All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I'm 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 the brand new Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism, and I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you at scotthorton.org.
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All right, you guys, on the line, I got Dave DeCamp.
He's News Editor at Antiwar.com.
Hey, Dave.
Hey, Scott.
How you doing?
I'm good, man.
How are you doing?
I'm good.
Thanks for having me back on.
Yeah, man, I wanted to ask you about a bunch of things.
First of all, the Russians are coming.
They're going to invade eastern Ukraine, and then what's America going to do about it, do you think, or is any of that true, or what's going on?
Well, yeah, this was on Thursday.
This was yesterday.
There's a report in Bloomberg that said U.S. officials briefed their European allies that they think Russia's going to invade Ukraine, and the report was very vague, and it even said that they didn't give the Europeans information on what they based their assessment on.
And then today, actually, Russia denied the report, said it has no plans to invade Ukraine, and said that, you know, this is all based on Russian troop movement inside Russia, supposedly.
It's tough to know with these claims made by the U.S. exactly what's happening there.
One of the reasons why Russia may be putting more troops in, you know, in what appears to be near Ukraine or in the Black Sea region is because the U.S. and NATO have really stepped up their activity in the Black Sea.
There's a few U.S. warships in there now, you know, there's spy planes buzzing around the U.S. since bombers once in a while.
So Russia responded by saying, you know, this is what's raising tensions in the region.
But yeah, it seems like that report in Bloomberg was just more, you know, kind of Russia nonsense.
So yeah, they've been blinking, the Secretary of State, he's been, you know, quote, unquote, warning Russia not to invade Ukraine, and has said that, you know, the U.S. is committed to Ukraine's sovereignty.
So whatever that means, it's kind of a vague thing.
It's not clear if the U.S. would actually intervene if Russia really invaded Ukraine.
But, you know, they're making the vague threats.
And Lloyd Austin was recently in Ukraine, the Secretary of Defense, and he kind of signaled that the door is still open for a Ukraine-NATO membership, which would be a huge provocation towards Russia.
But at this point, it seems like the U.S. is still kicking that can down the road and because Ukraine wants in.
But I think they recognize, you know, that it will cross a red line with Russia.
So they're holding off on that for now.
Yeah.
Well, and the Germans and the French have made it clear in the past that they would not allow it.
But I don't know how reliable that is.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, so now, is there any indication from the Russian side that they've been really hawking it up about maybe we should go ahead and absorb eastern Ukraine lately or anything like that?
No, not that I've seen.
All right.
Just another false alarm.
I'm used to those.
Yeah.
And again, you know, this is Russian, the Russian military moving inside Russia.
And, you know, they have a big base in Crimea and that's their Black Sea base.
And they have been responding to the U.S. and NATO exercises there.
So it's kind of a natural thing for them to send more troops in that region when the U.S. is doing it.
All right.
So two things to add here real quick.
The first is, I have a friend who lives in Ukraine now who told me that the rumor around there is the Russians are coming because Kiev nationalized a helicopter engine factory in the Donbass region there.
And the Russians want it.
That doesn't sound like a good enough reason to go to war to me, but that's what they're saying inside Ukraine anyway.
And then the other thing is that in the middle of the war in 2015, the people of the Donbass and that's Donetsk and Luhansk, those two, I guess, provinces or, you know, counties or however they call them over there, they voted in a plebiscite to join the Russian Federation and Putin told them no.
And he helped supply special operations forces to help them keep Kiev out.
But that was it.
And that's been the status quo since, you know, I guess it's been relatively low level conflict since Minsk 2, which was in 2015, if I remember right.
The end of 2015 or maybe it was the beginning of 2016.
So it seems like Putin had his chance to just say, yeah, you know what, I think I will absorb the eastern predominantly Russian speaking regions of eastern Ukraine.
He could have probably marched as far as Odessa if he wanted to.
But he didn't do that.
He just took Crimea and in a coup domain without a shot being fired, without a single person killed.
So, yeah, I don't know.
I'm not that alarmed.
That's a pretty important detail that I should include in my articles that they did vote to join Russia and the Russians didn't absorb those two provinces.
So, yeah, it does show you that.
Why would they do it now?
Try to take parts of eastern Ukraine now?
Yeah.
Well, as you said, well, if we try to bring them into NATO, they will, you know.
And in fact, so I had gotten this one screwed up in the past.
People might have heard me say this wrong.
I conflated this with Nyet means Nyet, which is a cable from our current CIA director, William Burns, back when he worked for the State Department, reporting about a meeting where Sergei Lavrov told him, you better not.
And you know what I mean by that.
But it was it was not that.
That was what I said was the source before.
But what it was, I was conflating two different things.
It was Putin said this to an Italian diplomat that, you know, that we could be in Kiev in two weeks.
And what he meant by that was don't bring them into NATO because you won't bring them into NATO.
We'll bring them back in the Russian Federation before we let you bring them into NATO.
So go ahead and call good enough.
Good enough, pal.
You know, a pretty tough talk.
Yeah.
And, you know, I do think the Biden administration recognizes that and they're kind of just teasing it.
It's kind of funny because they say Biden has said that, you know, Ukraine has to work on its corruption before it can join NATO.
Kind of the irony of Joe Biden saying that when he was vice president, the U.S. orchestrated a coup in the country and then his son landed a job.
Making what, $50,000 a month on a national, the board of a Ukrainian gas company.
So and then, you know, the narrative is that, oh, that story never really went anywhere.
But that's really not true.
I mean, it seems Matt Taibbi did the best work in it.
You know, he speaks Russian.
He actually made some phone calls and did some reporting on this about how it really does look like that Biden intervened to get the prosecutor fired who was looking at the company and was investigating the company that his son worked for.
And then later, of course, bragged about that at the Council on Foreign Relations.
So they all tried to dismiss that.
Oh, that's a conspiracy or whatever.
Yeah, it's conspiracy, but not the kooky kind of theory, but just a plain old conspiracy like the kind of Justice Department charges all the time.
Yeah.
And that's become like, so there was some U.S. intelligence assessment that Putin interfered in the 2020 election that was just based on nonsense.
It was based on the fact that, you know, people in Ukraine, what they considered Russia, Russian influence were looking into the Biden, that whole situation, because people in Ukraine were concerned about the U.S. corruption in their country.
That's interference.
Somehow that means Putin interfered in the 2020 election.
So you can just see how this is all just built on just total nonsense.
Yeah.
All right, man.
Well, well, yeah, I don't know.
What can you say?
Nothing but nonsense.
Next is Aaron Maté, all about more about that nonsense.
But anyway, so let's talk about Iraq, because we have an American-supported prime minister in Iraq, which, you know, best of my reading is the least Iran-tied prime minister America has supported there this whole time.
Jafari and Maliki and Abedi and I'm forgetting a couple of their names now.
But this guy Hashemi was an army guy and I think was never part of the Dawa party.
But now, so there's all this political contention inside the Shiite supermajority coalition in power there in the majority in the parliament between the Saudis, the current prime minister and the Iranian-backed militias, and including an alleged assassination attempt against the prime minister.
Is that correct, sir?
Yeah, yeah, that's correct.
And then so what the hell is going on there?
Well, so there, Kadhimi, the prime minister, you know, he said that there was a drone attack on his home and just a few of his guards were like slightly injured was the reporting.
And, you know, there's some conflicting reports that said he wasn't even at his house at the time.
So who knows really what happened there?
But so the idea is that what they call the Iranian-aligned Shias in Iraq, they're contesting the election results.
So they're suspected of this assassination, but they all deny any role in it.
And, you know, it's tough to say what really happened.
But at this point, you know, Sadr's party, you know, they're the clear victor.
And Iran just said yesterday that they should respect the results of the election in Iraq.
So, yeah, I mean, that's really the situation there.
There's a few reports that it was citing like U.S. and Iraqi officials blaming the assassination attempt on Iran, and they seemed a little sketchy to me.
So I wouldn't go ahead and and, you know, there's different levels of influence when it comes to the Shia, those militias, how much Iran really controls them or how much influence they have.
And it's kind of been dwindling over the past few years, according to a lot of reports that I've read on Iraq over the past year or two.
But, yeah, they're quick to blame Iran.
And then some of the these militias are, they kind of accused Kadhimi of orchestrating like a false flag assassination attempt.
So that's another accusation.
So but yeah, so but it looks like these election results are going to stand.
There was some violence protests that turned violent and Sadr's party is going to form the next government.
Yeah, I've been entertained reading about how Sadr is somehow pitted against these Iranian backed factions.
Maybe now he's a nationalist who's turned against Iran when, no, he always was.
And they were just lying about him before.
Now they have to pretend to be confused about what's going on here.
But anyway, yeah.
Yeah.
Well, so yeah, it's a democracy for some, and it seems like it's functioning about like America's democracy is, you know, I don't know, total basket case, something like that.
So what's going on in Yemen?
I know there's a lot of fighting for Marib, and there's a lot of public relations going back and forth these days.
I don't know if you saw this where they're making a movie that's like one of these Black Hawk Down things.
Only the UAE soldiers leave no man behind.
Our valor and honor are on the line.
Come on, let's go rescue our boys.
Yeah, that's some good propaganda there.
But yeah, so within Yemen, there's been, like you said, a ton of fighting around Marib, which is kind of the only significant piece of territory that the U.S.
Saudi backed government controls.
And Jason Ditz has been covering this really well at antiwar.com.
And just about every day, the Saudis have this big death toll.
They say that, you know, over a hundred or like they'll say 125 Houthis were killed in airstrikes today.
And it's tough to confirm these numbers, but there are big, like major casualties on the ground as a result of the Saudi air campaign.
And, you know, just in the past few weeks, judging by these numbers, you know, thousands are being killed and the Houthis aren't stopping and they're still gaining territory.
So it kind of shows what a futile effort this is.
And there's been the Houthis also, they detained some people at the U.S. embassy in Sanaa, which is the capital of Yemen that the Houthis control.
And the U.S. doesn't have any staff there.
They're all Yemeni that are just like, I don't, I don't know exactly what they're doing in the building, but the Houthis detained some of them and the U.S. said that they've released most of them.
So it's not really, it seems kind of like a nothing story.
Oh, what a headline though.
Oh, yeah.
Yesterday, oh, look, the Washington examiner and the whatever, all these right wing papers.
Oh, they seized the American embassy.
And you're just supposed to picture a bunch of Americans being held hostage, you know, and then, you know, I don't know.
It's a great headline.
It reminds people of other things that happened before, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And they say Iranian-backed Houthis.
Always Iranian-backed Houthis.
Fighting against the al-Qaeda-backed other guys.
But anyway.
Yeah.
And then the other aspect of this here is that, you know, Biden is still supporting the Saudi air force.
They're still maintaining their war, their planes and stuff.
And without that support, you know, most experts agree that the air force would be grounded, you know, very quickly.
And they just approved another missile sale to the Saudis worth $650 million.
And I saw their excuse for it.
It's for Saudi warplanes, but they're air-to-air missiles.
So they're like, oh, this is defensive in nature because it's to shoot down Houthi drones.
But it's still support for the Saudi air force that's destroying the country of Yemen.
And so nothing has changed there.
Which is unfortunate because I know we all got a little excited at first when Biden said, you know, he was ending support for that war.
But there was so much pressure building, too.
But they just figured out how to relieve the pressure with a few kind of broken-ass promises and then just move on from there.
Yeah.
And now it's just still just a total disaster.
And who knows how many people have died since.
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Well, like you say, when the Houthis are winning against the Muslim Brotherhood and Al-Qaeda and UAE and Saudi and American backed former government forces on the ground there in Marib, then that means that they don't see a real reason to quit now when they're ahead and they're getting ahead, taking some casualties, sure, but obviously they're going to take that city within a matter of time.
At the same time, what do the Saudis and their Al-Qaeda friends and so forth have to lose other than control of a city in Yemen?
But it's not like they're going to lose Riyadh.
It's not like they're going to run out of oil money.
So from their point of view, the more they're losing, the more reason to keep fighting the war, not finally give up and say, OK, well, screw it.
Now that the Houthis are in a stronger position than they've been in all along, now's the time to go ahead and negotiate with them and give them whatever they want.
And, you know, they can't do that.
So they're all just going to keep fighting, even though it's been almost seven years and people are all starving to death.
Yeah, they're just going to keep throwing bombs at the situation, just keep bombing the hell out of that area of Marib.
And another thing, I think it was in September, Biden also approved, it was a military deal to maintain Saudi Arabia's helicopters, including attack helicopters.
So I don't know how they justify that that is defensive in nature.
I think that was worth 500 million.
So, yeah, what is the total there?
Over a billion in sales of Saudi Arabia has been approved by Biden when he said he was going to stop doing that.
So it's not a good sign.
Yeah.
And, you know, in a little while here, I'm going to be talking with Hassan Al-Tayyab about all this, too, and and the activism that they're doing on Capitol Hill to try to bring this thing to an end somehow.
It's too hard to get people to care about it.
It's too far away.
It's too hard to understand.
And so people just don't, I guess.
Yeah.
And so right now where we're at with that, I mean, you're going to talk to him about this.
So but from what I understand, the House version of the NDAA has an amendment, a good amendment from Ro Khanna.
But now the Senate, it seems like once they go to conference with the Senate to make the final NDAA, it could kind of easily be stripped down to the House.
Once they go to conference with the Senate to make the final NDAA, it could kind of easily be stripped out of there like it has been before.
So I got to understand this D.C. stuff better because I like I just don't understand why he can't just introduce a War Powers resolution like they did during Trump if it has the support.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, I mean, I don't think the Democrats want to confront Biden in a way that's going to weaken him.
And anything short of that kind of pressure is not going to do so.
Yeah.
Here we are still.
All right.
Well, you've been writing a lot about China lately.
Give us some good or bad news there.
Yeah, well, the China stuff, especially over Taiwan, has been pretty, you know, kind of scary lately.
The attitude in Washington now is that the U.S. should defend Taiwan if China invades.
And, you know, the current policy known as strategic ambiguity means that the U.S. won't say whether it will or will not defend Taiwan.
But recently there was a CNN town hall where Biden said that he has the U.S. has a commitment to defend Taiwan.
You know, U.S. officials were quick to say that that didn't signal a change in policy.
But there's all these bills being introduced in Congress to get...
There's one that there are, you know, and this isn't just ultra hawkish Republicans like Tom Cotton.
There's some Democrats now that want to give Biden war powers so he would be able to send troops to Taiwan if China moves to take it.
And the fact that that's even a conversation is kind of scary.
And other things, a lot has been happening.
Taiwan recently confirmed for the first time since 1979 when Washington severed diplomatic relations with Taipei and recognized Beijing as China, that they confirmed that the presence of U.S. military troops.
Now, it's kind of been an open secret for decades that there has been U.S. military on the island training Taiwan's military, but it's never been confirmed.
And kind of the confirmation, you know, a lot of this stuff seems kind of silly to people, but this symbolic diplomatic stuff as the U.S. is increasing diplomatic relations, still informal with Taiwan, those are kind of arguably more of a provocation to China than the U.S. sending so many warships and warplanes in the region.
Just the other day, there was a group of Senate Republicans and some House Republicans that flew to Taiwan on a military aircraft.
And, you know, they went to Taiwan's defense ministry, met with the president.
And, you know, China really, they weren't happy about that.
They sent a patrol down the Taiwan Strait in response.
Yeah, and I saw the article in the Military Times where they said this was clearly a response by the Chinese, I think they flew some planes as well, to the American provocation.
There was no point in even trying to deny it.
I guess it was that blatant.
Yeah, yeah, I did notice that, is that the kind of Western media outlets did say it was a response to the trip.
Yeah, what are they going to do, deny it when, you know, Monday comes after Sunday, guys, what can you say?
Yeah, yeah.
Well, they always leave the context out of, you know, there's been all this media hype about Chinese planes flying into Taiwan's air defense identification zone.
And that is just totally mischaracterized.
The ADIZ, they're called, it's a concept that the U.S. created in the region.
It made these zones for Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, I believe the Philippines, like, you know, back in the 1950s.
And this idea isn't covered by any international law or treaties.
And Taiwan claims one that goes over mainland China, but they don't report those.
They report them if the Chinese planes are in this zone across the median line, usually, which is what separates the Taiwan Strait.
But if you look at, in October, they were like, oh, China's largest incursion ever into Taiwan's air defense identification zone.
And if you look at the map where they're flying, it's the southwest corner, and it's nowhere near Taiwan.
It's closer to mainland China, usually.
And, you know, some Western media outlets completely just falsely portrayed it as an incursion of Taiwan's airspace, which is just false.
It's just a lie.
Or other outlets are intentionally vague, and they say Chinese flights near Taiwan, or they call them incursions, which kind of makes it sound like they're a lot closer.
Right.
Yeah, I did an interview with a guy in Chicago who's a good guy, but just what can he do?
He listens to his own top of the hour news on his own radio station all day.
And so he says, oh, they're violating Taiwan airspace and threatening to attack.
Man, this stuff is going on 700 miles away.
What are you talking about?
Yeah.
And missing from the context, because you could say that there is an uptick in Chinese military flights in the region.
But there's been a huge uptick increase in U.S. military activity in the region, just under Biden.
So I was tracking it in 2020, because the Trump administration, they started sending more warships and planes into the South China Sea and other, you know, the Yellow Sea and the East China Sea.
And there was a big increase in 2020.
Well, since then, under Biden, there's been another significant increase.
The numbers, based on numbers that Chinese researchers and think tanks are putting out, this year, there's been over 2,000, like, reconnaissance flights in the South China Sea, Yellow Sea and East China Sea, just waters kind of near China.
Over 2,000 at this point in 2021.
At the same time last year, it was about 1,000.
So that kind of, you know, there is like a real major shift happening here.
And that is important context when you're talking about Chinese flights in the region.
And it seems like this is just the direction everything is going in.
And it's really dangerous, especially when you had the submarine crash in the South China Sea into like an underwater mountain, they said.
You know, that highlights the danger.
What if, I mean, it would be pretty hard for two submarines to collide.
But in 2001, a U.S. spy plane crashed into a Chinese plane near Hainan Island.
And that was squashed pretty quick.
But if something like that happened right now, that could really turn into something the way things are.
Or if that sub had sank, there might have been an incentive to say, boy, no, we're not that stupid.
It was somebody else's fault.
What did that to us?
You know, instead of admitting it.
Yeah.
So, yeah, I mean, there was also the thing where I'm pretty sure it was the Russians, but near there were the Americans, you know, were supposed to yield the right away, I guess, to the Russian ship turning right or whatever it was and rammed them or got themselves rammed or very close because of, you know, it's funny because the Americans were like, oh, the Russians.
And then all the comments immediately were like, no, man, they had the right of way, you know, like everybody.
So, yeah, I admit that I read boating for dummies a few years ago.
I'd have to go back and look exactly.
But that was the reaction at the time was, no, this is essentially incompetent seamanship on the American side.
So, yeah, you could see something like that becoming a real problem really quick.
Yeah.
And, you know, China's not just going to sit down and, you know, watch this happen as always.
I mean, there's aircraft carriers in the South China Sea like all the time.
Now, that used to be kind of a rare thing.
And another major part of it is that the U.S. is getting its allies to like join in like Germany, France.
France is a little upset with the U.S. now because of that submarine deal with Australia.
But they've sent ships to the region, the British, they just deployed their new aircraft carrier to the region, a big naval flotilla.
And, you know, if you know anything about China and its history, like the British Navy being, you know, near its coast with the Americans, you know, this has some historical context to it.
You know, the opium wars in the 1800s and the time between the second opium war and when Mao won the Chinese Civil War, they called a century of humiliation.
So this is all, you know, if you kind of poke China like this, they're not just going to take it.
You know, it's just making the region very dangerous and volatile.
Yeah.
Now, you say here, though, that Biden is going to have a virtual summit with Xi.
They say what they're going to talk about or if there's any real motive to try to cool things off here.
Yeah, well, that is one thing that could be good.
I think they're set to talk this Monday.
And I'm not sure exactly what they're supposed to talk about.
The way that the White House put it is that they said, oh, we need to talk to China so we can responsibly manage our competition with them.
So keeping it framed as competition.
And Xi recently, you know, said that China's ready to work with the U.S. to repair relations.
And that's kind of the message.
I mean, you see a lot in our media.
Everybody bases the Chinese government's talking points based on like the Global Times and the state media, like hawkish state media outlets.
But if you ever, the Chinese government, the foreign ministry, the Chinese ambassador in the U.S., they're very conciliatory and they are like imploring with the U.S. that we don't, you know, it doesn't have to be this way.
We can cooperate and get along.
Cooperate and get along.
So who knows what their real intentions are.
But kind of if you just look at the different messages from Washington and Beijing, you know, the U.S. is framing it as a competition, even though, of course, the two countries are going to compete in many ways.
But it's just kind of confrontational.
It's a confrontational approach from the U.S.
So what I just don't have much faith that much is going to get done in these talks.
All right, everybody, that is Dave DeCamp, news editor at Antiwar.com.
Thanks so much, Dave.
Appreciate it.
Thanks, Scott.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A., APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.
