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, introducing Giorgio Caffiero.
He is CEO of Gulf State Analytics, a Washington, D.C.-based geopolitical risk consultancy.
And here he is writing for the American Conservative Magazine, Gulf Powers Fear Turkey's Jockeying for Soft Power in Yemen.
Welcome back to the show.
How's it going?
Hey, Scott, always good to be with you.
Thank you for having me back on your show.
Very happy to have you here.
And, you know, I was sitting here thinking that it's too bad the war in Yemen isn't worse.
Maybe we could get the Turks involved on the side of the Muslim Brotherhood, huh?
Yeah, you know, it's very unfortunate that the war in Yemen has not ended, despite the efforts of the U.N. and some other actors that want to try to find a way to settle this conflict diplomatically.
But the war between the Houthis and the Saudis is going on.
And there's a question about the division of Yemen between North and South that involves the UAE.
And according to some people in the region, there is now a Turkish role in Yemen.
And it's playing out at a time in which the Turks and Emiratis don't seem to be getting along at all.
As we notice in Libya and other parts of the Arab world, there are so many conflicts taking place in what some are calling a cold war between Turkey and the UAE.
And at least when it comes to propaganda in a war of narratives, this cold war between the Turks and Emiratis seems to be having an impact on Yemen.
So you know, mostly when we talk about the broader Middle East, and in fact, of course, this plays into the war in Yemen itself.
The idea is the American backed Sunni alliance, which includes Turkey and the GCC in Jordan and Israel.
And not that the Israelis are Sunnis, but they're part of the American axis and at least de facto allies with most of those Arab states there, versus the evil Russian backed bad guy Shiite crescent of Iran, now Baghdad, and at least eastern Iraq, the eastern two thirds of it, and of course, in alliance with the government in Damascus, Syria, and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.
And now they include the Houthis in that too.
But the split that you're talking about is within the Sunni side of that, the American side of that overall regional divide.
And that is, I guess it's the Turks and the Qataris and the al-Isla party here, which is the Muslim Brotherhood in Yemen.
They all have, and I guess they back the Muslim Brotherhood, also the Turks back the Muslim Brotherhood groups in Tripoli, in Libya as well.
And I think Saudi, usually they oppose the Muslim Brotherhood.
Like for example, in Egypt, they absolutely hate the Muslim Brotherhood and support the dictatorship to crush the Muslim Brotherhood and overthrow their government there.
But here they back Hadi, who is an ally of the al-Isla party, right?
Even though the Saudis are allies with the UAE in their war against the Houthis, and the UAE hates the al-Isla party, and they would rather back the southern socialists.
Do I got that straight?
Yes, I think you did a really good job of helping us understand why and how this conflict in Yemen is so complicated, and there are so many conflicts within the grander conflict in Yemen, and also a number of ideological and geopolitical contradictions that we have to take stock of.
You know, I think it might be useful for us to go back to March 2015, when the Saudi-led Arab coalition began its operations in Yemen.
The two dominant actors in this U.S.-backed coalition were Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
The goals of the Saudis and Emiratis early on pertained to defeating the Houthi rebellion, which was receiving support from Iran.
And as Riyadh and Abu Dhabi saw it, the Houthi takeover of Yemen's capital represented a danger in the form of greater Iranian influence and power in the Arabian Peninsula.
Now, how much influence Iran had in practice is perhaps a whole separate conversation.
But nonetheless, the perception and the narrative was that the Houthi rise was an outcome of Iran becoming stronger and stronger in the Arab world.
So at that early stage, the Saudis and Emiratis were largely on the same page, with their attention turned against the Houthis.
Turkey was supportive of the Arab coalition, but its military never got involved.
The Turks thought that the Arab coalition had a right to intervene in Yemen to prevent Iran from gaining power in Yemen.
And the Turkish government's statements at the time were pretty much in alignment with what the Saudis were saying.
However, to the credit of officials in Ankara, to Turkish military officials, they knew that the Saudi plans were unrealistic and that what the Arab coalition was going to do was likely to lead to disaster.
And very wisely, Turkey chose to keep its military out of Yemen.
Now, the conflict over the past five years has become increasingly complicated.
The UAE, for all intents and purposes, has withdrawn its own forces from Yemen.
And this is not to say that the UAE is no longer a powerful country in Yemen, but it is demonstrating its power basically through proxy, as many analysts like to say.
There is a group known as the Southern Transitional Council, the STC, which advocates separatism.
Their dream is to establish, or I should say re-establish, an independent South Yemen.
The Saudis view this as a threat to their interests because the Saudis back the Hadi government, which the coalition has spent the past five years fighting on behalf of.
Now, the Saudis believe that the Hadi government has the legitimacy to control and govern all of Yemen, so it's very easy to see how and why the Saudis and Emiratis have big differences that seem in many ways to be rather incompatible.
Whether Yemen will be unified or it won't be, now they've been trying to negotiate some sort of settlement.
Maybe there's a unified Yemen with some greater autonomy in the south.
But nonetheless, efforts to reconcile these two positions have not been successful so far, and the conflict between Hadi's government, backed by Saudi Arabia, and the STC, backed by Abu Dhabi, is not resolved.
Now this is where it's interesting to bring in Turkey.
One of the reasons why the UAE supports the STC, and I should say there are numerous reasons in play, one of them has to do with the fact that the STC is anti-Muslim brotherhood to the core, to its core, just like the UAE is a state that probably is the most anti-Muslim brotherhood Arab state in the whole region.
Now in Yemen, the Muslim Brotherhood's local branch, al-Islah, has been on the side of Hadi's government, and it has been supportive of the Saudi-led coalition, which has been fighting to restore Hadi's government to power.
The STC is against Hadi's government for numerous reasons, and one of them has to do with the fact that the STC is a part of Hadi's government, so excuse me, that al-Islah is a part of Hadi's government, so the STC thinks that in part, Hadi's government is made up of Islamist terrorists.
Now the UAE has its concerns about Turkey giving support to al-Islah.
This is a time in which al-Islah in Yemen is starting to grow more distant from Saudi Arabia.
This is not to say that there's been some official divorce between al-Islah and the government in Riyadh, but the relations have been becoming a little more cool, a little more distance between the two, and there are suspicions that Turkey may at some point try to establish itself as a more important player in Yemen via the local Muslim Brotherhood branch.
Now as I argue in my article, a lot of these accusations that the Emiratis and others have been making regarding an alleged Turkish role in Yemen are at best very exaggerated, and while Turkey does have links to al-Islah, and there are certain connections that have to do with civil society and Turkish media outlets that provide evidence of these links, there is no evidence that I've seen that Turkey is arming al-Islah.
But nonetheless, there are a growing number of media outlets in the Middle East which in the past few months have been accusing Turkey of playing really a hard power role in Yemen.
Now, well, so what exactly, I mean, do they have like a large presence of intelligence and or military people on the ground advising or anything like that, or it's financial support, or what exactly is the tangible support there?
So for a number of years, Turkey has actually played a humanitarian role in Yemen, and there are Turkish aid organizations that have gone into Yemen to help the Yemenis who are coping with the numerous humanitarian disasters in the war-torn country.
You know, the last time I was on your show, we were talking about COVID-19 in Yemen.
Unfortunately, this pandemic is only one of the nightmares that the Yemenis are dealing with.
So there's been an opportunity for Turkish humanitarian groups to help out.
And according to some Emirati and I think also Egyptian media outlets, the Turks have been using these humanitarian groups as a cover for nefarious activities such as the ones you imply, you know, giving money and salaries to militia men linked to al-Isla, engaged in, you know, intelligence operations.
Nonetheless, there has been no international source to confirm any of these allegations.
And in my personal opinion, I think we should be quite skeptical given the source of those accusations.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, so that's good.
And now let me ask you about al-Isla themselves.
I mean, on a scale of one to Ayman al-Zawahiri or al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, just how radical is that Muslim Brotherhood group there?
And they support Hadi, the old president, after all.
That's doesn't sound exactly like a suicide bombing.
Sure.
You know, it really depends who you ask.
What I will say, though, is that al-Isla has been targeted by radical jihadist groups in Yemen.
And when we're talking about, you know, like real violent extremists in Yemen, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Islamic State, just to be clear, these are the groups who I'm calling the extremists in Yemen.
They do not see themselves as having common cause with al-Isla.
Al-Isla, you know, whatever you think about their agenda, they could not be compared to those kinds of groups.
And now AQAP, I mean, they fight with the UAE against the Houthis, but that's not for Hadi or for Saudi or UAE goals.
That's just thanks for the guns.
Let's kill some Shia and worry about what happens later.
It's a very good question you ask.
The Associated Press came to the conclusion that there was cooperation between members of the Arab coalition.
So we're talking Saudi Arabia and the UAE on one side.
And al-Qaeda's local branch on the other.
You know, this is something we see in a lot of conflicts where states have sort of maybe a temporary truce, maybe an unwritten understanding, some, you know, quiet cooperation that's in pursuit of short term goals when they're shared.
And there has been documentation of these kinds of forms of cooperation between the Emiratis and the local al-Qaeda branch in Yemen.
However, regarding the Hadi government in the UAE, on paper, they're allies because the UAE has been and still support, has been in the Saudi led coalition and is nominally still supportive of it.
And this coalition is aimed at putting, its aim is to put Hadi's government back into power.
However, in reality, the UAE and Hadi have been on pretty bad terms with each other for a number of years.
An official in the Hadi government went as far as calling the UAE an occupying force in Yemen.
So within this coalition, there is a lot of tension between the different players.
And it has to do with the fact that the coalition is made up of various actors that have various goals in Yemen.
And a whole host of these goals are simply incompatible with others.
Right.
And so I don't know who's done the best latest reporting on this besides the AP.
But what is the strength of al-Qaeda there now?
I'll tell you a funny story.
I says to Nasser Araby one time, the great journalist, former New York Times reporter out of Sana'a.
And I said, well, geez, Nasser, I'm reading these stories that say that Donald Trump's ordered the CIA to do some drone strikes against AQAP there.
So maybe they're fighting for al-Qaeda there, but they're also fighting against them, I guess.
And he goes, ha, yeah, right.
Like they're bombing the UAE's militia, which all the al-Qaeda guys have joined.
These are their ground forces and they are not bombing them.
Of course, they're not.
Don't believe that.
This is our side in the war.
The U.S. side in the war is al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the guys that helped coordinate the September 11th attack on our country.
Yeah, well, you know, there's many interesting points you make.
Well, obviously the U.S. military has so many times targeted al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
And before the Saudi-led coalition went into Yemen, the main focus of the U.S. government vis-a-vis Yemen had to do with this group.
You make a very valid point that the U.S. has been supporting a coalition that, you know, according to some sources, has definitely cooperated with this al-Qaeda linked group.
And it's, you know, it certainly points to contradictions and hypocrisies and paradoxes with respect to Washington's Yemen foreign policy.
I completely agree with you that it is quite outrageous.
Yeah.
Earlier today, I had this great conversation with Doug Bondo, and, you know, he's been at this for decades and lives in Washington, D.C.
And he's really impressed me.
I already knew this, but I kind of was re-impressed again with his tales of just the ignorance and arrogance of the people in charge of these policies.
And maybe they were all straight A students all the way through PhD degrees or whatever it is.
But they are just so narrow-minded and short-sighted in their thinking.
It's just crazy that they think, well, I mean, think about what you just said.
We got some competing interests in our foreign policies that sometimes put us on the side of al-Qaeda.
Wait, what?
Really?
Yeah.
And it's because, of course, because they hate Iran more.
They don't care who knocked the damn towers down.
If they could convince us all that Hezbollah did it, they would.
They don't care about who hit their own stupid Pentagon.
They'll turn around and back these guys if they're killing Shiites.
When you bring up the Iran factor, you really put your finger on it.
We see something very, very similar in Syria.
We have seen something very similar in Syria throughout the past 10 years as well, is that Washington's fears of Iranian influence in the Arab world has led to the U.S. directly or indirectly taking the side of certain actors that have links to al-Qaeda.
And it has to do with what I would call really an obsession in Washington with trying to prevent Iran from advancing any of its interests in the region.
But the blowback is always a risk.
It's in my mind always dangerous and misguided to think that temporary cooperation with these kinds of extremist groups can pay off later.
I just think the risks are just so high.
Right.
Yeah.
You know, what's funny is if you go back to 1993, it's, hey, this is a lot easier in hindsight.
I understand that.
But, you know, certain people got it right at the time.
But you look at 93, they almost succeeded in knocking one tower over into the other, which probably would have killed, what, 30,000 people in an instant or something like that?
No chance to evacuate the buildings at all, right?
And then both towers then falling over, you know, broken at the bottom and falling over 110 stories and hitting other buildings and stuff.
So the fact that only six people died, and it was real lucky in that sense, not for those people and their families, but you know what I mean?
That shouldn't have mattered, right?
The people in charge should have used their imagination and said, holy boy, what a near miss.
But let's go ahead and take this as seriously as if they had gotten their 30,000 dead, okay?
And then what are we going to do?
And of course, my answer isn't go to war.
It would be re-evaluate what we're doing in the Middle East that is driving this.
And of course, Ramzi Youssef was perfectly clear, it's because of American support for Israel in Lebanon and Palestine, and because of American occupation of Saudi to wage the no-fly zone bombings and the blockade against the people of Iraq.
Cut and dry, simple as that.
That's, you know, three years before bin Laden's first declaration of war, is what Ramzi Youssef wrote to the New York newspapers after that attack.
It's the same kind of thing here with AQAP, which after all, they did participate in the September 11th attack.
That ought to do you right there.
But look at what happened on Christmas Day 2009, when they almost blew up a plane over Detroit.
And yes, the CIA or American intelligence intervened to make sure that guy got on the plane.
They didn't know he had a bomb, I don't think.
They weren't trying to follow him.
They admit it.
Patrick Kennedy admitted it under oath, that they were trying to follow him.
So they let him on that plane to Detroit.
And luckily his bomb didn't go off, but his plan was to set off a bomb in his underpants, blow out the wall of that plane, and crash that plane into downtown Detroit on Christmas Day.
So, okay, good.
It didn't work.
Like Ramzi Youssef's truck bomb.
It didn't work.
But let's just picture that for a second.
Okay, now let's take this group that seriously, all right?
What if that had worked?
You gonna still take their side against the Houthis after they blew up a plane over Detroit?
Or might that change your mind?
And how could it be that the fact that it was a near miss means that it doesn't count?
You know what I mean?
All you should have to do is just picture it, a plane blowing up over Detroit.
And that ought to be enough to remind you that if the American people have any enemies in the world anywhere, it's these former agents of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, and since then, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, who continue to threaten us.
And Trump, too.
Trump's still backing him in Yemen.
He quit backing him in Syria, but he's still backing him in Yemen, so I don't want to leave him off the list.
Yeah, you know, I mean, the American officials would never outright, you know, own this or, you know, claim to have been on the side of Al Qaeda.
But again, you're making points that are very valid and need to be brought up in discussions about America's Yemen foreign policy.
We are supporting a coalition that has tacitly cooperated with ACAP, and there are even terrorists whom the U.S. Treasury Department previously listed as terrorists who came to cooperate with the Hadi government and to represent the Hadi government in certain forums.
So yeah, these connections are real.
And again, you know, it's within this context of America, you know, not just the Trump administration.
Remember, the U.S. began supporting the coalition from the beginning, which was in March 2015.
So also Obama's administration has been very concerned about Yemen becoming a weak or failed state that Iran is able to take advantage of.
And not to say that there's nothing about Iran's, I'm not denying that there are problematic things with aspects of Iran's foreign policy.
I'm not pretending that Iran is involved in Yemen because of any noble goals or intentions.
But I think it's a mistake to have a foreign policy vis-a-vis Yemen that's excessively oriented around the perceived Iranian threat.
Yeah.
And, you know, I think every real Yemen expert in the world is unanimous about this.
They're like, yeah, the Iranians, they have a friendship and somewhat of a relationship and they've given them some minimal aid from time to time.
But nothing that would even, you know, be parallel to, say, for example, Tehran's relationship with Nasrallah's Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.
In fact, that was Joost Hilterman wrote a piece for foreign policy called The Houthis Are Not Hezbollah.
He's saying essentially, OK, OK, Hezbollah is Iran's 51st state, but the Houthis just aren't.
OK, it's just an entirely different thing.
Yes, you know, I actually wrote a piece that made a similar argument.
I will definitely share it with you.
And if you want to post it on the website, the linked interview, that would be great.
It might be useful for your listeners to read.
Put that in the show notes for sure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
In this piece, I made the argument that it's not appropriate to call the Houthis a proxy of Iran.
It would be much more appropriate to call them a partner or a friend of Iran.
But to call them a proxy would imply that Iran has control over the Houthi rebellion.
And while Iran has influence over the Houthis, again, I don't think it's appropriate to act like, you know, the Iranians are controlling every move of the Houthis.
And it should also be pointed out that in 2014, when the Houthi fighters were moving in on the central government in the capital and they had momentum on their side, the Iranian government advised them to stop before getting to the capital, basically saying, look, you've flexed your muscles, you've demonstrated your power.
You should go into negotiations with the government from this position of strength.
If you actually take over the capital internationally, there's going to be different dynamics with a lot less sympathy for your rebellion and for your cause.
Nonetheless, the Houthis went on and took complete control of the capital against the urging from Iran's government, which in my opinion, basically demonstrates that the Houthis are not a proxy.
If they were an Iranian proxy, they would have taken orders from Tehran at that moment, which they clearly did not.
Yeah, boy, and they sure didn't take good advice that they should have.
And just think of the crisis that could have been avoided.
And you know what?
I don't know what the Saudis would have done if they'd stopped just short of the capital, but hard to imagine it would have been the same reaction that we got here.
Even with the amount of cooperation that they got from the regional allies and from the U.S. too.
You know, if Obama probably, well, he would have been less likely to go along or as far if the Houthis hadn't actually taken the capital like that.
It's also true that if the Ayatollah has been PayPal-ing them money or whatever it is to help support them, that it's the war itself that has made them more dependent on Iran than they ever were.
Same thing happened in Syria, where we accused Assad of being friends with the Ayatollah.
Well, now he's a dependent.
So how does that help us?
In fact, sometimes they even admit that, but try to turn it around and say, yeah, that's part of our maximum pressure campaign.
We're bankrupting the Iranians by making Syria expensive for them.
But come on, at the same time, you're making Assad a de facto agent of the Ayatollah.
Because of course, he has to compromise for Iranian interests in order to receive Iranian help.
So before they were friends, now he's a dependent and the Ayatollah is the boss.
How does that help America's anti-Iran policy?
Sure.
I agree.
I think in Syria, the U.S. has pursued certain strategies which have ironically empowered the Iranians in Syria.
And in Yemen, we could say the same thing, too.
I think it's really important for your listeners to understand that historically, Iran has not been a major outside actor in Yemen.
The Arab states where Iran has been more influential throughout history are the Arab states closer to Iran, chiefly Iraq.
Yemen has been further removed from Iran's foreign policy agenda throughout modern history.
And let's keep in mind that the Houthis waged their first insurgency back in 2004.
So that was 16 years ago.
At that point, there were basically zero links between the Houthis of northern Yemen and Iran.
It has been through the Saudi intervention, supported by the Americans, that conditions have arisen which gave Iran opportunities to assert its influence in Yemen.
So I think your point, Scott, is really important that Iran has definitely been able to capitalize on the blunders, strategic blunders of Washington and the Saudi kingdom in some very, very fascinating ways.
It's truly remarkable how gifted the Iranians are when it comes to taking advantage of the miscalculations of its adversaries.
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So what's the narrative inside Turkey about what they're doing and why they need to do it and all of that kind of thing?
So in Turkey, the narrative is largely based on anti-UAE sentiments and due to a host of issues that have really nothing at all to do with Yemen, UAE has become a very unpopular country in Turkey.
One of the reasons why, and one of the main reasons why, is that the Turkish government and Turkish media outlets accused the UAE of having a big role in the failed coup plot of 2016 when the certain elements within Turkey's military sought to overthrow the government of President Erdogan.
And ever since then, there has been a lot of blame that the Turks attribute to the UAE for regional problems.
And so when people in Turkey are talking about Yemen's problems, many fingers get pointed at the UAE, and Saudi too, but more so the UAE.
And they point to the humanitarian disasters in Yemen and attribute all of this suffering to the Emiratis and the Saudis.
Now it's interesting that earlier on in the conflict, we go back to 2015, 2016, the Turks were sympathetic to the Saudi and Emirati-led military coalition's objectives in Yemen, and the blame was put on Iran, and it's shifted now.
This is not to say that Turkey is supportive of what Iran is doing, and there's no evidence that Turkey has given any support to the Houthis, but the narrative has changed.
And it's no longer about just solely blaming Tehran.
It's now about blaming these two Arab states that we've been talking about.
And so what about Qatar's role?
Because I know they support the Muslim Brotherhood whenever and wherever, but then they've got their beef with Mohammed bin Salman and the Saudis right now because of their relationship with Iran over their shared gas field and all of that.
But so are they part of the coalition with Saudi to support, if for no other reason than to support al-Islah there?
Great question.
When the coalition began its operations in March 2015, Qatar was officially a member of that coalition.
However, Qatar played a very, very small and symbolic role in the war, and the main narrative in Doha at that time was that Qatar had to go in to help Saudi Arabia protect itself from the Houthis so that Qatar could demonstrate that it was a loyal ally of Saudi Arabia.
Then in the middle of 2017, the Saudis, Emiratis, Bahrainis, and Egyptians imposed a blockade on Qatar and cut off diplomatic relations with Doha due to a number of issues that had been fueling tension between Qatar and the Saudi bloc.
And at that point, Qatar ceased to be in the coalition in Yemen.
And ever since then, we have heard a popular narrative in Saudi and Emirati media outlets that Qatar took the side of the Houthi rebels and basically aligned itself with Iran against the Saudis and Emiratis.
Now, my personal opinion is that that is basically a bunch of fake news and misinformation used to smear Qatar.
However, it should be noted, though, that Qatar owns a number of media outlets, such as Al Jazeera and others, which have given Houthis an opportunity to come on television and to voice their grievances and to make their arguments and to appeal to an international community.
So I would say that the main way in which Qatar, post-2017, has been influential in Yemen is through media outlets.
Okay, last question here, Giorgio.
It's been more than a year, about a year and four months or so, since the United Nations estimated that more than a quarter of a million people had been killed in the war so far.
And I don't know if there are other, in the time since then, if there have been any other major studies like that trying to find, you know, the overall number of either excess deaths or deaths caused directly by violence in the war.
But I know that they're going through, you know, another, really a continuing humanitarian crisis there with people starving to death and the excess death rates are way up because people are dying of normally, easily survivable diseases because of just how already weak they are with malnutrition and everything else.
And so I wonder if you know, first of all, if there's any new and good research about those kind of total numbers.
And or if not, if we can end on a note after that, either way, about any, you know, actual hopeful, you know, events going on on the international level as far as negotiations and all that.
You mentioned how the UN had been trying to intervene and host, you know, some diplomacy and this kind of thing, although none of that has seemed to have gotten really far.
I wonder if there's really anything to look forward to here other than just another few years of this.
I wish I had a more optimistic outlook about Yemen, but I think people who have been paying close attention to this conflict since 2015 generally share a rather pessimistic view about Yemen's future.
The UN has certainly failed to bring peace to Yemen.
And that's not to say that some people at the UN haven't tried very hard to resolve this conflict, but given the interests of the actors and their disregard for international law and their motivations for being involved in this conflict, UN efforts have not been able to stop them from continuing to fight.
I think we should be open to the possibility, and I really stress the word possibility, that if Joe Biden is elected, the U.S.-Saudi relationship could change in some ways.
Not to say it would be fundamentally restructured, but given a host of issues, such as the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, the mistreatment of some human rights activists inside the kingdom, the kidnapping of the Lebanese prime minister in Saudi Arabia during 2017, a recently filed lawsuit by a former Saudi intelligence operative in the United States, plus other issues, the democratic establishment is losing a lot of patience with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
And if Biden becomes president and the Democrats are running the show in Washington, we could possibly see the U.S. try to suspend or freeze some arms sales to Saudi Arabia, which could give officials in Riyadh incentive to begin looking at the Yemen crisis a little differently, possibly give the Saudis some more incentive to try to reach a diplomatic settlement with the Houthis.
But, again, this is anything but inevitable.
I mean, to point out the obvious, Trump could obviously win a second term, and I'm sure he would love to continue arming the Saudis as much as he has been since he stepped in the Oval Office.
Well, there's a bunch of hawks among the Bidenites, too.
There's no guarantee that Biden would change U.S. foreign policy.
Michelle Flournoy, she basically works for the Saudis, and she's first in line to be secretary of defense for Grinnell, secretary in charge of losing more wars.
You know, we got to distinguish between rhetoric and what rhetoric from candidates and what presidents do once they're actually in power.
There was a Democratic debate that took place in late 2019, November 2019.
Joe Biden referred to Saudi Arabia as a pariah state, and he has also vowed to stop.
Trump did, too, right?
That's what Trump was saying in 2015 and 16, was like, I don't care about these Saudis.
And now he couldn't be a more loyal lackey of their interests.
Yes.
And, of course, Joe Biden was the vice president when the U.S. started supporting the Saudi-led campaign in Yemen.
So nothing's guaranteed.
But what I would say, though, is that if the U.S. were to cut off its support for Saudi military operations in Yemen, that would be more likely under Joe Biden than under Trump.
I think it's safe to say that, you know, possibly at least a bit.
I mean, for Trump, he clearly just doesn't care about this issue whatsoever.
And nobody around him is urging him to care about it either in any real way, right?
Like his daughter showing him a picture of a dead baby in Syria, regardless of who killed him and trying to get him to react in that sense.
He doesn't really have any positive influence on this issue that I've ever heard of.
So.
Yeah, I mean, he, you know, used his veto power against resolutions passed by Democrats to cut off U.S. support for the Saudi military campaign in Yemen.
So, you know, he's very committed to supporting the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, and he bends over backwards to give Mohammed bin Salman the benefit of the doubt.
His administration is filled with figures like Mike Pompeo.
And you know, when they talk about the crisis in Yemen, they sound like, you know, Saudi paid lobbyists in Washington.
Their lines on Yemen are lockstep agreement with Saudi Arabia's official positions.
They almost sound like they're reading Saudi government's press releases.
So yeah, I do not think that Trump would stop supporting Saudi Arabia in Yemen.
Of course, he's unpredictable.
He's not consistent.
However, we should we should point out that when it comes to Trump's support for Saudi Arabia, this is one area where Trump actually has been quite consistent since day one.
And I have to assume in a second term we're going to get more of that.
Yep.
And, you know, he complains about the troops in Afghanistan.
He's complained, at least historically, he's mentioned how he, you know, doesn't believe in the mission in Somalia.
He'd like to withdraw from Syria and Iraq.
He never ends any of these wars.
At least he's on the record being mildly annoyed by them.
But that's just not the case when it comes to Yemen.
I don't think I've ever heard him complain that, geez, we're killing all these people over there.
And what are we getting out of it?
Free oil or anything?
No, he's never even complained that.
He's never complained a word about it that I'm aware of.
You know, a lot of these weapons that the Saudis are using in Yemen, they're buying from the United States.
Oh, he brags about that.
Hundreds of billions of dollars.
He always exaggerates, too, how much we're all making off it.
Like this is fine.
Like, what's the cost of a few Yemeni lives compared to some airplane sales?
Unfortunately, you're totally right.
When it comes to Yemen, that seems to be Trump's main interest.
What a nut.
I mean, for all the demonization of him and all of that stuff, at the end of the day, he's just a Sean Hannity fan.
That's all he is.
He's just a guy who golfs and watches Sean Hannity and has opinions, but he doesn't know anything.
He doesn't read anything.
He's not really interested in knowing stuff.
He's like George W. Bush.
I know enough.
I've heard enough.
I've made my decision.
And that's it.
Good luck, everybody else.
He's a very simple-minded man who does not care to become informed about the Middle East, despite the fact that his decisions have such a huge impact on the Middle East.
Joe Biden is a much more thoughtful killer.
I've thought long and hard about it.
I know exactly what I'm going to do.
I'm going to help George Bush launch this war because I think it's going to be good for me.
And I don't care who dies in it.
He could have written a whole book about why I've decided to do this.
So there's your difference between the Democrat and the Republican this year, folks.
It's just reflexive, mindless violence or thoughtful genocide.
Well, you know, I mean, you make a good point in 2002, 2003, Joe Biden did a lot to help the Bush administration make its case for a war against Iraq.
That is definitely a part of Biden's record.
Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
I mean, he led the Democratic senators in supporting that war.
He was, you know, Hillary and Kerry and all the rest of them that went along with it.
He was the leader of that pack and demanded allegiance from the rest of them.
We have to do this.
Yeah, I think you've had both Scott Ritter and Dr. Steven Zunes on your show in the past, but they can tell you much better than I can about the role that Biden was playing at that time when it came to this debate about whether or not the U.S. should go to war with Iraq or not.
Yeah.
Oh, well, all's forgiven.
Look, everybody, we brought Colin Powell to the Democratic convention to vouch for us.
See, he says we're cool.
So that's where consensus lies, right?
Between Biden and Powell.
We took the cast of the 1996 Republican convention and then brought them over to the 2020 Democratic convention.
It's funny that that worked out.
Amazing.
It just might work, but just might not.
That's it.
We'll see.
You know, they use the same.
Sorry, we're just talking politics now.
Their calculation in 2016 was, screw the left, they'll support us.
The liberals, the progressives, the socialists, the leftists, the minority groups, where else are they going to go?
Meanwhile, let's recruit Bob Kagan to host fundraisers for us.
And let's go ahead and try to appeal to all the national security hawks and get them to support us.
That'll convince Republicans to vote for Hillary Clinton.
We'll turn Texas blue, they said.
And what they were really saying was that their own base can go to hell.
And then guess what?
They lost.
And they're making the exact same calculation again, that the left isn't going to go anywhere.
Who else are they going to vote for?
And so now the whole contest is to win over the right to Joe Biden.
And so they have the entire list of everybody who got us into Iraq War Two just signed a giant letter supporting Joe Biden.
And John McCain's staff just put a story, you know, signed an open letter and everything and put a story in The New York Times saying that they're supporting Biden primarily because he's worse on war.
They are hawks and they can't stand even the idea that Trump might follow through on some of his grumblings and end any of these wars.
And so they are 100 percent solid in the Biden stay at war everywhere camp.
And they think this is good politics.
You know, I bet I could make a good living, you know, charging Democrats 50 bucks to tell them how stupid they are and that this is how they run their campaigns, because I don't think that that's a very good recipe for victory.
You know?
Yeah.
No, I share your concerns.
We hear so many, we've heard so many neoliberals who are so insistent that the only way to beat Trump is to have a, you know, a pro war hawkish centrist.
Well, you know, we tried that in 2016.
You know, that that was not a winning strategy that that resulted in Trump getting elected.
And my concern is that it's going to this time around, it could result in Trump getting reelected.
You know, when we were talking about Yemen earlier, we were making distinctions between the rhetoric of candidates and then their actual policies that they implement when in power.
So obviously, when Trump and the Republicans at their convention talk about ending the quote unquote endless wars, you know, that's not consistent with Trump's foreign policy.
I mean, he's increased spending on the military.
When you look at what he's done in relation to Iran, he has increased the chances of a new war in the Middle East that involves the United States.
But at least their messaging, their rhetoric and their narrative is that Trump is winding down the wars in the Middle East.
The Democrats don't even have that.
I mean, excuse me, those who were speaking at the Democratic convention didn't even push that with their rhetoric or their messaging.
And given the fact that Trump is very hawkish in so many ways and so, you know, keen to, you know, increase spending on the military, I think that's an area where the Democrats should be attacking Trump.
And they're not, which is very frustrating to people like us.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, their whole narrative against him this whole time is about what a patriot he's not and that he puts the interest of foreign countries.
They never mention Israel.
It's always Russia that they pretend that he gives a damn about.
And so he's some kind of traitor and and is not a nationalist enough.
And so what's the answer to that?
We need a president that the CIA and the FBI can believe in.
And so this is and the Democratic voters of America, the liberal Democratic voters of America have gone along with that narrative for the last four years with this whole Russiagate stupidity.
And so to them, they don't retch when Colin Powell shows up and say, oh, my God, this is who we are, that we're going to take the worst people in the world and use their support as proof that we're doing the right thing.
They look at it, you know, in that simple two dimensional way that like, hey, look, we're being bipartisan.
We've got Republicans who support us.
The fact that it's because it's the very worst Republicans crossing the aisle because of the very worst thing about them.
That's a whole other discussion.
They hadn't even considered that.
They're just looking at, wow, geez, if Robert Kagan can support a Democrat, maybe that means that actual Republican voters out here in the country will switch, too.
But that doesn't follow.
The American people aren't a bunch of big fat think tank Israelis trying to lie us into war all day.
Robert Kagan has an agenda.
The American Republican voters don't.
If anything, they already lost one son in this thing and they want to keep their other one.
Mm hmm.
Yeah.
No, I mean, the vast majority of Americans, including citizens across the political spectrum, do not want a war with Iran or another war in the Middle East.
So yeah, I mean, you're totally right that these neoconservatives who are extremely hawkish are very out of touch with the views of majority of voters.
And it's just naive to think otherwise.
Yeah.
You're right, though, that at least Biden has said, boy, this Yemen thing is really bad and we need to end it.
And frankly, I think that this is other than America's relationship with Russia, America's war.
It is the American led coalition after all.
And the Saudis might be, you know, fronting it, but we're the world empire and they are the client state is the reality of the situation.
And it is the worst thing that America is doing right now, maybe the worst thing in the world that's happening right now.
And it you know, Donald Trump could turn it off with a single spoken command and Joe Biden could do the same thing.
And I guess I have to agree with you that on the margin, there's probably a greater chance that Biden would do that and countermand Obama's order finally, where Donald Trump has not.
And so, frankly, that may be the best argument for his presidency, is that there's a slight chance that he would be better on this absolutely most important issue.
I agree.
And I also think that if Biden gets elected, the possibility of the U.S. returning to the Iran nuclear deal would be very real.
And that in itself, in my opinion, perhaps you have some listeners who see this election differently than I do.
But in my opinion, I think that's one important factor that should give us reason to vote for Biden, notwithstanding all of the awful things about his record.
Then again, the Democratic Party should be abolished and all these people should be catapulted into the sun for their fake Russiagate hoax.
Because when you team up with the CIA and FBI to falsely accuse the president of high treason for three years, then you're the traitor.
And so I kind of I don't know what kind of, you know, Trump would, I think, have to carpet bomb Tehran on behalf of Tel Aviv to get me over that.
They must be punished for that Russiagate thing.
I don't know, man.
You know what?
This is why I don't vote.
Because we're talking about absolute evil.
We're talking about Beelzebub versus Satan.
Just I will not choose sides.
You know, I can't.
They're both worse than each other in so many ways.
And on the on the most important things.
I mean, really, Trump's worse on Yemen, OK.
But then Biden is worse on Russia, which is just a shorthand way of saying the thermonuclear standoff of the planet.
Which there we can only have one direction on that, which is cooling off always.
You know, America and Russia have to find a way to get along.
And you know what, seriously, it's you could trade a thousand Yemen's.
You could, you know, a nuclear war with Russia would be quite literally the Yemen catastrophe times a million or more.
Right.
It would be the it would make it would be the number of dead that died in World War Two in just the first couple of hours.
Of a war between America and Russia.
Yeah, I do have concerns that Biden would try to approach Russia in ways that are, you know, too aggressive and very dangerous.
That being said, though, you know, there's all as you talk about all this Russiagate hysteria.
But at the end of the day, whether you wanted the U.S. and Russia to have an improved relationship or not, I would argue that Trump has not done a good job in terms of improving U.S. relationship with Russia.
No argument there.
Yeah.
Anything Trump has done quite a bit to actually increase tensions between Washington and Moscow.
Of course, if you get your news from MSNBC, you'll you'll never hear these points because it goes against the mainstream narrative that, you know, Trump is a Manchurian candidate or he's a robot controlled by Putin or whatever.
But, you know, when we talk about Syria, Venezuela, Iran, so on and so forth, there's a lot the Trump administration is do is doing that directly clashes with Russian interests, including sanctions that the U.S. has put on Russia since Trump began his presidency.
You know, two new members of NATO pulls the troops out of Germany, sends them to Poland.
Thanks a lot.
Yeah.
So, boy, yeah, I wouldn't want anyone to misinterpret anything I said as saying that he was any better on it.
Just I think Biden would be worse.
Again, these guys are all just worse than each other.
Neither of them better.
Biden was involved in some way.
I don't know exactly.
I mean, we know about some of his intervention after the fact, but he was involved in some way in the coup in Ukraine in 2014 because Victoria Nuland says on the tape that we're getting the vice president to stick this thing together.
We're going to make sure and, you know, everybody can hear that's the famous F the E.U. phone call and the vice president is involved in the conspiracy to overthrow the government that caused a terrible war that killed 10,000 or more people in the east of the country and led to Ukraine's loss of Crimea and all the rest of that.
So yeah, regardless of who wins this election, I think it will be interesting to see how the U.S. responds to the situation in Belarus right now.
You know, I was talking with with Gilbert Doctorow about that earlier today, and he's a real Russia expert.
And he was saying essentially that the status quo is going to hold because that's what Russia requires to happen.
And that contrary to the Ukraine narrative, that the opposition there in Belarus is not really pro-EU or pro-NATO or pro-Western or any of those things.
So those interests aren't really at stake.
And that maybe if the opposition won, that would be a thumb in the eye of Putin.
But it wouldn't really be anything more than that.
But that Putin is in the position to not let that happen anyway.
And that in fact, you know, they have like a political union of some kind.
It's not exactly the old USSR, but they have an agreement where Russia can send in troops or police to guarantee the status quo if they want and this kind of thing.
It's already legal before the fact.
So as Dan McAdams was saying on the show a week ago, America's not winning this one.
You know, the Russians are going to have their way because they will not accept any other way.
You know, it's just too important to them.
I got to say, I do not have expertise when it comes to Eastern Europe.
But what you're saying is very, very interesting.
And if you have an expert on your show to talk about Belarus, I will definitely tune in because I would like to learn a lot more about the situation in that country.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Gilbert Docter, we ran his piece at Antiwar.com the other day, too.
You can find it there.
It's in the viewpoint section there.
And with that, you know what, we're over an hour and it's Friday afternoon and I bet you've got to go and live your life.
But thank you very much for sharing some of your time with us on the show today, Giorgio.
I really appreciate it a lot.
Thank you.
And I hope we can do another show.
I can appear on your show again at some point before too long.
And once again, thank you so much for this opportunity to talk about Yemen.
Yeah, absolutely.
You just keep writing stuff and I'll keep interviewing you about it.
Sounds good.
Thank you.
Thanks, man.
All right, you guys, that is Giorgio Caffiero.
This one is at the American Conservative magazine.
It's Gulf Powers Fear Turkey's Jockeying for Soft Power in Yemen.
You can find that in the viewpoint section also at Antiwar.com.
