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Welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
Appreciate y'all joining us today.
We've got a pretty full lineup, but now it's Jason Ditz.
He's our news editor at antiwar.com.
That's news.antiwar.com.
And welcome back to the show, Jason.
How are you doing?
I'm doing good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Hey, man, my favorite headline of your headlines today at news.antiwar.com is the Egyptians...
Well, hang on.
I want to read it.
I don't have it right in front of me.
Egypt reopens Gaza border crossing.
Fill me in.
Well, it was something that had been coming for a few days now.
They announced over the weekend that they were planning to reopen the Rafah border crossing between the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip.
And yesterday they finally opened it.
And there was a long line on the Palestinian side of people who had already registered and gotten permission to cross the border.
And it was open for about five hours yesterday.
And quite a few people were able to cross.
They're saying that going forward, they're going to eventually get it to the point where they're running at 24 hours a day or it's open for crossing pretty much constantly.
Now, has there been any reaction from Tel Aviv yet?
Not as of yet, although they did launch some attacks on the Gaza Strip today, which may or may not be related to that.
Yeah, who knows?
They bomb the Gaza Strip all the time.
You know, a militant was getting near the fence or something.
So, well, I guess, you know, for people who aren't all that familiar, we can't go back over the whole history of how they all got in Gaza or anything like that.
But maybe you can at least sort of catch us up on the state of siege in Gaza as it's been for the last two and a half, three years.
Well, more than that, even, I think.
And then, you know, so why is it that it's so important that Egypt is opening this border?
It was previously sealed, right?
Right.
Ever since Hamas took over in the Gaza Strip, which was sort of in the wake of those elections that Hamas won and then the Fatah bloc and the Palestinian Authority announced that they were just going to keep power anyway.
Back in 06, right?
Right.
Hamas took over the Gaza Strip and Fatah more or less took over the parts of the West Bank that aren't entirely occupied.
There are a few small slivers of the West Bank that are actually mostly Palestinian controlled, although Israeli tanks do go in there pretty regular and Israeli troops go in and arrest people.
But on the Gaza side, Israel's more or less had a complete blockade, including a naval blockade, on the Strip.
They closed the border.
They pressured Mubarak to close the border, which, of course, he did because under the 1979 peace deal, he was basically obliged to close it just on Israel's say-so.
And, you know, every once in a while, someone would blow up the wall between Egypt and Gaza or they would dig a tunnel or something.
But mostly it's just been closed ever since.
And all that's coming into Gaza was just the bare minimum humanitarian aid that Israel decides to let in through their side of the border.
Well, and it's come out to there was an aid to Ehud Olmert, who was the previous prime minister before Netanyahu again, who used the phrase, we're trying to keep them on a diet.
We don't want them to starve, but we want to keep them hungry, that kind of thing.
And then the WikiLeaks cables just in the past, what, a month and a half or so have come out with more quotes like that from inside the Israeli government, I guess, talking to the State Department employees.
And this is a policy that the Egyptian government has been complicit in up until now.
I guess they opened the border for a very short time after the Mavi Mamara incident.
But but so, I mean, this is perhaps the first real concrete change in Egyptian government policy since the fall of Hosni Mubarak, no?
Well, it's certainly the most noticeable.
By and large, everything else has remained in place domestically, other than firing a few people here and there and announcing that they're going to rule entirely by edict instead of having that sort of sham of a parliament operating thing.
And the Gaza Strip has been part of what's one of the major demands of the protesters, which is opening up Sinai as well.
Because under the 1979 peace deal with Israel, although Egypt has had control of the Sinai Peninsula, it's been pretty restrictive on individual Egyptians traveling there.
There's a lot of checkpoints, and they need a lot of permission to go different places.
And really, freedom of movement has been very restricted in that area.
And that's, of course, the area that borders Gaza as well.
So I think a lot of people see the opening up of Gaza, obviously against Israel's wishes, as a sign that the whole peninsula is going to be open pretty soon.
All right, y'all.
Well, if you're anything like me, you need Jason Ditz.
You need antiwar.com and particularly the news summary feed there at news.antiwar.com.
I think, what, seven days a week, Jason is reading every newspaper on earth and putting together the summaries of, you know, what's all the breaking news?
What's all the most important news in the world?
And if it's, you know, three or four different sources on the same story, then he'll link to the different aspects of the story that are highlighted the best in the different particular articles.
And it's, you know, it's not just having antiwar.com as your repository for all of the most important news of the day, but also Jason's analysis and summarizing of that news.
It's extraordinarily useful as, of course, as you're hearing right now, or as you were just hearing 45 seconds ago, as is his time as an expert guest on this show.
And in order to keep Jason doing what he does, we need your help.
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Hold it right there, Jason.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's antiwar radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Jason Ditz.
He's our news editor at antiwar.com.
That's news.antiwar.com.
So now tell me, Jason, what's the most exciting thing going on over there in North Africa, in the Middle East, and our revolutions we're witnessing here today?
Okay, Libya right now.
Well, tell me what's going on.
Well, virtually the whole eastern half of the country has separated from the Gaddafi regime.
There are celebrations in a lot of the major cities in the eastern half, and the protests, they're growing in the western half.
So on the one hand, it seems like if they wanted to, the protesters in Syranaica, which is the historical name for the sort of eastern Libya, could declare independence right now if they wanted.
But it seems like they're probably within a few days of having control over the entire country anyway.
So it might be a moot point.
Well, and by control, that means the army has said, we're on the side of the protesters, not you, jerk.
That's what that means city by city basis, right?
Right.
There's no one left killing them except for planes that, which planes haven't defected or haven't crashed into the side of a mountain because the pilot jumped out, are basically all that's left threatening the people in the eastern half of the country.
There's not really Libyan military forces there that are opposing the protesters anymore.
Well, now, what are you hearing about the situation in Tripoli, though?
I guess that's where he's strongest, right?
Well, it's definitely where he's strongest right now, but it's not.
I mean, a few days ago, we would have said he has virtually absolute control over Tripoli.
And now I don't really think that's the case anymore.
There's a lot of fighting going on in Tripoli.
There are a lot of killings going on in Tripoli.
But the protests there seem to just keep going in spite of it.
Well, you know, I saw one headline coming over Al Jazeera English this morning.
I don't know whether anybody ever verified this.
I guess let me know if you heard of it.
But they were saying that Gaddafi's daughter was on one of the planes attempting to defect to Malta.
Oh, I hadn't heard that.
I guess we'll see.
My favorite quote from Gaddafi's speech yesterday.
It wasn't the Waco bit.
That's my second favorite.
My first favorite was, what has gotten into you people?
That was my favorite one.
I didn't realize that there was a direct translation from Arabic to English in that exact phrase.
But that was just hilarious.
I was literally holding my gut laughing so hard.
I've never seen such desperation in a falling dictator before.
I mean, it's really something, isn't it?
My favorite part was when the ceiling behind him started falling apart.
Right.
Well, and, you know, I actually was making fun of him yesterday for doing a show from what looks like, you know, a bombed out basement on the run or something instead of a, you know, plush, powerful looking background.
But then I guess I tuned in late and I later found out that he was in part of his own palace that was bombed by Ronald Reagan in 1986, that they left that way for, you know, TV purposes like this.
So that was why he was in that bombed out looking place with the ceiling falling in and everything is that was supposed to show that, you know, he was standing up to the powerful Americans.
You'd think he'd have fixed it up anyway, though.
I mean, what he's done right now kind of makes it look like he just left that basement all messed up for 25 years on the off chance that when he when he started getting overthrown, he could give a speech from there.
Right.
Although, you know, I wonder maybe they've used it for those purposes in the past.
I don't know, but maybe they have.
It's pretty funny.
Well, and, you know, Romano points out in his article today that all these Americans talking about intervening because, of course, you know, the military or at least the mercenaries that Qaddafi's hired in Libya have been much more willing to use violence seemingly than in Egypt, or at least, you know, bombing people from the sky, that kind of thing.
It seems more objectionable.
So now there's this consensus building in D.C. that perhaps we need to land the Marines or at least put some no fly zones and U.N. resolutions and American interventions in Libya, which is exactly what Qaddafi needs more than anything else, is to try to be able to pretend that all these people who are trying to overthrow him are at least the at the very least, you know, unwilling dupes of the United States.
Well, right on the surface, just just as a gut reaction, intervention in Libya after what's happened in the last few days sounds reasonable.
But if you think about it for even a minute, you start to realize, hey, this guy's losing.
He's lost almost his whole country.
He's just barely hanging on by a thread.
Why on earth would you give him any sort of legitimacy by having some sort of international military intervention that's only going to be used as an excuse for him to say he's standing up to foreign occupation?
Yeah, I wonder if George Bush is kicking himself.
You know, he refused, like Clinton before him, to accept Muammar Qaddafi's kissing up to the West and trying to be brought back into the fold.
And then Bush finally let him back into the fold, you know, as an American backed military dictator in 2003, basically just so he could try to pretend that there was one good result to the Iraq war, even though Qaddafi, of course, had been trying for years before that.
But and now he's being overthrown as an American backed military dictator.
And the Americans can't say, see, we told you this guy was bad or whatever.
They so consistently demonize Qaddafi all this time.
And then they gave him an eight year hiatus right before he gets overthrown.
All right.
It's incredible.
I mean, people our age or older remember just how horrible Qaddafi, everyone was telling us Qaddafi was when we were kids.
I mean, the Libyans were the villains in Back to the Future, for God's sake.
And now there was this eight year period where they're our buddies, you know, and seemingly just like you say, so that Bush could say it was the result of the Iraq war.
And so some US oil companies could get some contracts there.
But really, his internal policy hasn't changed over the course of his time.
41 or 42 years rule.
He's been the same tyrant he's always been.
And people are just fed up with him now.
Yeah, well, they made a big deal about him giving up his nuclear weapons program, which amounted to a warehouse full of boxes of leftover crap from AQ Khan's garage sale that had never been put to use at all.
And look, everybody, we got Qaddafi's nuclear weapons program.
It's only because we invaded Iraq, we were able to accomplish this great thing.
In fact, someone in the chat room was saying that just yesterday, Don Rumsfeld used that line on MSNBC with Andrea Mitchell Greenspan.
Yeah, it was because the Iraq war that we got Qaddafi to give up his nuclear weapons program.
All right, well, so tell me about Saudi Arabia, because that's the one I know least about.
And that's the one that of course, the whole world is watching and waiting with bated breath.
The only thing I saw today was the Financial Times reporting that the king has raised everybody's welfare payment and is going to start some new government programs to get rid of poverty.
That ought to work pretty well.
Well, and that's been tried in some other countries.
I think Kuwait has done something like that.
Bahrain did something very similar to right before the major protests started there.
The big thing with Saudi Arabia right now really is Bahrain, because you've got the Shiite majority rebelling against the Sunni monarch there.
And if it's successful, pretty much everyone agrees that the next step is going to be that the Shiite part of Saudi Arabia, which is one of the big oil producing parts, and right along the border with Bahrain is going to start rebelling too.
This is the entire Reagan strategy was to prevent the Shiite revolution from spreading into Kuwait, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.
The entire strategy of Reagan Bush years that junior went and undid and overthrew.
I hope that someone smart enough to understand any of this is near enough to George W. Bush to explain it to him.
And Iraq, of course, too.
Iraq was another country that they were trying to keep the yeah, Iraq itself.
Of course, they're using Iraq to protect the rest of those.
But yeah, of course, Iraq, too, where the Shiite majority now rules the Dawah Party, Supreme Islamic Council, Muqtada al-Sadr, government of Iraq.
And I've seen some reports today.
I don't know if they've been confirmed yet that Sadr has actually returned to Iraq again.
Well, you know, what was I was just hearing yesterday about?
Oh, I know what it was.
I was interviewing Michael Hastings, who wrote The Runaway General, and he won the Polk Award.
And he said that he's hearing unconfirmed, but he's hearing that there's about to be a new kind of official proposal to keep to to keep 20,000 troops in Iraq after the deadline at the end of this year.
And then so of course, then the question is, well, what about Muqtada al-Sadr?
Right.
That's going to be a tough sell, I think, for him.
Amazing, though.
We're out of time, Jason.
Okay.
Thanks a lot for yours, man.
Appreciate it.
Sure.
Thanks for having me.
Everybody, that's Jason Ditz, news.antiwar.com.
