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.
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All right, you guys, welcome to the show.
Introducing our news editor at antiwar.com, the great Jason Ditz.
Welcome back to the show.
Jason, how are you doing, sir?
I'm doing good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great, man.
I hope you guys are hanging in there pretty tight with the whole viral plague going around the world and everything right now.
Yeah, more or less.
Yeah.
Well, speaking for most of us there with that, for sure.
So we got a bunch to talk about to try to catch up on some of the news here.
And I think I'd like to start with the top story on antiwar.com today.
It's Friday as we're recording this U.S., Iran prepare for new escalation in Iraq.
But Jason, didn't we fight the last two wars in Iraq on behalf of Iran's best friends there?
Well, we did.
And there seems to be some buyer's remorse there because we ended up putting in power a government that was fairly Shiite dominated, really almost entirely Shiite dominated.
And a lot of those groups had militias, the Shiite political parties had militias that are now part of the government there.
While they were cherished allies in Iraq throughout recent wars, a lot of these militias, as soon as you cross the border, they become enemies.
We saw that a lot in Syria, especially where Iraqi paramilitary forces were allies.
They cross into Syria, then they're enemy Iranian proxies.
Just like the al-Qaeda guys are the bad guys in Iraq until we chase them across the border and they become mythical moderate heroes.
Right.
Now they're Turkish allied moderates who are just trying to live their lives in Idlib province Yeah, poor little guys.
The Russians and the Syrian government just won't leave them alone.
When I say the last two wars there, just to catch people up, of course, that means Iraq War II as George W. Bush's war 2003 through 11 there.
But then came Barack Obama's Iraq War III after his policy in Syria of backing those mythical moderates led to the rise of the Islamic State, who then rolled into Western Iraq in June of 2014.
Come August, he launched Iraq War III to ally with those very same Shiite militias, which as he said, they had buyer's remorse and wish they hadn't backed in Iraq War II, allied with them again in order to destroy the Islamic State, which after all was a little bit out of control from what they were planning.
They wanted to weaken Assad, not lose all of Western Iraq.
And so they took the same, not just the Iraqi army and the Iraqi government side, but all of those Shiite militias side in the war as well in order to destroy the Islamic State, which they did.
But our troops are there now and their mission officially, if I understand correct, there's about 6,000 special operations forces mostly there on the ground and their job is working with the Shiite Iraqi army, if not directly with those same paramilitary militias, to still fight the Islamic State, the remnants of ISIS and their insurgency in Western Iraq, correct?
Right.
They're supposed to fight the ISIS remnants and they're also supposed to train up the Iraqi military because apparently fighting two huge wars in just the last few years doesn't have them combat ready.
So they have to train them some more.
But yeah, basically, and that's what the US troops are nominally there for, although in practice they haven't been, Iraq hasn't been requesting US help in any operations lately and the US has stopped training the Iraqis because of the coronavirus and the worry about cross-contamination.
But really, President Trump's been one of the few officials honest about what's going on in Iraq, if you can believe it, because he's said all along that, well, we're in Iraq, we're not going to leave, we want to use that country to keep an eye on Iran.
I mean, it's really, the reason to stay in Iraq is as a staging area for a war in Iran because there's no real other way to fight a war with Iran except through Iraq.
You can't possibly go through Afghanistan, that country's a mess.
Right.
Well, and so it's interesting that he thinks that that could possibly work.
I mean, I know that he doesn't know that much about it, but I guess, isn't it right that just last week, the top general in Iraq wrote a letter, I don't know if it was directly to him or to the Secretary of Defense, saying, we can't do this, we can't fight our allies and turn this war around in Iraq right now, because he was extremely afraid of what that would mean for the merely 6,000 guys in Iraq who, that's not enough for force protection if they're going to take on the Shiite supermajority, their army and Iranian backed militias there, which is what that fight would really mean, right?
Right.
And he says it's not enough troops to do this.
It's not going to help anything.
And it also risks starting a war with Iran, which you really wouldn't have enough troops for that.
I mean, if 6,000 is not enough to fight the Iraqi militias, it's definitely not enough to fight the entire country of Iran.
Yeah, it's completely nuts.
But so Trump says, well, Iran is plotting a sneak attack that our guys in Iraq are under threat from these Shiite militias.
And that's because of the Quds Force, even without Soleimani, they're still up to no good and they're trying to kill our guys.
Is that right?
Well, that's what he says, and he doesn't offer any evidence for that, although some of the other National Security Council officials did chime in to support what Trump said and said that Iran was plotting the sneak attack in such a way that it could conclusively be proven to be Iran if they had done it.
So I mean, they're just setting the table there so that if anything happens in Iraq that's bad for U.S. interests, they can say Iran did it, which is what they do anyway.
But this time they would have both Trump saying it beforehand and potentially being able to use this as an excuse to launch a preemptive strike, probably against those same militias they were already planning to attack.
You know, there always has been a problem of the real lack of realism, I think probably based on a real lack of understanding about who's who over there.
I mean, I bet if you really tried to nail them down on it, I bet Mike Pompeo doesn't really understand much better than George W. Bush ever did about who's who over there and why it matters so much anyway.
And so I guess it's no surprise then, and that could go for the Secretary of Defense Esper too, right?
It shouldn't be any surprise that it comes down to the commanding general on the ground to say, guys, we're fighting the war in this direction.
We can't turn it back around against our enemies.
It'll be like Order 66 over there.
You know, we're embedded with these guys and there are far more of them than there are of us.
Well, and you might remember this, I don't 100% recall the details, but as you said, they're not grounded in reality, any of their planning.
And I seem to remember during the Bush era, some of the officials disdainfully, you know, criticizing old style military planners as being stuck in reality, being too grounded to facts on the ground and the reality and arguing that the U.S. military will create our own new reality there.
I can't remember exactly who said it, kind of sounds like a Cheneyism, but it might not have been.
Yeah.
No.
Well, I think it was Mark Danner said that it was that it was Karl Rove, although Rove denied it.
The quote came from...
Oh, that could make sense too.
Yeah.
The quote came from the journalist Ron Susskind writing in the New York Times.
I forget the title of the article now.
I can picture it.
It's the headline, but it's, yes, we create our, we're an empire.
And so we create our own reality now.
And because as you're saying, who could stand against the U.S. Army?
There's no more powerful force in the world.
And so we can do whatever we want.
And if reality doesn't line up with what we want, well, we'll just set it on fire and start over again, make things our way, which at the time, you know, does go to show the level of delusion there.
And look at what they were doing.
That was right when they were in the middle of fighting a war for these Shiite parties that they hate so much, who were, you know, the Dawa party and Supreme Islamic Council who'd been living in Iran for 30 years.
And they said, yeah, we're going to put Iran's sock puppets in power, but don't worry, they'll be our sock puppets by the end of this thing, because we say so, when that never was true.
And it never did work out that way at all.
And so, yeah, I mean, I really, you know, I don't think that they want a war with Iran, but I think that they really could get us into one anyway.
You know, it seems like they want a regime change.
They want to destabilize the place.
They want to figure out how to do a coup or something like that.
But the military's been telling them that Iran, you know, we're talking about Persia.
It's just too much to bite off and chew.
There's just no way to take it on without suffering such casualties as to make it certainly not worth it, no matter what.
But I don't know, you know, you crawl in Donald Trump's brain and look out of those eyes for a little while.
Him and Mike Pompeo, especially.
I don't think they have any idea who's who over there or why it matters at all, you know?
And you know, I'm reminded back in 2007, William S. Lind, the military strategist, had written an article for the American Conservative called How to Lose an Army, Dig into Iraq, and Then Attack Iran.
And he was saying back then, as we all knew back then, if you bomb Iran, the south of Iraq is going to go up like a candle.
That was what an intelligence source had told Seymour Hersh.
The Iranians could take Basra with one imam and a sound truck, right?
In other words, one religious leader on a megaphone.
We're here, and we need your help to fight the Americans.
And it would be done deal.
And we could lose.
And that was when we had 100,000 men there.
Now we've got 6,000.
And if they really do this, we could lose them all.
Or at least, they'd have to hightail it to Kurdistan as fast as their little feet can carry them.
Yeah.
There's a real lack of understanding of just how bad that war would be.
And it really is a miracle that they haven't gotten into that war yet, because there's so many people within the administration pulling them in that direction.
I mean, Mike Pompeo especially seems to be, every time he comments on Iran, it's something that's steering us in the direction of a war, or is based on the assumption that there's about to be a war.
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Now on the other hand, I mean, there are cooler heads like we're talking about here with this local general on the ground in Iraq.
At least they didn't fire him like the Roosevelt's captain for saying the wrong thing.
But I guess they could replace him with somebody who is just a yes man and maybe also doesn't know who's who over there or how dangerous a situation he's being put in.
And, yeah, they're close enough, quite literally on the ground, they are in the position to make the kind of mistake that could lead to a very real war, a real catastrophe.
And for the people of Iraq, again, too.
Yeah, and it's, like I say, it's practically a miracle it hasn't happened yet, because that seems to be the direction that a lot of people want it to go.
I think the military brass that would be in charge of fighting this, though, they're more realistic about what it would take to fight a battle like this.
They're more realistic about what it would cost.
And I think after, you know, almost 20 years in Afghanistan, they see that it's not necessarily good for their careers to have these forever wars, because after all, Afghanistan, how many commanders have we gone through there?
And it's like everybody gets 17, 17, 18th general in Afghanistan.
Everybody gets to a certain position as a general or other commander, and they get promoted to Afghanistan, and then a year later, their career is ruined.
Yeah.
Well, at least there's that silver lining.
You've got to get that ticket punched, but it just makes them look bad, because they keep losing.
And, you know, by the way, I'll just complain about David Petraeus here.
He recently wrote this essay, I guess it came out yesterday, saying that, oh, no, the Taliban is getting the better of the peace deal in Afghanistan.
Well, I'm sorry, but whose fault is that?
I can't believe that he is even allowed out in public by his people, whoever they are, to say these things.
David Petraeus lost the Afghan war.
Now he has to shut up about the fact that he did, without ever admitting it or taking any responsibility whatsoever, a war that he doubled and then lost.
And now he wants to say the Taliban won it?
Yeah, they did.
They defeated him and everybody who came after him.
And so that's right.
We have to leave, and the Taliban have the advantageous position.
That's exactly right, David Petraeus.
And how dare he sit here and say, oh, yeah, no, all we need is what?
Another 18 months?
Is that what it is?
Oh, no, no.
He assures us now that he never said that, even though we know he did.
He lied in the Washington Post, lied to the CIGAR investigators who published his statement in the Post, where he pretended that Obama was the one who made up the 18-month timeline, not him and Robert Gates.
And that, you know, I don't know.
It's just sickening to see him sit there and say that.
What?
How many more American Green Berets got to die in Nangarhar?
And how many more Marines got to die down in the Helmand province to lose anyway in another few years?
You know, like you said, every general, they take control of that mission and then they lose credibility, but not him.
Good old David Petraeus.
He just keeps failing upwards.
At least Stanley McChrystal has the respect to keep his mouth shut about that.
But anyway.
So let me ask you about Yemen, Jason.
There's big doings going on over there.
I guess, can we start with the Houthis' major gains on the ground near the Saudi border, huh?
Yeah.
So the Houthis have, over the past few weeks, they've carried out some offensives against certain parts of northern Yemen, particularly along the Saudi border.
They've taken over a lot of that territory themselves.
And it makes sense for them to do that because the Houthi leadership is almost to a man from northernmost Yemen.
They're from the Sada province.
And so this is their neighbors, their territory.
And they really understand this area a lot better than they do with the south.
So they can say, well, you know, instead of just sending endless armies into Taiji to fight over a city that's been stalemated for four or five years, we'll just send some over here and take over this border area, which worked pretty well.
And then it was maybe they can loop around and contest some of the most valuable oil fields in Yemen, which they say that as though that's really a thing.
The most valuable oil fields in Yemen are barely worth having.
You can operate them, but especially with the price of oil like it is now, you're probably not going to make any money off of them.
That's why it's the poorest country in the Middle East.
They hardly have any oil resources at all.
And so, but now, you know, the Saudis, it's always mixed messages with them.
They kind of panicked at the Houthis gains at the border region and on one hand offered peace talks and on the other hand, increased all their carpet bombing in the capital city, right?
Right.
So they increased their, their carpet bombing, the Houthis fired a few ballistic missiles into Saudi Arabia, which the Saudis insisted didn't hit anything.
They insisted they intercepted every single one of them, which they seem to be remarkably good at to hear them tell it.
But then the Saudis bombed a bunch of what they insisted were legitimate military targets last week.
And one of them was the stable outside of a military school and killed 70 some horses.
And I think the Saudis underestimated how much people would care about that.
Because it's like the Saudis kind of underestimated how much people would care about the civilian human population that they've been killing in Yemen.
But there are some animal rights groups that really didn't like the fact that they bombed a bunch of horses, killed 70 Arabian horses in a, in a stable and said, Oh, that was a legitimate military target and made it out like, these are the assets that are threatening the Saudi population as, as though one battle in this entire war has happened on horseback.
Yeah, seriously.
I mean, and, and what a shame it is that that's what it takes to get people outraged is, you know, obviously a horse is innocent, a horse in a stable being bombed, you know, I can see how people get upset about that.
And yet, how about the Yemeni humans, a quarter of a million of whom have been killed in this war in the last five years, at least on the verge of another cholera epidemic as a rainy season is just getting started now, after the two worst in recorded modern history.
Right.
And then the coronavirus is bound to hit eventually there.
And it, that's a country that has no medical infrastructure anymore after years of bombing their hospitals.
They don't even have clean water to wash their hands with.
Right.
And, you know, we talk about needing 10,000 more respirators in the United States and things like that.
And some of those countries, it's like, it's not even a consideration.
Like I don't know what Yemen's exact number of respirators looks like, but I've read Afghanistan's got 14 or something like that.
Yeah.
Yemen's lucky if they have a single one.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They might have one or two in the capital city that probably don't work because they don't have reliable electricity there.
So it's just, it's going to be a disaster above and beyond what it already is.
Yeah.
I mean, they count now the United Nations and Save the Children say that 85,000 children under the age of five have died.
And those numbers are almost a year old now, a half a year, at least last summer.
Right.
So it's certainly more than that.
I mean, innocent horses.
How about children under five years old, 85,000 of them starve to death, bomb to death, otherwise, you know, killed of cholera or otherwise deprived and dying from easily treatable diseases in any other circumstance.
It's just sickening.
And there's no end in sight, I guess.
I mean, so there was that Wall Street Journal story about the Saudis offering some peace talks and some kind of ceasefire, but that never did amount to a thing, huh?
It's, I mean, they've had peace talks by way of Oman off and on for a couple of years now.
The big problem isn't the Saudis or the Houthis.
It's the Hadi government in Yemen, the government that the Houthis chased out of power and the Saudis invaded to reinstall and whose term in office ended six years ago.
They've been just a thorn in the side, even though the invading forces are all on their side.
They have resisted every single attempt at compromise.
They want to be unconditionally reinstalled doing this, doing that.
You know, they lost control of most of the southern cities to the separatists in Yemen and the United Arab Emirates and the Saudis came up with this power sharing deal.
And the Hadi government's been resisting that ever since, saying it's not fair, they should have to share power with the southern separatists just because the southern separatists took all their cities.
They're saying, well, we're the real elected government, even though, I mean, you look at how Hadi came to power, it was preposterous at the time because the United States and the United Nations basically came up with, we're going to have an election in which Hadi will win.
He'll be the only candidate allowed to run and you can't vote no.
Yep.
And people can just put in Monster Hadi election into Google Images and they'll show you the ballot.
One name, one face, only one choice on the ballot and you'll see where Hillary Clinton praised his so-called election as the dawn of the age of democracy in Yemen.
And the only way they got away with it at the time was on this, oh, this is just a very interim government for transition.
It's going to be a two year thing.
Then they're going to draft a new constitution.
They're going to come up with new laws.
They're going to have a free election.
And that's where the Houthis came from most recently was that the two years rolled around and Hadi said, no, I'm going to stay.
There's no need to have elections yet.
And you know, six years later, we still don't have elections and any peace deals that have been proposed with the Houthis, the Houthis' big consideration is we want to have elections quickly after the peace deal.
And the Hadi government always says, oh, no, that's unfair.
We don't need that.
And then the Saudis, the Saudis, their patrons, I mean, is the Hadi government, it's not more than 10 or 15 guys anywhere or something, right?
But the Saudis can't shut them up, don't they all just live in a hotel in Riyadh or is Hadi back in Yemen now?
He's been reported to be under house arrest.
Or the equivalent of house arrest in Saudi Arabia.
And so in other words, where there is even a chance for peace here, he's the one obstructing it.
Him and his people are obstructing it.
When meanwhile, everybody knows that the war can never succeed.
Five years into Operation Decisive Storm here, there's no chance that the war could succeed in reinstalling him on the throne there.
And there's no way that the Houthis are ever going to agree to a deal where he comes back to power.
And so, but why can't the Saudis just, you know, cut him up with a bone saw and be done with it?
Or, you know, just shut him up and tell him he's fired and let him live at the penthouse suite at some hotel in Riyadh for the rest of his life.
It doesn't seem to make any sense.
I mean, it's clear that they can't achieve their goals there.
So what's the point of continuing on?
Yeah, there really is.
There really is no point in not making a deal at this point.
The Saudis are already gotten into a way bigger war than they expected.
There's still nowhere near winning.
And I think they're trying to save face with some sort of power sharing deal.
And Hadi keeps, you know, throwing a spanner in the works and no deals ever happen.
But it doesn't seem like he can do that forever.
And I'm surprised the Saudis have let him do it as long as he has.
You know, might as well bring up that Bernie Sanders is still in this race.
And he is one of the only senators who ever cared about this war.
And he could be running for president on this issue right now.
He could be using every chance at that stump to say, you know, he wants all these government programs and all the things that he wants to happen.
And yet why can't we do that?
It's because this is our policy instead.
This is where our money is going instead.
Trump says we're profiting off of this war.
Not so.
We're going broke so that we can kill innocent people and their animals in a war that we know cannot be won.
And that would actually be important and meaningful and might even educate people as to the nature of the problem here in this war that most media never even cover at all.
And when they do, they call it the Saudi led coalition and erase American participation and responsibility for the whole thing.
And so nobody's winning this war and nobody's.
Nobody's making any money out of it except for a few arms makers that are selling the Saudis.
Endless munitions to drop on Yemen.
And so what a great issue for any politician on the national level to highlight.
And if it's not an issue, that's a very important and popular issue with the people.
That's maybe is just because they don't know about it and could use some leadership.
And here's a guy who did.
And this was a miracle.
Right.
He was one of the leaders led the effort to get the war powers resolution invoked in the Senate last year in order to try to end this war.
And Trump just vetoed it.
I mean, that should it is the worst thing in the world going on.
So it should be the most important issue for a presidential campaign.
And here's a guy who knows all about it and cares about it and won't say a thing about it.
So anyway, let me ask you about Venezuela.
Are we at the verge of another attempted regime change down there?
It sure looks like it.
It looks like there's a there's a sense that they could follow the path of 1989 Panama with Noriega, removing him from power in the name of the drug war, that they're playing up a bunch of ideas that he's the Maduro government is a problem for the drug war and needs to be removed.
They put a 15 million dollar bounty on his head.
And it's you know, they've sent warships to the coast again.
Once again, nominally to stop drug smuggling, as though Venezuela is where all the drugs were ever coming from South America in the first place.
Venezuela's communications minister made a good point with that, that it's like if the U.S. wanted to stop cocaine from coming out of South America, they should be focused on Colombia, not Venezuela.
Yeah, but those are our allies.
Right wing sock puppet government that does what they're told.
So that's different.
Right.
And plus, Republicans got to get their coke somewhere.
Yeah, I think very easily.
And some of the proposals that show that the administration hasn't totally given up on Venezuela are really incredible.
I mean, we saw Guaido, the opposition leader that the U.S. recognizes as Venezuela's true president, making a proposal of, well, coronavirus is going to get real bad.
We're going to need foreign aid.
And the only way to get that is if I take power.
So the military should all unite behind me and a new government.
And then the U.S. will see to it we have all the aid we need.
And that didn't work.
And then a couple of days later, the U.S. made a proposal that was like, well, we're going to basically propose what Guaido already proposed, except why don't we just cut him out of the equation, too, and just make it the military and some other people and form a new pro-U.S. government that way.
And you'll have all the aid you need.
But that didn't work either.
Yeah, I mean, that whole proposal for a joint government with Guaido, who has repeatedly called for the American military to invade his country, to put him in power.
I mean, he is a traitor to his people, period.
Not that they're his at all, but he's a traitor to his country.
How in the world would anyone accept that?
You imagine if Hillary Clinton said the Russians stole the election for Donald Trump, so I'm calling on the Chinese to invade the United States in order to put me in power on my rightful throne.
What would people think of her then?
That's just completely insane when you say it like that.
But somehow it makes sense for Guaido to call for the Marine Corps to come and kill his countrymen until power is in his hands.
That's nuts.
He's so far outside of the mainstream in Venezuela, it's not even funny.
I mean, a recent poll, they asked, well, who's the rightful current president of Venezuela?
Overwhelming majority said Maduro.
About 20 percent said neither one.
And then Guaido got about 3 percent.
And then there was another question in the same poll saying, if you could have anybody you want, who would you want?
Maduro didn't do quite as well there, but Guaido is still sitting around 3 percent.
So I mean, he's not under the best of circumstances someone popular enough to be leading a rebellion or be about to take over the country.
They've given lip service the idea he's going to be in power, but he just never has been and he never is going to be.
Yeah.
So, I mean, what do you think are the real chances that they're going to do some kind of Panama-style attack?
Are they really preparing for that?
It certainly seems like they're preparing for that, but it could just be a, it could just be another of countless moves to posture and try to intimidate Maduro and to make some sort of deal.
Although at this point, I'm not sure what sort of deal the U.S. would even accept out of Maduro.
Yeah.
You know, it's just crazy the way that they think that they can just do this, put a $25 million bounty on, was it $25?
Oh, $15.
Oh, $15.
Any kind of bounty on the head of a foreign leader and win, you know, whatever problems that their government has domestically.
This is a country that's no threat to the United States, who no one would even pretend would ever threaten to attack America or even American interests.
They just want to steal the oil.
And in fact, you know, back when Bolton was in, he made it very clear that, you know, what we could do is we could invade the country, you know, take over the country and take over the oil and turn it over to American companies.
That way we get the oil and the money too.
And they're just as blatant as that.
No one in the world pretends that Venezuela ever threatened the United States.
And yet somehow it just goes without saying it's perfectly reasonable for the Americans to threaten war against them.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Tell me again about the terrible cocaine importation they're trying to stop.
I mean, who in the world is falling for that?
Right.
And I think the real problem is that the U.S. announced early last year Maduro is not president anymore.
We don't approve of his election.
So he's not president anymore.
And he stayed in power.
I mean, we went into the United States, went into a very expensive lobbying campaign internationally and had the State Department constantly calling people up and chiding them for talking about a President Maduro.
And they say, well, he's not a U.S. recognized president.
And it just he's still in power.
And I don't think they can accept that they failed there.
Yeah.
And boy, did they fail.
I mean, was there any greater humiliation for the American?
Well, yeah, there's plenty.
But what a humiliation it was last year when they believed that if they just declared this guy Guaido the president, that the military was going to switch to him and everything was just going to work out fine, which did not happen at all.
And the people of Venezuela, you know, the revolution was out there in the streets surrounding the presidential palace, facing out in support of it and keeping the coup from coming anywhere near the president.
However bad he is, who's not a foreign sock puppet imposed on them from without.
And here they are a year later going, oh, yeah, well, we'll just do the same thing again somehow.
Try that again.
And God, I sure hope that they don't go as far as really trying to do a Panama type attack, because after all, Panama's government was a complete pushover and their military, you know, was already, you know, somewhat infiltrated and run by pro-Americans who'd been installed there by the U.S. in the first place.
And so, you know, taking over Panama in the scheme of things was easy as part of what prompted them to go on to Iraq.
War is easy and fun now.
Forget Vietnam.
We can do one of these in a week or so.
But that is not going to be the case with Venezuela.
You know, I guess if they got one lucky smart bomb or rod from God or something and got the president himself right away, sure.
But that didn't work with Saddam Hussein, the decapitation strike that only failed.
And if they send in the army and Marine Corps to really force the issue, then they're going to have a bloody fight on their hands.
And there's no way that this is going to be some week long thing like it was against Noriega.
No, I mean, this is a very large country that you're talking about.
It's a country that's not in great shape and especially isn't in great shape after years of U.S. sanctions, failed coups and talk of regime change.
I mean, the U.S. would not be welcomed there at all.
And this would be just the start of another open ended mess.
Yeah, man.
All right.
Well, here's sure hoping and praying they don't go that far, everybody.
That is the great Jason Ditz.
He is our news editor at Antiwar.com, news.antiwar.com.
And go and double check me.
I promise he's on it.
Every one of the most important issues every single day for you there at news.antiwar.com.
Thank you so much, Jason.
Thank you for having me.
