, is that the people who have been working behind the scenes on getting the Yemen war powers resolution to the floor and get it passed in both houses do, in fact, argue that they believe that this will not just get the United States out of the war in Yemen, but in fact have a political effect of forcing the Saudis to give up their efforts to continue this war.
And I'm not absolutely confident that this is true, but I think that they do have a very important argument, which people should be aware of.
And certainly it is not beyond the realm of possibility that they could be correct that the final passage of this war powers resolution in both houses would send such a powerful political signal to the Saudis that they would then really be ready to settle diplomatically with the Houthis in a way that is realistic and that could end the war very quickly.
That's the argument that they're making.
Okay.
So now, first of all, when it comes to the War Powers Act, just to refresh a little bit there, we had just two months ago in November of 2018, the Senate finally did historically pass for the very first time, they passed a resolution invoking the War Powers Act and their authority to call an end to American participation in this war.
And of course, the Republicans, with some help from some Democrats in the House, killed it.
But now we have a Democratic majority in the House.
But so, and I'm getting conflicting views on this, and I guess I don't know the authoritative source, but can the president veto the War Powers Act resolutions or they're just by bare majorities, he has to obey if they're passed or would they have to override his veto to make them law?
And I'm not talking about the political ramifications necessarily, but just legally speaking, is a bare majority in both houses enough to force him to stop the war?
It's a very important question, Scott.
And it's one that the people behind the War Powers resolution have obviously given thought to.
There are trade-offs here that are involved in how to do this.
First of all, there are two kinds of War Powers resolutions.
There's a joint resolution and there's a concurrent resolution.
And the concurrent resolution, if I remember correctly, although it's possible that I've mixed them up, the concurrent resolution is one that is possible for a president to veto, whereas the joint resolution is one that the president cannot veto.
But there are different authorities that go with each of those types.
And the people behind the War Powers resolution, as it has been carried out so far, as it has been brought to the floor so far, have believed that the best way to do it is by a a form of resolution that the president can veto now, because that's the easiest to get past because it's the easiest to get past.
Exactly.
So.
So that's the tradeoff.
And, you know, it remains to be seen exactly how this is going to play out.
The president, of course, the executive branch is making the argument that that, of course, this is unacceptable.
The president will veto it.
But you know, the politics of this thing are a bit more complicated.
And it's anybody's guess exactly how that's going to play out.
And of course, you know, once once there is a veto, if the president does veto it, then they can go back and pass it in the other form or try to pass it in the other form with the hope that, you know, that public opinion will weigh in on this.
So those are the complications that surround this this issue.
Well, at least if they went that way, that would be, you know, an easier effort than trying to override the veto with super majorities.
That's right.
If it came to that.
But I guess we'd all like to think that even just the fact that the Senate passed the thing should mean that, and in fact, before the Senate even passed the thing, the fact that they were about to pass it meant that the Trump administration announced that they'd like to see this thing wrapped up in about 30 days, which, of course, has come and gone.
But the pressure is there already.
And that's a lot of what you talk about in the piece, too.
I mean, we'd like to think that once the Senate and the House have both passed this resolution, that even if Trump, in a Cheneyite way, feels like he's not bound by that legally, presumably, hopefully he'd feel like he's bound by that politically, that time to stop this war.
That is the argument.
And indeed, I think that there is a great deal of logic to it, particularly since the actual history of Trump, of Trump administration's response to the prospect, not just the passage, but the prospect of passage of the Yemen resolution in the Senate was, in fact, to take very specific actions that were, that represented significant concessions to the anti-war view in order to try to slow it down or to hopefully ward off its passage in the Senate.
And of course, that was a failure.
So- You're talking about when they announced that they were going to call a halt to the midair refueling and so forth.
Exactly.
Exactly.
This is a key part of the argument that's being made by the sponsors of the Yemen resolution, that when the Senate first signaled it's to be voted on, the administration then immediately went into action to try to get some sign of progress toward a settlement of the conflict in the hope that that would convince some senators to back off voting for it, to vote for the resolution.
So that was the first step in a complicated effort by the Trump administration to try to slow down the momentum that was actually building.
Now, we have to step back for one moment and just recall that what had given the Yemen resolution such a momentum was actually the report that Khashoggi had been murdered by the Saudi government in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
It was first, it was the school bus bombing and then the murder of Khashoggi.
Now, when you say Khashoggi, this is a guy who is a Saudi dissident.
I think everybody knows the story, but just to recap real quick, the Saudi dissident who was writing for the Washington Post, which made him almost like a made guy, right?
And the Saudis apparently, somebody's seen the proof somewhere, Gareth, was murdered by the Saudis, as you say, in Turkey at the Saudi mission there.
And that was what caused the scandal was, you know, the Saudis and the Americans are willing to look the other way no matter what the Saudis do, except this, apparently.
This was finally crossing the line for the last time.
This was a huge political break for the Yemen resolution.
There's no question about that because it created a whole new political atmosphere surrounding the entire subject of U.S. alignment with Saudi Arabia in general and on the Yemen war in particular.
So it really, it really made a huge difference in the Congress in terms of legitimizing the position that the Yemen war powers resolution represented.
There's no doubt that it added to the number of Republican votes to clear that resolution for a vote on the floor.
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And so, but then there's also the question of arms sales, right?
And there are different resolutions coming up where some of these politicians really want to stop.
And that's where the rubber really meets the road.
You were talking about whether an end of American support would necessarily mean an immediate end to the Saudi war.
Well, a ban on arms sales to them certainly would.
Well, it would certainly help.
There's no doubt about that.
If we banned arms sales, it would be a much more powerful signal and arguably it would be one that the Saudis would not be able to resist.
One more immediate, however, that would be a vote in Congress to cut off the supply of spare parts because that would ground the Saudi air force within a matter of a very few weeks.
I mean, the best estimate that I've seen is after two or three weeks they would be grounded.
They would be unable to keep the, the air force planes in the air enough to continue the air war.
And even more quickly, they could ban all American military and contractor support for the maintenance.
It seems to me like that could, even faster than arms sales, that could call an end to the thing over the weekend.
You know what I mean?
You can't fly if you don't have your American contractors checking over your plane before you take off.
Fair enough.
That would do it even more swiftly.
That's true.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean.
There would be an end to this war immediately.
That's, that's really the point.
Yeah.
And by the way, I found the piece from January, four years ago, exactly four years ago, January, in the Wall Street Journal about how the attitude of central command was, hey, the Houthis have come to power here, which we don't mind.
Nothing about, oh no, Iran.
Nothing about that.
They said, we don't care if the Houthis come to power here.
In other words, there was no Iranian connection for them to fret about.
And that's in the WikiLeaks, by the way, where the Americans debunk that, the State Department debunks that.
It's all a bunch of overblown accusations about Iran that Saleh used to make to get American help against them.
But anyway, they said, yeah, we're working with these guys and we're giving them information to use to target AQAP.
And this was in January of 2015, after the Houthis had ceased the capital city.
And then based on that same crisis, America and Saudi Arabia turned right around and went to war against the Houthis, launched a war of genocide, of a deliberately inflicted starvation, famine campaign against the civilian population of the poorest country in the Middle East.
Turned on a dime because that was what some spoiled, rotten little Saudi princeling wanted.
In fact, even in the Financial Times, the CIA put a thing in the Financial Times saying they always hated MBS.
They wanted bin Nayef, his cousin, the previous crown prince that he had arrested and deposed, that he was the CIA's guy.
So they don't even like this guy.
And they are committing a genocide for him when it was obviously, as all of us critics have been saying all along, this puts America directly on the side of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
The guys who tried to blow up the plane over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009.
Right.
And this, by the way, is probably the 17th or the 27th, depending on how you count them, case study in U.S. policy in the Middle East, essentially betraying the interests of the American people in counterterrorism, specifically in the case of al-Qaeda and its variants of al-Qaeda in the Middle East, because it's really not the interest that is being served by U.S. policy over the past 10 years.
It's just not even close.
It is.
It's crazy.
And, you know, you can look at the maps where there are entire color coded sections of the map of Yemen that are now al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula territory, where they've seized entire towns, entire tax bases, military bases, and all their weapons, magazines and everything.
Just unbelievable.
Yeah.
And there are stories, as you know, well, that that document the fact that UAE troops have been using local militia who are clearly al-Qaeda in their in their background and in their interests.
This is this is no longer secret.
It's well known.
This this is just part of the much larger tapestry that I'm talking about.
Yeah, which is all, in fact, reported by the Associated Press, who have been great on this, on UAE working with al-Qaeda, UAE torturing people on barbecue spits.
Incredible.
And also, you know, it's gone without saying, but it shouldn't go without saying that when we talk about this war starting in 2015, we're talking about the Barack Obama administration starting this war and the Donald Trump government absolutely following through in every way, not altering the policy in any way other than to escalate.
But on both sides, for and against al-Qaeda.
And in fact, as you're talking about, and Nasser Araby, this reporter in Yemen that I interview regularly, was saying, I was saying, well, you know, they say they're cranking up drone strikes and more special operations strikes against AQAP.
And he's going, oh, really?
They're drone striking the UAE armed force on the ground?
No, they're not.
All these guys, they're joining the UAE mercenary force.
So the war against AQAP is called off.
As far as that goes.
I mean, we still hear about some drone strikes sometimes.
And there are different agencies and different departments of the military and the CIA on different missions.
Right.
So, you know, the other thing that we haven't talked about yet, which I know you want to get back to, is the further development of the Trump administration's efforts to try to head off the vote, which included clearly putting the pressure on the Saudis and the UAE, particularly the UAE, to go ahead and start negotiating with the Houthis more seriously, or at least to make it look like they're negotiating seriously with the Houthis.
And that- Speaking of Nasser Araby, I mean, he told me that, hey, yeah, this deal that they made for the ceasefire in the Hodeidah port, you know, one way or the other, that he believed in it.
He was really looking positively on it.
And it was the key to him was a Dutch general or colonel or whoever is in charge of the peacekeeping force made up of nations from, you know, different countries from far away with no direct interest, this kind of thing, that that, I guess, to him felt official enough that only that maybe could thwart the continued UAE and Saudi attack there.
Well, the point that I make in my piece that I think is perhaps most striking about the way in which the Trump administration clearly put some pressure on the Saudis to do something different, differently, is that they called off their offensive, if I'm not mistaken, about a week after it had begun, and at the same time agreed to sit down and negotiate over the fate of Hodeidah.
So, you know, one has to take fairly seriously the fact that they had to reverse a policy.
It appears that they had to reverse a policy that they had begun to try to sort of win the war for Hodeidah, which is absolutely crucial to their whole strategy for victory in the war in general.
Their strategy of starvation.
Well, it's a strategy of starvation, but in order to carry out that strategy, they have to shut down the Hodeidah port.
That's the key.
Yeah.
Yeah.
My country tis of thee and all that.
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All right, now, Gareth, let me ask you real quick about plans to leave Syria.
It's already been delayed, but Trump seemed to be, you know, still sticking by that.
Within the short term here, he is ending the alliance with the Syrian Kurds and pulling troops out of there.
And all the crybabies are pretending.
It's funny the way they list them.
The winners are Assad, Iran, Russia, and ISIS.
When one of these things does not belong, right, the Syrian government is the government of Syria.
And Iran and Russia are there at the invitation of the government of Syria to fight against the Islamic State, which, in fact, the Americans have kind of been standing in the way east of the Euphrates and preventing them from finishing that job.
But so they also say that our allies, the Turks, are going to massacre all of our Kurdish friends and that there's nothing we can do about that other than continue to occupy Syrian Kurdistan.
So what say you, Gareth Porter?
Yeah, well, that's, of course, Lindsey Graham's throwaway line, really, isn't it?
I mean, you know, it's the most obvious thing to say, to grab the headlines and somehow create the sense that something awful is going to happen.
But I mean, the reality is that the Kurds are not going to be massacred.
There's going to be an arrangement which will take the form of at least some tacit understanding involving the Turks and the Assad government and Russia and the SDF about mainly the Assad government, the Syrian government, taking over the positions that the SDF had been occupying with some kind of understanding about at least negotiating an agreement between them on the political status of the SDF.
I mean, all that's going to take some time to finally work out.
But it seems clear that there's going to be some kind of an arrangement that the Syrian government will be involved in and the Turks will be involved in as well.
And so, you know what?
Let me say one more thing here, ask you about one more thing.
I'm not sure which all versions of the video you saw of the Trump cabinet meeting, but he told an anecdote there about when he first came to power in D.C., how they took him to the Pentagon and they took him in the fanciest, most high-tech screen, you know, bank of computers, kind of out of a movie sort of room that they had in the Pentagon.
And then they gave him this giant lecture about all the generals lined up and gave him this lecture about Iran, Iran, Iran, Iran is taking over this, they're taking over that, they're taking over the whole Middle East, and how are we going to stop them?
And then it was actually, for me, I thought, you know, it was nice to hear him say that Iran is a totally different country now than they were then, you know, because of me.
I already, you know, have defeated them, you know, the change is already made.
We don't have to worry about their influence in Iraq, Syria, even Yemen anymore.
For some reason, he doesn't say exactly that specifically, but pretty much he seemed to say that they were right, but now they're not anymore and that the problem is solved, which is good enough for me, whatever he means by that.
But I just thought it was interesting, that anecdote of these generals, because of course, as we're talking about, when they say Iran, Iran, Iran, what they're really doing is they're selling out their actual anti-terrorist mandate, which has nothing to do with Iran, because Iran is not the greatest state sponsor of terrorism.
The mandate is to fight al Qaeda, bin Ladenite groups.
And not that that's my mandate, but that's the American people's mandate to the government to do, while instead they keep taking the other side because they hate Iran more.
Well, I mean, that was necessary to the whole thrust of U.S. policy in the Middle East.
And there's no doubt that Mattis was carrying the water for the entire war system there in making, you know, giving this briefing at the tank, which is the Joint Chiefs of Staff meeting room there at the Pentagon, with Trump, in which they were trying to impress on him the necessity to cape at it in the various places where the U.S. had troops and military operations in the Middle East, because he was complaining constantly about all these wars going on and these troop deployments that he didn't like.
And that was the setting of that 2017.
I believe it was June, if I remember correctly, but the summer of 2017, when they took him down to the tank and really were hoping that this would solve their problem.
But of course, it didn't do that at all.
Trump was continuing to complain.
And we've now seen the ultimate, or not the ultimate, but one of the longer term results in his decision to pull out of Syria.
And no matter what you read in one source or another in the media, there is no question in my mind that his decision, you know, stands.
It has not been changed.
I think that it's true that he gave them four months, at least tentatively, four months to withdraw from Syria.
Whereas before, you know, he wanted out, but there was no there was no deadline of any kind.
And I think now he has given them a deadline.
They don't want to, they're avoiding making a public statement about it.
But that that appears to be the reality at this point.
So I don't know if you saw this piece by Spencer Ackerman in The Daily Beast, where he says that Trump really did this, you know, made this announcement in a sense in reaction to John Bolton.
Because he had said, you know, two or three times this year, last year, that we're only there because of ISIS.
And as soon as we're done defeating ISIS, we're leaving.
Now Rex Tillerson had contradicted him on that, but then he got fired.
I think over Qatar, not over that, but still.
And then I think Pompeo actually has contradicted him on that.
Mattis contradicted him on that, but now Mattis is gone.
But then in any way, in this story, it was, there's this guy, Jeffrey had made some comments to the Washington Post, which I don't know if Trump even knew about, but then John Bolton had announced that as long as any Iranians are in Iraq or in Syria at all, then America's going to stay.
And that Trump really got upset about that and said, no, you know, I already said six times that this ain't about Iran.
This is about ISIS.
And then we're leaving.
And so then in reaction to that, he got even better.
But then I should also add that I'm really suspicious because Bolton actually kind of has said, I think all along, that why strike at the branches?
We only hate Assad because he's friends with Iran.
Let's just go ahead and get the Ayatollah.
And so I'm worried that if John Bolton is going along with Trump on this, that whether Trump's in on his game or not, that maybe Bolton's playing a game here to actually make things much worse rather than better.
We're looking at it short term, but he's looking at it over a little bit longer period of time in escalating against Iran, actually in Iran.
Yeah, that that's always going to be Bolton's game as long as he's able to, you know, lift a finger in that direction.
But you know, I did read the Spencer Ackerman piece.
And you know, I think what was really going on there was that both Jeffrey and Bolton on behalf of the Israelis were they had conversations either together or separately with Trump in which they made the pitch for this Israeli policy of using troops there in Syria so that the United States could support the Israeli military operations inside Syria, which were aimed at, you know, basically trying to give the Russians a choice of either risking a bigger war between the Syrians and the Hezbollah and the Iranians or intervening to put pressure on the Iranians to cease and desist their use of Syrian territory.
And of course, that's what the Israelis wanted.
But, you know, clearly, Jeffrey and Bolton, both of whom are very close to the Israeli government and Winep, of course, that Jeffrey worked for, writes pieces all the time that represent or reflect Israeli interests.
And in fact, Jeffrey had written a piece before he became an official of the Trump administration, saying precisely what he ended up calling for, calling for that before he was in a position officially to call for it.
And in both cases, I think they were premature.
I mean, they got the idea that Trump said, yeah, well, that sounds reasonable.
And they went with it publicly to put pressure on Trump.
But it didn't work.
And in fact, Mattis, in response to the Bolton statement, pointed out that there had not been such a decision.
And he was open to having a conversation, but it hadn't happened yet.
Well, there was so much reaction that just blatantly said, this is bad for Israel.
How could you do this?
And Israeli media, but also, you know, Bret Stephens in The New York Times and a lot of these guys making it clear that, I mean, hey, why did Obama back al-Qaeda in Syria in the first place?
To try to check Iranian power.
Now that completely backfired when it blew up in the Islamic State.
Then it meant another de facto alliance with Iran to defeat the Islamic State.
Frankenstein America and its allies had created there.
So now they're in an even better position in Syria than they ever were, you know, relative to the Syrian government anyway.
More power and influence there than they've ever had.
And so you could see why the neocons are really frustrated, Gareth.
They don't want to leave now, now that they've screwed up everything.
Indeed.
But everybody, check out the great Gareth Porter at original.antiwar.com slash porter for this one.
Is the end of the brutal war in Yemen finally at hand?
Thanks, Gareth.
Thank you, Scott.
Glad to be back again.
All right, you guys, and that's it for Antiwar Radio for this morning.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm here every Sunday morning from 8.30 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 4,800 interviews now, going back to 2003 at scotthorton.org.
See you next week.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
