All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio, or anybody who's checked the page at AntiWar.com in the last couple of days knows well that the revolution in the Middle East is still on, and big time.
Our first guest on the show today is Jason Dittz.
He is the news editor at AntiWar.com, news.antiwar.com, to find his kind of mini-essays linking you to all the most important news of the day, sometimes, I mean, you know, daylight today.
We got too many headlines to give them each a headline, so Jason, he writes them up in summary form and directs you to all the most important pieces and explains what's so important about them for you.
That's news.antiwar.com.
Welcome back to the show, Jason.
How's things?
I'm doing good, Scott.
That's good, man.
I'm doing fine.
So, top headline.
I don't even want to hear this, but I guess I have to.
Obama, U.S. ready to act rapidly against Libya.
Say it ain't so.
Well, it's perhaps less so than it was a couple of days ago when it looked like everybody was on board for invasion, occupation, and Iraq-style regime change, but some of the officials are still talking that way, and the U.S. keeps moving more troops, more ships, more everything into the region, so it seems like it's still something they're holding out as at least a possibility.
Well, okay, so let's talk about this.
Hillary Clinton, basically.
She's the most hawkish, it seems like, in the administration, leveling all kinds of threats.
Does it seem like...
Can you detect any reluctance on the part of Barack Obama, for example?
Not so much on Obama, but Secretary Gates has made several comments expressing concern in Congress that a lot of congressmen are a little too eager to start a big war in Libya and expressing concern that people don't realize what a big endeavor it actually would be for the U.S. to intervene militarily in a big country like that.
I mean, Libya is a large, large country compared to even, say, Iraq.
Right.
Well, and you look at the no-fly zone in Iraq.
It was implemented at the end of the complete smashing of Iraq's military force and really the surrender of much of its military force.
You know, in the terms of the ceasefire in 1991, there wasn't much left in Iraq to shoot.
The no-fly zone bombings were basically just kind of a ritual thing, I guess, at radar stations here and there.
But as Gates was explaining to the Congress, look, a no-fly zone, he says, call a spade a spade.
A no-fly zone means we've got to bomb any air defenses that they have.
It means war.
Oh, right.
And the air defenses, that's a double problem, because not only does Libya have quite a lot of air defenses ever since the Reagan administration bombings of Tripoli, but a lot of those air defenses have fallen under control of the protesters.
So for the most part, they would be bombing protester-held targets.
Right.
Right.
Yeah, that's the other thing, is how's a military intelligence supposed to know who's the bad guys and who's not?
Well, and in the context of a no-fly zone, I don't think that much matters practically.
They're pretty much obliged to blow up any air defense systems, whether they're rebels took the air defense system and set it up outside of an oil refinery to prevent Qaddafi from attacking it, or whether it's still under Qaddafi's control.
But I don't think it matters from a practical standpoint.
If they're doing a no-fly zone, they pretty much have to attack both, and that means they're going to be fighting both sides of that.
That's a very important point.
And you know, it seems like, well, I don't really know, maybe you can tell us about how solid the leadership of the revolution movement is there.
I know there's some kind of self-appointed council of leaders or something, but have they made much noise about this either way?
Well, the National Leadership Council, I think it's called, or the National Council of Libya or something like that, they have said they oppose foreign military intervention and that they don't need it.
They want this revolution to be finished by Libyans themselves.
And there's concern from some of them that if the U.S. or if NATO starts interfering, it's going to mean the entire purpose of the revolution is going to be lost and it's going to become about something else entirely.
Well, you know, I guess maybe I'm not the best at figuring out the D.C. politics angle on this, but it seems like just the whole real world politics angle on this, Gates is right.
It would be absolute madness.
It's worse than he says.
It would be very inadvisable to intervene here, even if they didn't want to occupy the oil fields or something, even if they just wanted to use it as a PR stunt to show America is a good guy for a change or something.
Even the most minimal kind of thing here is playing with, you know, not just fire, but jellied gasoline, man.
Right.
It would be a disaster to launch an attempted military occupation here.
I mean, the thing with Libya is so much of it is just empty territory.
If you start sparking up insurgents resisting the occupation, that's going to be an enormous problem.
Territorially, Libya is larger than Iraq and Afghanistan combined.
There's a lot of empty space out there, and I don't think simply that we have the troops to occupy the whole place.
Wow, you know, I didn't realize that, but I guess you're right, huh?
Bigger than Iraq and Afghanistan combined.
And you think about that, too.
When we say insurgency, you know, American occupation and insurgency, all of a sudden we can predict with 1,000% certainty.
Can we not, that the whole tone of this revolution will change from young and secular and democratic to, you know, scarves over the face and jihad and suicide bombers and the same kind of lunacy we saw in Iraq in 2005 and 2006?
Well, there might be some possibility that if the U.S. went in and was just sort of a bystander politically, that they might put up with it.
Not necessarily approve, but put up with it.
But I think we know historically when the U.S. goes in like that, they never go in unbiased politically, and they never go in with an eye towards a quick exit.
Right.
It would eventually, the creation of the new government would become a U.S. enterprise like it was in Iraq and like it was in Afghanistan, and they would start handpicking who they like as the potential successors to Qaddafi.
Well, you know, remember back when Obama was taking power and he kept doing everything wrong, and there was this meme on the left blogosphere that said, well, he's playing three-dimensional chess, he's thinking so far ahead that he knows what to do in order to make the counterreaction to the counterreaction work out in the right way, and they would always say that about him.
Makes me wonder whether he's such a close ally of Muammar Qaddafi that he's actually got his government talking all this smack about intervention just to shore up Qaddafi's position and give him some good talking points for blaming foreigners for the domestic insurgency against him.
Well, he certainly is giving him some good talking points, but it's kind of too late once again.
As with Egypt, by the time the Obama administration started getting interested and involved, the guy had already been tasked for major change, and I don't think anything he can do is going to save Qaddafi's regime at this point.
Yeah.
Well, and I'm mostly being facetious, but then again, they were selling him a bunch of helicopters, you know, and there's some money there, general dynamics and all that.
All right, everybody hang tight.
It's Jason Ditz, news.antiwar.com.
We'll be right back.
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 been covering the massive intifada from Morocco to China.
Not so much in China, particularly in the Muslim countries, and particularly, as we've seen, in the Muslim countries allied with the United States.
Now, Jason, I was hoping we could just sort of, you know, get a rundown from you of the biggest news out of Libya this week, the status of, you know, aside from the United Nations and Hillary Clinton and, you know, warships, American warships on their way, in terms of the situation on the ground in Libya, as best you can tell, how well is the rebellion doing?
Who's winning the battles?
How many people are still fighting for Gaddafi?
How much land does he still control?
That sort of stuff, if you could, please.
Well, there's quite a bit of fighting still, but it's sort of hard to tell how well anyone is doing at this point, because the media reports are all over the place.
You see a lot of reports saying, well, the rebels have routed the mercenaries in this city or in that city and chased them out of the city or captured a few.
But then you'll see the same article on another site that says the rebels are struggling and they desperately need international intervention.
It's interesting, though, to note that every time we see a story saying that the rebels' fight is going poorly, it's couched in terms of now the U.S. needs to invade.
Now, what's the name of the city that's just outside of Tripoli?
Zawiyah.
Zawiyah.
And now, does the rebellion still have complete control of that town?
Of the town itself, they do, but the mercenaries have set up a blockade around the town, so travel in and out is pretty much impossible as of the last couple of days.
Well, man, I think they need to arm up Joe Lieberman and send him over there to save those people.
You know, wouldn't it be funny if all the people who wanted the government to intervene there had to be the ones to go?
I'd like that.
All right, well, so now let's see if we can get an update about Bahrain and Yemen.
Those are two very important states in the midst of uprisings as well and two states that are very important to the U.S. Empire.
Well, Bahrain is sort of the same situation going on.
There's a lot of protests and there hasn't been much violence in the last week, although some of the spokesmen for the monarchy are saying that patience is wearing thin on the protest movement, so there might be another backlash at some point.
Yemen is really where things are happening, and not necessarily for the better.
The protesters got a big bump over the weekend when the political opposition announced they were joining the protest movement, which before they'd just sort of, you know, there's students and some tribesmen protesting and then there's the political opposition that's just sort of ignoring that it's happening.
But they joined the protest movement, and that seemed to give them a big shot in the arm as far as size of protest.
But then within 48 hours, and interestingly, as soon as the political opposition joined, the protesters started complaining, well, we think the political opposition is just going to sell us out.
And in fact, within 48 hours, the political opposition announced that they'd made a deal with Saleh on an exit strategy where they're going to let him stay in office for the rest of the year, and then he comes up with some sort of exit plan somewhere early in 2012, and then they'll discuss if that's acceptable or not.
That sounds like a pretty good ploy to sort of at least attempt to buy off the opposition.
Then again, I think the way I read it, Jason, it was the opposition's idea, right?
We'll give you a way to leave power and save face.
We don't want to make this too difficult for you.
But by the end of the year, you've got to go, like the American soldiers in Iraq.
Well, it's been spun that way by some, but a lot of the protesters aren't buying.
They're saying that's way too long.
And Saleh was already saying he wasn't going to run for re-election in early 2013, so a plan to leave office somewhere in 2012 isn't necessarily going to be a big improvement on that.
Well, now I guess aside from cracking skulls, their best strategy, these dictators, is to just try to wait the people out.
I mean, at the end of the day, the masses are unorganized.
That's why they're masses, and it becomes very difficult to sustain this kind of pressure.
I wonder, well, it's been a few weeks, though, in Yemen, and they seem to be keeping it up pretty tough, huh?
Right, that's been the incredible thing.
We've seen a lot of places try that wait-them-out strategy or try the bribe-them strategy, particularly Bahrain, where they just announced fairly early in the protest cash payments to everybody in the country as an attempt to try to buy a little quiet.
But people are out there demanding change, and they're not settling for anything less.
So it seems like all these delaying tactics are failing just as badly as the violent crackdown tactics.
Now, there's been a lot of accusations that the dissent in Bahrain, which is, I think they say, about a 70-30 split between Shiites and Sunnis, the Sunnis being the ruling minority propped up by the United States, and a lot of the hype, at least from the right-wing, has been that Iran, and I guess from the government of Bahrain, too, is that Iran is behind the protests and are aiding them and intervening in Bahrain and trying to turn this into an international incident.
Have you seen anything concrete like that at all?
No, no, not at all.
Iran's state media has been covering the protests in Bahrain better than most, certainly, but as far as Iranian infiltration or anything like that, I don't think we've seen anything even close to that.
It seems like the protest movement has been pretty much entirely peaceful, and all the violence has come from the Bahraini monarchy's side.
And it's sort of an odd case there, because when Yemen or Libya cracks down, they don't really say anything afterwards, but the king in Bahrain always apologizes a few hours after a violent crackdown and says he's going to look into why that happened and it shouldn't have happened, and then another violent crackdown comes.
Right.
Yeah, in fact, at one point he made a big deal about saying that all the police are ordered to protect the protesters.
Right, and he made that speech shortly before the tanks started rolling in the streets.
Well, it makes you wonder to what degree he's even the king of that place.
Yeah, or if he's just trying to save face internationally or what, because it seems like his comments got covered a lot better than the violent crackdowns did.
Right.
But now, back to the question of so-called Iranian influence, has there even been, you know how the New York Times does it, well, we talked to a couple of unnamed intelligence officials who say that they have reason to believe or anything, has there even been anything like that at all?
No, the closest thing I've seen to anything was when the reports came out that Saudi Arabia was sending some additional tanks to Bahrain across that bridge, Bahrain's government denied it and said that Iran's state media had made it up.
That was the closest thing I've seen to any allegation of...
Right, but then even in your piece on that, you traced it back to the original source.
The Iranians were just quoting an Egyptian paper, and you went and found that, right?
Right.
It was ridiculous.
I mean, very clearly in the Iranian piece they say, well, this was according to witnesses who were quoted in an Egyptian newspaper, and if you went to the Egyptian newspaper's website, which had the English-language translation of it, sure enough, it said the exact same thing.
Fifteen tank carriers crossing the bridge from Saudi Arabia into Bahrain.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's really sad, the stories of all these dictatorships in the region.
It's really heartening to see all these regular people of all ages and all backgrounds standing up to overthrow them, but at least in liberated Iraq, where America has gone and done those people a real big favor and gotten rid of their dictatorship, everything's going swimmingly, right?
Yeah.
Iraq's protests have been some of the most interesting because they haven't been particularly covered in the West.
We see every once in a while one of them will make a British newspaper or something, but in the U.S., the fact that there are protests in Iraq doesn't really seem to be reaching the media at all.
Well, that's a little contrary to our narrative.
We're on the side of the people of Libya and Bahrain, don't you know?
Some of these have been pretty good-sized protests in Iraq, too, and there have been some very violent crackdowns, which were accompanied by the U.S. Embassy praising the Iraqi government for its restraint in the wake of the protests.
I can't find it anymore.
I was looking for it and I couldn't find it at news.antiwar.com, where you can run down all the headlines.
I couldn't find it anymore, but I could have swore it was one that you wrote that said the Iraqi government was cracking down on intellectuals, on the leadership, writers, and Pol Pot style, looking for people with glasses, I guess, like back when the CIA gave all the lists of the socialists to Saddam Hussein to murder, that kind of thing.
Was that you that wrote about that?
Yeah.
So tell me more about that, and if you remember the headline, tell me that.
I don't remember the headline, unfortunately.
I think that was the day before yesterday.
They're arresting, well, of course they've been arresting journalists right along, and when we say arresting, that's not really a great term for it, because what they're really doing is sending these guys out in turtleneck sweaters that are supposedly members of the special forces that just sort of drag the journalists off the streets and put them in some sort of detention center and threaten to cut their heads off if they keep covering the protests.
But we've also had reports that the leadership, some of the people that have been speaking at the protests, the intellectual types are just being disappeared into these detention centers and never coming back out.
So whether they're still being held or whether they're executed or what, we don't really know, but it seems like the attempt is pretty similar to what the Egyptian government tried early on and what the Libyan government tried early on, really what every government's tried early on, which is get rid of the leadership of the protests and assume that everyone else will just go back to business as usual.
Yeah, that was Don Rumsfeld's strategy for the insurgency, right?
Right, which of course hasn't worked at all in any of these cases.
It just riles people up when their leadership gets disappeared like that.
Well, I'm sorry, audience, I still can't find this one.
It's not at least 21 dead in Iraq protest crackdowns.
That's not the one, right?
It had the intellectuals in the title, I thought, right?
No, I don't think it did.
Let me find it here.
I've been flipping through news.antiwar.com and there's so much here, so much important news.
But I guess while you're scanning, Jason, I'll go ahead and remind people what you wrote the other day about these protests in Iraq from Mosul, which I think is the northernmost major city in the country up there in Kurdistan, all the way down to Basra and every population center in between.
Yeah, the title of it was Report Maliki Using Special Forces to Shut Down Protests.
Oh, okay, well, isn't that on the front page of antiwar.com today?
I believe it is, yeah.
Okay, anyway, so yeah, the point is that we had Human Rights Watch here on the show talking about Maliki's secret torture prisons that the Red Cross doesn't have access to.
Now we have these.
Basically, I'm so happy to see Iraqis rising up in peaceful protests.
It's been a while since we've seen those against the government there.
And I guess they're suffering the same kind of price inflation as everybody else in that region and the horrible effects of it.
But you're right.
I think probably, Jason, the most important part of this is just how it goes completely unmentioned in the media.
They can count on the fact that Americans don't really know that much about American backing for Hosni Mubarak or for Ben Ali in Tunisia or even for Gaddafi over the last eight years.
They certainly don't know that about Libya.
But it would really screw up their narrative.
If the people of Iraq basically feel like they live under an American-backed, tin-pot dictator just like the rest of these people in the region and want to rise up and create some kind of more democratic system that serves their interests, that doesn't go along with the American empire's narrative about what happened in Iraq at all.
So TV just blacks it out.
Let's talk about Libya only and no Iraq at all.
Right.
Even Yemen hasn't been covered all that much in the Western media.
I guess it has in newspapers, but you never see it on TV.
I was talking to somebody the other day that watches a lot of cable news, and she was totally unaware that anything was even going on in Yemen.
Wow.
Now that's a real statement right there, and we're going to have to leave it at that because we've got to go.
We've got to get Will Grigg on the line here.
I sure appreciate you coming on the show all the time to tell us about all this great stuff that you know about.
Sure.
Everybody, that is the great Jason Ditz.
He's our news editor at Antiwar.com.
News.
Antiwar.com.
Really, it's, I think, of the highest value.
Where else could you go online to find this level of coverage of these most important subjects?
Tattoo it on your hand so you don't forget.
News.
Antiwar.com.
Thanks, Jason.
Thanks.
