All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
You can also sign up for the podcast feed.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right, you guys, on the line, I've got foreign correspondent Reese Ehrlich.
You can find what he writes all over the place, but especially at antiwar.com.
He wrote the book Inside Syria, Conversations with Terrorists, and his new one is The Iran Agenda Today, which I actually bought today and I should have a long time ago, but it's on its way right now.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Reese?
I'm doing well, thank you.
Very happy to have you on the show here.
So three things I want to talk to you about.
Two of the three are in your recent article, A New Arab Spring in Lebanon and Iraq.
But first, if you could, please give us an update on the recent violence in the Gaza Strip.
Well, what happened was the Israelis attempted to assassinate a leader of the Islamic Jihad.
The Islamic Jihad group fired missiles into Israel.
Israel in turn fired more missiles and dropped bombs into Gaza.
Quite a few civilians were killed on the Palestinian side.
No civilians were killed in Israel, although there were some people wounded.
And it's typical of how Israelis claim that they're acting in self-defense, when in fact it's now been revealed that they didn't kill the commander that they thought they did or that they claim they did.
And in fact, they killed a bunch of civilians living in the building there.
So it's one more example of how Israel claims that it's only defending itself if it's fighting terrorism but ends up killing civilians.
Yeah.
The New York Times is saying five children were killed in that strike where they claim that they're defending themselves.
And just imagine, never even mind missing, but just imagine that Egyptian Islamic Jihad or Hamas assassinated, say, I don't know, the defense minister of Israel and said, hey, it's just self-defense because of his future possible aggression and that kind of thing.
Never mind killing five of his kids.
But imagine anyone taking that seriously for a minute, Hamas would be laughed right off the face of the earth.
That might finally destroy them.
It would be the laughter if they tried to claim that an assassination like that was self-defense.
Put the shoe on the other foot for a minute and the whole thing is a joke.
I agree with you.
But of course, comparing what the Israelis do and what the Palestinians do, there's a rather large imbalance, whether it be from the U.S. government or from the media, mainstream media.
The Israelis basically get a giant pass on the things like they've been doing for now for many decades.
Yeah, it sure looks like it.
Well, let me ask you something.
I'm sure we talked about this a little bit before, and I know it's a little bit outside your expertise, but it's certainly consistent with your experience.
Do you think that the American people just don't understand who's occupying who and sort of the basic kind of 101 on the ground over there?
Or is it that they really do understand and just don't care at all about how the Palestinians are treated this way?
Well, that's a tricky question because I suspect there are Americans who fall in both camps.
That is people who don't follow the situation too closely.
They may be here from the mainstream media or from leaders in the United States that these Palestinians are a bunch of terrorists and they go along with it.
And they're mistaken, but the mistake is out of ignorance.
And then there's other folks who basically justify what the Israelis are doing and have been doing so for a long time, which is that, yes, we know they're killing civilians.
Yes, we know they're overwhelmingly powerful compared, the Israelis are overwhelmingly powerful compared to the Palestinians.
But that's what you've got to do in order to fight terrorism.
That's the justification, of course, the U.S. used for torture in Iraq and elsewhere, which is that they're the bad guys, we're the good guys, and sometimes good guys do things that are not so good, but it's understandable under the circumstances.
Though what's interesting is that I think popular opinion in the United States has shifted.
There's a lot more willingness to criticize Israel today.
Over a decade now, Netanyahu's rule in Israel, he's basically a Donald Trump for Israel.
He's an ultra right winger.
He's very controversial in Israel as well as elsewhere in the world.
And the fact that even American Jews are strongly opposed to Netanyahu's policies, and there's a shift going on in attitudes towards the Palestinians as well.
All the opinions polls show that American Jews are far more critical of the Israeli government today than they have been at any time in the past.
Yeah.
And now, when you travel around and give your talks and your book signings and all these kinds of things, do you run into more confusion than clarity?
Do you think people are just kind of thrown for a loop about this, or they pretty much are doing better and better at really picking up what you're talking about here?
Well, the people I talk to tend to be critical of Israel.
Well, that's true.
There's a little bit of a selection fallacy going on there, but I just wonder if a lot of people look at you like you're crazy too, though, but everybody knows that the Israelis are our friends and the other guys are the bad guys, right, or not, or what, you know?
To be fair, I do speak to college campuses where there's definitely a diversity of views.
Community colleges are mostly working class folks who maybe are learning or hearing about Israel for the first time.
And what I find in those kind of places, in other words, people who don't have a fixed view already, what I'm finding in those places is that, you know, just presenting the basic facts when at the end of all of these crises, hundreds of Palestinians are killed and no Israeli civilians are killed.
Dozens of Israeli soldiers are not hurt, and dozens of fighters for the other side are hurt.
So people understand the basic statistics and the basic idea that if these folks are so defensive, they're only acting out of self-defense and so on, how come such large numbers of people are killed on the other side?
It's a basic logic.
It's a convincing argument.
I remember this one Jon Stewart bit from 2014, the horrible slaughter in 2014.
He played a clip of, it was probably CNN or MSNBC, I think.
They have two reporters, heads in boxes kind of thing.
And one of them, he looks like you in that picture, where he's wearing the helmet and a bulletproof vest that says press on it and all of this.
And you can hear bombs going off in the background, and he's clearly terrified.
And then the American reporter in Israel is wearing a pink polo shirt and is like, oh yeah, it's really dangerous.
Everybody's terrified about all of the danger and all this.
But you can tell, he's not in the slightest bit of danger whatsoever.
And Jon Stewart is just talking about just the incongruity between the narrative and what we can see with our own eyes going on in front of us here, you know?
Yeah.
That is a classic bit, and it's very funny and reveals, of course, a lot of truth.
I've reported from all over the West Bank, Gaza, Israel itself, and if you're living in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, one of the reasons the government can get away with what it's doing is the fact that you don't really have a sense of danger in the big cities of Israel.
It's not like the missiles or the rockets are going to be following on you.
Yes, there have been some incidents where people have hijacked buses or trucks and driven them into civilian crowds and so on.
So yes, there's dangers.
But it's an acceptable level.
Israelis have gotten used to having all their bags searched when you go into a bus depot, for example, and various security measures at the airport.
You know, it's not so bad that you can't live with it, whereas for the Palestinians, it's a real oppressive wartime situation, particularly in Gaza.
There's not enough electricity, there's not enough fresh water, the garbage system, the sewage system doesn't work.
The Israelis have basically blockaded Gaza and turned it into a giant prison camp for a million people.
I've been in Gaza and experienced, I've stayed at Palestinian homes, and things that would never be acceptable in Israel are considered just normal day-to-day activity in Gaza because it's imposed by the Israelis.
Yeah.
All right, well, let me ask you one last thing before we switch here, and that is, yeah, but what about Hamas?
And I don't mean that just in too flippant of a way, because that really is going to be the very first answer that the Israeli side says, is that we can't let up whatever degree of siege, however you want to characterize it there, because the whole place is run by a bunch of crazy Islamist terrorists, Reese.
Well, that's not the reality.
I've interviewed the top leaders of Hamas on numerous occasions.
They are a conservative political Islamist group.
They come out of the Muslim Brotherhood tradition, which actually, relatively speaking, is more moderate than the Islamic State, for example, or Al-Qaeda, or even the Islamic Jihad in Gaza, all of which are more extremist versions of political Islam.
And by political Islam, I mean the people who use Islam as an excuse to put themselves into power.
And it's not the same as the religion of Islam.
So Hamas is willing to participate in elections.
They have indicated to me, and not just to me, but to many, many other people, that they can live within Israel as long as Palestinians get their own genuinely independent state.
And yes, they have engaged in activities in which Israeli civilians have died, but they are not the kind of terrorist group that Al-Qaeda or Islamic State is, which are seeking to kill the Jews and drive them out of Israel, or something like that.
But all of that gets lost in the vilification of Hamas, because they're the enemy, they're putting up an effective fight, and the Israelis can't take that.
I would simply note that the Israelis called the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization, terrorists for many, many years.
They called Yasser Arafat a terrorist, right up to the point where they were willing to negotiate with him, and then suddenly he wasn't a terrorist anymore.
And ultimately they negotiated, they reneged on the Oslo Accords, but there were negotiations that took place.
So the same thing is going to eventually happen with Hamas, which is suddenly the US and Israel and Europeans are going to discover, oh, well, Hamas isn't as bad as we've said they were.
Let's sit down and have some negotiations.
And that's the only way that this issue is ever going to get resolved.
And just to be clear, they have said explicitly, and even to you, that they would accept settling for the measly 22% of what's left of Palestine if they could get 67 borders and a two-state solution.
They're dropping their demand for all of Israel back.
They don't exactly phrase it that way.
But yes, they would accept if Palestine, you know, if there was a continuous, independent Palestinian state living alongside Israel, yes, they would accept that.
Alongside being the operative word, not in place of, not a new one-state solution, but the two-state solution.
It means having airports, it means having seaports, it means having a normal state.
It's not some kind of Bantustan created by Israel that makes Israel able to shut off the tax money or the commerce at any time.
It has to be a genuine, independent state like any other state in the world.
And they would take care of those people who are further to their right politically, who would want to continue the fight against Israel or would continue firing rockets.
They would clamp down on those people.
That's entirely reasonable.
But so far, the Israeli governments have not indicated at all a willingness to do that.
And yes, in case listeners are skeptical about what I'm saying, they can look up under what I've written.
They told Jimmy Carter the same thing.
They have- I saw Mama Charlie Rose show saying that, that they would accept two states- It's not a secret.
Yeah, it's not a secret at all, except for the American people and others around the world who have been misled by the Israeli government's position on this.
Well, this just in, Rhys, 20 minutes ago, Jerusalem Post, Mike Pompeo announces West Bank settlements are not illegal, according to the United States government.
Oh, really?
Whoa, whoa.
That's a huge shift in U.S. policy, and not surprising, but a huge shift.
Of course the settlements are illegal, they're illegal international law.
When you come into a country, you defeat the country, and you take over their territory, and you start basically a process of expelling the indigenous population and bringing in your own people, that's almost a classic definition of violation of international law.
And whatever the U.S., I mean, it's just typical of what the Trump administration has been doing in terms of changing not only policies that hurt the Palestinians, but changing long-standing U.S. policy on this question.
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Let's talk about Lebanon and Iraq here.
First of all, the protest movement in Lebanon, if you could, sir.
Okay.
Roughly a month ago now, the people of Lebanon came out into the streets.
The initial issue was a tax that was going to be levied by the government on computer programs, on apps.
Things like WhatsApp.
Lebanese, even poor Lebanese, have cell phones.
But the way you survive and you use it is you don't buy a monthly plan.
You hook up through Wi-Fi and then use something like WhatsApp to make your phone calls.
It's all free, except for, of course, the initial cost of the phone.
Taxing those transactions, those phone calls or those texts, would actually hurt working people and poor people the worst.
People were angry and it set off very large, peaceful protests initially.
People would gather into various parts of Beirut and other cities.
They shut down the roads.
The demands quickly changed and morphed into wider protests against the government.
They demanded a change in the current government, which is a coalition that includes and is heavily influenced by Hezbollah, but it includes people like Haddad Hariri, who was a filthy rich guy backed by Saudi Arabia, and various other corrupt officials.
Hariri, within a couple of days, resigned, and that meant his cabinet also resigned because he was the guy in charge as prime minister.
Ever since, there's been struggles, efforts by the corrupt political parties that run the country, as well as outside forces, including the U.S., Saudi Arabia, Iran, and others, to try to take over the popular momentum of these demonstrations and steer them in a direction favorable to those various powers.
So far, they haven't done it, but it's a real battle going on in the streets, and the demonstrations continue down to today.
All right.
Now, so I don't know if people know this, but there was a 15-year civil war there, right?
From the mid-'70s to 1990 or so?
Yes.
And so are you afraid that this could really lead to a fracture like that again?
It could.
I don't think anything is possible in Lebanon, although I don't think at this point it's likely to.
The critical difference between the civil war of the 70s that you mentioned was the, it was definitely along ethnic and religious lines.
Lebanon is a country that is a sizable number.
The largest number is Shia Muslims, Sunni Muslims, Christians are a sizable number, and then there's lots of other religious and ethnic groups.
And the Lebanese, the civil war of the 1970s pitted the conservative Christian forces backed by Israel and the United States against the more progressive Muslim forces and PLO, the Palestinian PLO, in a really pitched battle that was finally resolved in a piece of card in 1990.
So the current situation is not that openly political in terms of left, right, and so far has not also broken down along religious ethnic lines.
Folks from various classes, various economic classes, and various ethnic groups and religious have all been out in the streets demonstrating together.
And it's calls for clean government and an end to corruption.
It's not explicitly leftist or rightist, although the folks involved lean one way or another on those questions.
So what really is going to be key is will the political parties be able to reestablish their control?
Will they be able to reuse ethnic tensions that exist in order to rally people to their side?
And I think at this point, as we speak, it's not clear whether they'll be able to do that or whether, in fact, the protests will force a resignation and some kind of a new government that we have not seen before.
Yeah.
Well, I know this.
Hezbollah's got their own army.
The rest of them don't, right?
No, they all have militias.
They're just not as well armed.
Oh, okay.
Well, and they're all battle-hardened now from the great opportunity Obama gave them in Syria over the last few years there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's no question that Hezbollah is the most organized, strongest military force, perhaps even stronger than the Lebanese army.
The other folks, the other ethnic groups and parties, they have, everybody's armed in Lebanon.
The Second Amendment advocates in the United States would be proud that you go into people's homes and they got AK-47s or rocket propelled grenades.
Well, I mean, you know what?
It's supposed to be mutually assured destruction, therefore peace, not, hey, everybody, let's all take our rifles and shoot at each other with them.
But let's all not ever do that because we would all be in just as bad a position as each other is why.
Yeah.
And I'm talking to you, government, especially.
But anyway.
Yeah.
But anyway, Lebanon is nobody's ideal of what gun ownership should look like.
I guess not.
Well, so let me ask you this, and this is such an ignorant question, I'm sorry, but I had read that, you know, they have, I know that they have this confessional constitution, which means that each faction has power divided up by ethnicity and political parties are all sort of that way.
And so you get a prime minister and you get the presidency and you get to be the defense minister and you have this and you have that divided up by sort of ethnic and religious faction in that way.
But I had read a thing quite a few years ago now that was saying that, well, a real problem with that is that the population sizes have really changed in the country.
And so, for example, the Shia tend to have a lot less influence, I guess that hadn't been so much lately because they had their alliance with the president.
Well, actually, the Christians, it's actually the Christians whose numbers have been reduced over the years.
But they still retain major influence, whereas, say, the Sunni Arabs or some other group, the Druze or somebody else, maybe have more people, but less influence in the system, which is sort of carved in stone.
Is that about right?
That's the, it's, I'll break it down for you.
The Christian hasn't made a census in Lebanon in decades because everybody's afraid that they get the numbers that they currently have.
The Christians were given an outsized proportion of the spoils, if you will.
They have decreased in population, both because other folks have increased and because they've left the country to go live elsewhere.
But the Christians are guaranteed the presidency.
The Shia Muslims are now the plurality, some say even the majority, and that would be Hezbollah and Amal, which is another Shia party, and they're guaranteed, the Shia Muslims are guaranteed the prime minister, sorry, the Speaker of the House of the Parliament.
And the Sunni Muslims, which is Hariri I mentioned earlier, are guaranteed the prime minister's job.
And what this means is not just simply political positions, but you get to steer the government corruption in the direction of your particular ethnicity and your party.
So if you need to build a new bridge or a new road and you have ghost workers and you're charging the government twice as much as it actually costs and so on, all the kind of corruption that goes on between private contractors and government, it's split up along ethnic and religious and political party lines.
And everybody gets their take, and that's one of the reasons they can form these coalitions with really groups that are politically disparate, but which all benefit from the corruption.
And people realize that.
They see that.
They see buildings that were supposed to go up that never happened, or I mean, they don't even collect the garbage on time in any kind of normal way.
The electricity is lacking in the poor neighborhoods.
So all this money that the government is supposed to be making use of for the common good is going into people's pockets.
And that's a really important and key issue in the popular demonstrations these days.
All right.
Now, can I keep you a little while longer?
Talk about Iraq.
You got to go.
Oh, we'll do it for a little bit.
Yeah.
OK, great.
They all know about Dawa and Skiri and Badr and Sadr and the Ayatollah Sistani and Richard Pearl's great blunder in Iraq War II.
And so give us the nitty gritty man of who's backing who and stabbing who in the back here.
Badr and Skiri splitting, really?
And Ayatollah Sistani, whose side is he on in all of, oh, in Maqtada al-Sadr and the ruckus over there in Baghdad?
All right.
Well, never a dull moment in Iraq.
That's for sure.
Again, like Lebanon, spontaneous demonstrations broke out without any traditional leadership.
People were angry at the lack of electricity, the government corruption, lack of democracy, and outside interference in their government and in their country.
So a good example is Maqtada al-Sadr, who your listeners may remember was what his party won the plurality in the last parliamentary elections.
He was a strong opponent of U.S. domination of the country.
He was in Iran's hip pocket for many years.
He broke with them and now is playing the nationalist card.
He showed up at a protest rally, draping himself in the Iraqi flag.
Very interesting development that's been going on for several years now.
But he realizes that the people in Iraq, there's several issues.
There's corruption.
There's the lack of just normal government functions like electricity.
You know, there's less electricity in Baghdad to date than there was under Saddam Hussein.
There's less potable water that you can get from your tap than there is- And that was under the blockade and the sanctions after Rock War I, when Colin Powell deliberately targeted their electricity and water, isn't that right?
Exactly.
And I visited some water treatment plants while Saddam Hussein was in power and the difficulty of getting chlorine to just clean the water as part of the normal process of getting potable water.
So yes, the conditions were bad under Saddam Hussein, and they're worse today.
And you're telling me they're still not even at 1990 levels of sustainability, the most basic government service, clean water and electricity.
So you'd be mad too if you were- And that was after eight years of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan supporting Saddam's war against Iran, which was devastating for both sides too, of course.
Exactly.
Exactly.
So we're working on trying to get to 1978, 79 levels when I was a toddler.
Exactly.
The situation has led to the demonstrations.
What was interesting was it's taken for granted the people's criticisms of the U.S., the Iraq War, the occupation and all the negative things that happened as a result of that.
Iran portrayed itself as a anti-imperialist force that was going to help the people of Iraq, and it wasn't like the U.S.
But they have trained militias who are now formally part of the Iraqi army, but still have their own command structures.
They are engaged in bribery of officials, various political parties.
And the Intercept just came out with a, just today came out with some blockbuster articles you might want to check out of internal documents from Iran and their dealings in Iraq.
And that, of course, feeds the sense that Iran has no business being in Iraq either.
People threw Molotov cocktails at the Iranian consulate in Karbala, one of the key cities in Iraq where religious shrines are located.
And, you know, everybody claims that it's the other guy that's doing the bad things in Iraq.
The U.S. says, oh, it's Iran.
Look at these demonstrations.
The Iranians are hated.
The Iranians point to various things to point how the U.S. is hated.
The fact is, the Iraqi people aren't interested in being dominated by any outside country.
They want their own independent course, and these demonstrations reflect that.
Yeah.
I asked Patrick Coburn recently, well, I don't know, a year ago or something, I guess, about how bad is the kind of conservative fundamentalist religious tyranny over the regular civilians of Iraqi Shiastan, never mind all the sectarian divisions and the war with ISIS and all this stuff.
But just say, I don't know, in Basra or in Najaf or in East Baghdad or wherever things are essentially normal, how bad is sort of the religious oppression of some of these more kind of right-wing fundamentalist Shiite leaders?
And Patrick Coburn just laughed and said, ah, nah, anybody with any power is way too busy stealing money to bother oppressing anybody, essentially.
The place is just an absolute kleptocracy.
There's no effort.
The reason, like you're saying about the electricity and the water, nobody's trying to fix it.
It's all just take the money and run as best you can.
Nobody imagines any investment would last, and so what's the point of trying to just take the money and get yourself a Swiss or a Qatari bank account or something and move on with your life?
Yeah, I think that's an accurate description.
And that's the government of America and Iran both worked so hard to put in power there right now.
Go ahead.
No, I'm agreeing with you.
The next time we're told that it's time to stop terrorism or maybe bring democracy and evil ruler, take a look at the actual results, whether it be Syria, Iraq, Libya, or parts of Latin America, for that matter.
Whenever the U.S. intervenes, the net result is it's worse off for the people of that country.
And I just wish people would be aware of that prior to the invasion, not simply admitting it once it's over.
Yeah.
You know, there's a new movie out about Richard Jewell, the guy, the poor hero that saved a bunch of people's lives at the 1996 Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta and how they just demonize him and demonize him.
And they told the media to tell the people the following and the media just repeats it.
They did the same thing against David Koresh as they did to Saddam Hussein, right?
He's too crazy to negotiate with.
He's got illegal weapons and he's bad to his own people.
And we're going to send the Delta Force in there to get them exact same script.
And then they just do it again and again against whoever they want.
And the reporters fall for it every time.
And the public falls for it every time, at least long enough for it to count.
Everybody has regrets later on, but caught up in the moment, ooh, Russia attacked our election race or whatever the narrative is.
And I guess it's just fun to participate in, like watching a ballgame or something like that.
And so it just works every time, no matter what.
Well, it doesn't always work.
We should talk about David Koresh some other time, because I don't agree with that.
But certainly the Iraq, Syria, Libya, or for that matter, what's going on in Bolivia or Venezuela now, there's a similar playbook, which is the countries that are under scrutiny all have oil or natural gas or other important geopolitical location or military bases that we want.
And it's all about what's benefiting the U.S. government, the U.S. corporations, and has nothing to do with benefiting the people of those countries.
Yeah.
Well, and regardless of what you think about David Koresh, I can't imagine we're too far apart on the issue of him.
The point is, he is a human man surrounded by other human people, Texans, and instead they demonized him to the point where it was okay for them to massacre everybody, which is the same thing we see, whether it's a relatively bloodless so far coup in Bolivia or a worse thing like the war in Iraq.
It's essentially the same script to make somebody bad enough that whatever you can do to them ain't bad enough.
Conversation to be continued.
Yeah, man.
All right.
Well, thanks very much, Reese.
Appreciate it.
Thank you.
All right, you guys.
That is Reese Ehrlich.
He wrote Conversations with Terrorists Inside Syria, and the latest is The Iran Agenda Today.
And read what he writes at antiwar.com.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
