For Pacifica Radio, January 30th, 2022.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all.
Welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm editorial director of antiwar.com and author of Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,600 of them now, going back to 2003 at scotthorton.org and at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, introducing today's guest, the great Dave DeCamp, news editor at antiwar.com.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, sir?
Good, Scott.
Thanks for having me back on.
Very happy to have you here.
And there's such important news.
I think if we can, we'll try to do half Yemen, half Ukraine today.
But let's start with the crisis in Ukraine.
What exactly, in your estimation, is the threat of war?
And what's behind the hype in the news right now?
Well, I mean, that's a good question.
You know, I've been saying kind of the whole time that I never thought Russia was going to invade Ukraine.
You know, they don't really have an interest in doing that.
And there's been all the hype around what they call the Russian troop buildup on the Ukrainian border, which is really just Russia reinforced their bases in western Russia and on the Crimean peninsula.
And, you know, the narrative has really been falling apart.
You know, it's been, what is it, almost February.
The U.S. has been telling us that Russia is going to invade Ukraine since like the beginning of November, like the first half of November.
So we're all still waiting for this invasion.
But now the narrative is really crumbling because you're having Ukrainian officials push back and accusing the U.S. of overhyping this and creating a panic.
So today's Friday, the 28th.
Biden talked to Zelensky yesterday, the Ukrainian president.
And there was a report after the call on CNN, they cited an anonymous Ukrainian official who said the call didn't go well.
And they were like yelling at each other.
And they said Biden told Zelensky that Kiev was going to be sacked by Russia.
But the White House disputed the report.
And, you know, it's CNN and an anonymous official.
So we should take it with a grain of salt.
But then today on Friday, Zelensky basically kind of hit back at Biden.
And he said all these Western leaders are, you know, creating a panic.
And the quote from him, it said, do we have tanks on the streets?
No.
When you read media, you get the image that we have troops in the city, people fleeing.
That's not the case.
I'm the president of Ukraine and I'm based here.
And I think I know details better here than these leaders, Biden and Boris Johnson.
So, you know, I think that's pretty big because Ukraine, you know, they like all these weapons that they're getting, I guess, from the U.S.
But I think, you know, this panic has done some damage to their economy.
Their currency since November has really crashed.
And it's at the lowest point now in relation to the to the U.S. dollar than since the beginning of 2015, which was right after all the destabilization after the U.S.
Baku and Crimea and all that and the war in the Donbass.
So, yeah, I mean, it's not good for business when you have, you know, the biggest the empire in the world constantly saying you're about to be invaded.
So I think they're kind of they want the U.S. to dial back the rhetoric.
And Russia, you know, they're still saying that they're not going to invade.
They've been saying that the whole time.
I think the only thing we kind of have to worry about is if there's a flare up in the Donbass region in eastern Ukraine there where they've been at the war's been at a stalemate because pretty much any violence, no matter who starts it, whether it's Ukraine or the separatists there, the U.S. is going to blame it on Russia.
They've already set laid the groundwork for this.
They accused Russia of plotting a false flag in the region to justify an invasion with, you know, no no evidence to back up the claim.
It started with a random U.S. official to Natasha Bertrand at CNN.
So there's no reason to believe it.
But the White House said it.
I mean, their propaganda is getting really bad and really lazy, but I don't think we have to worry about a major war breaking out.
So now back to you saying that the Russians say they're not going to invade.
Dave, are they saying that, look, we're not going to invade as long as you give in to all of our demands, or they're just denying that they have any intention of attacking whatsoever?
Well, that was a Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister.
He said that today, he said if it's up to Russia, there's not going to be any war in Ukraine.
But he said Russia will still look out for its interests if the U.S. doesn't take its concerns seriously, its security concerns.
And I think it's kind of been pretty clear this whole time that if the negotiations between the U.S. and Russia on Putin's security concerns, which is mainly NATO expansion, if they don't work out, Russia will respond.
But the response isn't going to be an invasion of Ukraine.
It might be a deployment of some missiles to Belarus, or they've been hinting at Cuba and Venezuela, and they've been talking.
Who knows if they would even want some Russian weapons there to get mixed up in this.
But these are the things that they're hinting at, of just more deployments in the Black Sea, they would reinforce their bases probably in Crimea more.
I don't think that maybe they're trying to use the U.S. hype to their advantage by not saying exactly what their response would be.
But I don't see it being an invasion of Ukraine.
But the U.S. they did respond to Putin's concerns this week to the proposals that Putin gave to the U.S. and they pretty much, the document isn't made, it was a written response that the U.S. delivered.
And the document hasn't been made public, but the U.S. and NATO have pretty much been clear that they won't change their open door policy.
And Russia did say that they're not taking that concern seriously.
But then Biden said a month ago, at least informally, that look, we're not going to bring Ukraine into NATO anytime in the next 10 years anyway.
I think he told Putin that on the phone, right?
I don't know if he told Putin that on the phone, but he just said it at that crazy press conference that he did.
I don't know if you saw that.
I think it was like almost two hours long.
No, I read a little bit about it, but I did not see it.
Yeah, it was pretty wild.
But it was actually David Sanger asked him a question.
He was trying to get into like, because he just kept rambling on and Sanger tried to get him to actually give an answer.
He said, so what you're saying is you might offer Russia a guarantee that Ukraine won't join NATO for a few decades.
And Biden didn't really answer yes or no, but he kind of hinted that, yeah, that's kind of what the offer was.
He said, Biden's words were Ukraine won't join NATO in the near term because all members need to agree.
And Ukraine has all these issues and corruption, which is always funny for Biden to say because of, you know, most people at this point know how Hunter Biden landed a job in Ukraine on board of a natural gas company making 50k a month with no experience after the U.S. backed the coup in the country.
So he can't really talk about corruption.
And which is funny there.
I mean, the reasoning there, by the way, for people not familiar was that company Burisma was in close with the government that America had overthrown, that Biden as vice president had taken the lead in that, as they say, he held the Ukraine brief in the Obama administration.
And as Victoria Nuland said in the leaked F the EU phone call, that the vice president is helping glue this thing together.
He's going to do a conference call with all the coup participants and give them an attaboy and, you know, move forward and all that.
So when the government was overthrown, this gas company said, oh, no, the new regime might persecute us for being in good with the last guy.
So, you know, how we'll protect ourselves.
What are we going to do?
You know, hire the son of Yatsenuk, the new prime minister?
Nope.
Hire the son of the vice president of the United States who ran the coup.
And they did that just to protect themselves, because that's how political the gas business is in Ukraine and I guess everywhere, too.
Mm hmm.
Anyway, just fun little side anecdote there about how wrapped up our current president is in Ukrainian politics.
You know, not that these conflicts of interest matter at all.
Well, and it's it's pretty amazing because the U.S. now.
So if you're in Ukraine, say you're a Ukrainian politician or involved in Ukrainian politics and you want to get to the bottom of Biden and Burisma and all that, the U.S. government will accuse you of, you know, working for the Russians and trying to interfere in our elections.
If you look at there, there was like an intelligence.
I don't know if it was a report or just some kind of document they put out after the 2020 elections saying, you know, most of the Russian interference was based on the fact that news outlets in Ukraine are covering Biden and his son and Burisma.
Like, it's really just absurd.
If you if you look into these a lot of these claims, it's it's really unbelievable what they get away with.
In fact, Dave, I have here the clip.
So on that piece, Jeff, when I wrote the note, Sullivan's come back to me, VFR saying you need Biden.
And I said probably tomorrow for an attaboy and get the deets to stick.
Biden's willing.
OK, great.
Thanks.
OK, so Biden's willing.
All right.
Great.
Thanks.
We're going to do a coup d'etat in a week and a half.
OK, good deal.
See you then.
That was eight years ago.
And speaking of eight years ago.
So that started a war.
You mentioned that the Russians have taken the Crimean Peninsula since then, after the Americans and their friends threatened to kick them out of their naval base there.
And also there's was a terrible war in the east of the country, which there's still some fighting there.
But the worst of it was in 2014 and 15, of course, in the aftermath of the coup.
And then in early 2015, the Donbass region voted to join the Russian Federation and Putin told them no.
It seems like if he wanted to take eastern Ukraine, he could have done it then.
He had special operations forces on the ground, you know, deniable clandestine forces helping the, you know, rebellious factions there.
But he never did send his army and armor across the border when he absolutely could have.
And if he had motive to do it, that would have been at the height of his motive to do it, you would think.
And he refrained from doing so.
So do you think then that the the buildup on the other side of the border really is part of an extortion to make America promise not to bring Ukraine into NATO or really is just the same thing they do every season and it really is no big deal or reaction to American provocations in the Black Sea or somewhere in between these things or.
Well, I think it's definitely a combination of a few things, and I should probably take the time to really try to figure out exactly where they get to.
I think the number they always repeat now is 120,000 Russian troops near the border because, you know, there are always a certain number of troops at these bases and they do drills and they do rotational deployments.
And how near the border are we talking about?
They make it sound like they're right on the line, but I read that they're 200 kilometers in, which is what, 150 miles, something like that, 170.
All of the bases are about, are at least over 100 miles away from the border, and one of them is closer to Belarus than Ukraine.
You know, I mean, this is such like the propaganda here because you think about just the typical American that doesn't pay much attention to this stuff.
You turn on the news every day and you see Russian troop buildup at the border of Ukraine.
You picture Russian troops lined up, you know, ready to march in.
That's what they've been trying to spin it as.
So they say this 120,000 number.
Now, again, is it 120,000 more troops than are usually in the area?
I really don't know.
So what I think on the Russian side, I think, you know, some of it is a response to the increased U.S. and NATO activity.
And maybe when they saw all the attention that it got from the U.S., from the Western media, maybe they thought, okay, we could use this to get some leverage and finally deal with this NATO issue, because this has been a long time coming, this Russia really forcing this issue.
So yeah, I think it's a combination of all these factors.
And again, with the number, I mean, one statement recently, I think it was Ukraine's foreign ministry kind of disputing all of the Western hype.
You know, they said that this troop buildup began in April.
And if you remember, you know, last spring, there was kind of a similar thing.
It didn't last as long.
It wasn't as intense, but there was a Russian troop buildup near Ukraine.
And so Ukraine says that, you know, this buildup that the U.S. has been hyping up now since November as an invasion force started in April.
So that kind of tells me that this 120,000 number that they're saying, that could include, you know, troops from that were sent there back in April.
And things really might not have changed as much as they're portraying.
Give me just a minute here.
Listen, I don't know about you guys, but part of running the Libertarian Institute is sending out tons of books and other things to our donors.
And who wants to stand in line all day at the post office?
But stamps.com?
Sorry, but their website is a total disaster.
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Easyship.com is like stamps.com, but their website isn't terrible.
Go to scotthorton.org slash easy ship.
Hey, y'all, Scott here.
You know, the Libertarian Institute has published a few great books.
Mine, Fool's Errand, Enough Already, and The Great Ron Paul.
Two by our executive editor, Sheldon Richman, Coming to Palestine and What Social Animals Owe to Each Other.
Of course, No Quarter, The Ravings of William Norman Grigg, our late great co-founder and managing editor at the Institute.
Coming very soon in the new year will be the excellent Voluntarist Handbook, edited by Keith Knight, a new collection of my interviews about nuclear weapons, one more collection of essays by Will Grigg, and two new books about Syria by the great William Van Wagenen and Brad Hoff and his co-author, Zachary Wingard.
That's libertarianinstitute.org.
Slash books.
Now, one thing that's been pretty interesting in all of this, right, is that as even Biden has indicated, they have no interest in even bringing Ukraine into NATO.
And, you know, not in any near term anyway.
They haven't.
It seems like they're being emotional and saying, well, the Russians are not going to close the door on NATO membership, but they could just close it.
That would be fine, right?
Yeah, they could.
And it does seem like they're just being stubborn.
Obviously, you know, they're not going to want to make it seem like they're just giving in to Putin's demands or whatever.
But there's no plans to bring Ukraine into NATO anytime soon, within at least one decade or a few decades.
That's been said for a while now.
I mean, even if the coup had worked in 2014, right, and they had gotten away with stealing Ukraine away from Russian influence and all that, got them to sign the deal with the EU, it still would be years and years away, even if there hadn't been the confrontation over the Donbass and all these things, which, of course, make it even more difficult.
So but now Ray McGovern is saying that, look, they really just want assurances about missiles.
They know they're not going to get in writing that we're not going to bring Ukraine into NATO for, I guess, the same reasons I just said, because that's an emotional issue, makes the Americans look bad or embarrassed or something.
They don't want to climb down on that.
But to pledge to not put anti-missile missiles into Ukraine, they seem to be willing to do that.
And I think you've quoted in some of your pieces at Antiwar.com where that's what the Russian foreign ministry is saying that, yeah, you know, if there's a bright spot here, it's that the Americans are willing to talk about missiles.
I guess my point is that I think what Ray is saying is that that's the whole point here.
It ain't NATO.
It's the missiles.
And so that's how we know that everything's going to be fine here, because Biden's willing to give in on the thing that the Russians are really most interested in.
Yeah.
You know, throughout the whole thing, they've both sides have been saying that they're willing to negotiate this.
And I know one thing that Russia wants, they want to kind of bring back the INF treaty that the Trump administration pulled out of that ban the deployment of short and medium range land-based missiles.
And pretty much since that treaty's been torn up, Russia has been kind of trying to preserve it.
So, you know, that is some good that could come out of this, maybe a new arms control treaty or a revival of the INF or just an agreement.
Yeah.
And I mean, Biden said during that press conference, you know, that the issue of us deploying, you know, strategic weapons, as they call them, to Ukraine, like, yeah, we can work we can work with Russia on that.
Like, no problem is pretty much what he said.
Right.
Well, that would be the best case scenario if they just get back in the INF treaty, because, of course, you know, the Americans and I, you know, hear this from different experts that the Americans and the Russians both have no intention really in putting medium range missiles back in Europe.
They want medium range missiles for China.
Both of them do.
And so, you know, they could keep their INF treaty for Europe, get right back in it, and that could really help change the spirit of this whole, you know, kind of crisis as they've ginned it up to be at this point.
So I don't know if Biden's got it in him, but he does have the power to do it if he wants to.
That's for sure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
One thing that isn't a good sign is that during the Trump administration, the U.S. also pulled out of the Open Skies Treaty, which is a mutual surveillance treaty.
It allows each side to do unarmed surveillance flights over the other's territory.
Kind of at this point with satellites and stuff, it's kind of more symbolic.
But when Biden came in, Russia offered to restore the Open Skies Treaty, and Biden administration said no.
Wendy Sherman told Lavrov, no, not Lavrov, his deputy, I think is his name.
But so I think that's kind of a bad sign.
Yeah, it is.
Then again, it's just another thing that they can change their mind on in order to make a new deal if it comes down to it.
And there's just no reason to give that up.
I mean, no real one.
I guess they figured they have the satellite advantage.
But the whole point was for the two sides to reassure each other they're not mobilizing for war.
In other words, both sides agreeing to give up any advantage they might have of hiding behind their various iron curtains.
And instead, that confident, you know, the decision was made that confidence building was better.
But anyway, all right, I'm sorry, we got to switch to Yemen because time's running short.
And it's also the most important thing in the world.
Right?
American Russia has the potential to end the importance of all other things.
But as it stands right now, we have peace on Ukraine's eastern border there, more or less.
But in Yemen, we have an ongoing war, one which seemingly no side involved in is willing to back down from at this point, and one that's now in its almost seventh year.
Now, I'm sorry, I'm a broken record on this, but I think it's so important.
And actually, on the 29th of this month, Saturday, was the anniversary, the seven year anniversary of the Wall Street Journal story, talking about how America had allied with the Houthis, the Shiite faction out of the north of Yemen, that our current Secretary of Defense, then Commander of Central Command, General Lloyd Austin had allied with these guys, and was giving them intelligence to use to kill al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the guys that have bombed the coal, and it tried to blow up the plane over Detroit and did the Charlie Hebdo attack, etc, etc.
And then, two months later, it's actually not the seventh anniversary of the war, see, it's the six year and 10 month anniversary of the war, because it was two months later that Barack Obama stabbed the Houthis in the back and committed the high treason of taking al Qaeda's side against them, in alliance with UAE and Saudi Arabia, of course, treason, which Donald Trump continued for four years straight, and that Biden promised to end one year ago, and then didn't.
And here we are.
So give us the update on what's going on in the war, Dave.
Yeah, I mean, there was just a pretty major flare up.
Well, first off, people should understand that, you know, there's, it's gotten a lot less attention since Biden came in, I guess, but 2021, you know, towards the end, Saudi airstrikes and the battle around Marib really spiked.
And I mean, there is just, the war was really raging.
You know, the Houthis said at least 15,000 of their fighters were killed in Marib, mostly by these Saudi airstrikes.
So it's not like this latest thing was.
I mean, is that even possible?
The Saudis don't have heavy bombers.
I mean, who have their men grouped together that closely to be taken out in airstrikes by fighter bombers?
So like kind of the end of the summer into the fall, Jason did, he's been staying on top of this stuff.
And I mean, just about every day he was writing, you know.
He's our other news editor at antiwar.com.
Yeah, yeah.
And just about every day he was writing 100 Houthis killed fighting around Marib, another 100 Houthis killed.
And these were mostly numbers coming from the Saudi coalition.
But then the Houthis eventually said, yeah, between during the fighting, they lost 15,000 fighters.
So, you know, massive.
And they recently launched an attack on the UAE that hit Abu Dhabi, killed three people.
I think there are migrant workers at the oil facilities that they hit.
And of course, the way these things are with the US media, you know, it's like these attacks come out of nowhere.
But the Saudi coalition, the Saudi UAE coalition, I mean, they responded with really heavy airstrikes.
And one thing they did was they bombed the Hodeidah and they hit a telecommunication building that apparently had, you know, the internet wires that gave most of the country internet.
It all kind of stemmed from this place.
So that Yemen was just didn't have internet for about four or five days.
And that airstrike, there was also some children playing soccer nearby and three children were killed in the strike.
And then they also bombed a prison in Sana'a.
And I think the death toll now is about 87, maybe even higher.
And it was, you know, the Saudis before have bombed prisons and they actually have bombed their own fighters who were detained by the Houthis.
But this prison, from what I understand, it was mostly migrants.
So just the civilian prison and the fighting is still going.
And one thing that's important is that the UAE backed this group, the Giants Brigade, as they're known.
They've been pretty crucial in the battle around Marib against the Houthis and are the reason why the Houthis have lost some territory recently.
So that's probably why they attacked the UAE.
And they have been threatening more attacks.
You know, they shot another missile at the UAE this week, and the U.S. actually intervened and intercepted it.
So, you know, the U.S. is still very much ultimately behind this war.
And there's really no end, you know, I don't see really an end in sight right now.
Yesterday, Brett McGurk, who's Biden's been advisor on the National Security Council, you know, he just put all the blame on the Houthis.
He said that's why there's no ceasefire.
But one thing precondition for the Houthis before they enter talks for a ceasefire is that the Saudis lift the blockade on Yemen that's been imposed since 2015.
And they just refuse to do it as long as they have, and they have the U.S. support to do it because the Biden administration has outright lied and said that there's no blockade on Yemen, even as the Saudis are blocking ships from docking in Hodeidah, which is still doing.
So, in order for this to end, the U.S. needs to pressure the Saudis to end it, and they could, but it doesn't seem like they're interested in it.
Yeah.
And, you know, as many casualties as the Houthis may have taken in the fight over Marib lately, and some of those other cities to the southeast of there, their hold on Sana'a is not in question and has not been the entire seven years of this war so far.
And so they're not going to quit.
They're not going to give up whatever negotiations they do take part in.
If the siege was lifted, they're not going away.
And the Saudis, they're losing the war, but they're losing it on somebody else's territory.
You know, they're barely at risk.
There have been some limited strikes inside Saudi.
But from, you know, an ego point of view for Crown Prince Bonesaw there, bin Salman, it would be a huge loss and an embarrassment and a shame for him to back down having not dislodged the Houthis.
So just in other words, everybody has incentive to keep fighting and not much incentive to quit as it stands right now.
Unless, of course, Joe Biden puts his foot down and tells the Saudis and the UAE that that's it.
We're out.
And that he insists that they're done too, which he could do with one phone call.
But that's the only thing it seems like to me that could possibly see the end through here.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, I totally agree.
And, you know, one thing that's kind of interesting is that the UAE after the Houthi attack is that they're not blaming Iran.
Because they're looking forward to the medium term future here where they're going to still have to deal with their neighbors.
Yeah.
Yeah.
If you look back, it was in 2019, the Houthis that carried out a big attack on us, Saudi oil infrastructure.
And, you know, it was Iran, Iran, Iran.
Everybody blaming Iran because at the time, I guess it fit the narrative for the Saudis, for the Trump administration.
So it's kind of just interesting because where they hit in Abu Dhabi, it's further than the targets in Saudi Arabia.
Because that was the whole talking point was, oh, Houthi drones can't reach this far into Saudi Arabia, even though they haven't before that attack.
So it's just interesting because the UAE, you know, they've been in talks with Iran recently.
And so is Saudi Arabia.
So, you know, it just is amazing because you read U.S. media and they just portray it as a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
It's all about Iran.
But there's really no, you know, they never really show us concrete evidence that Iran is arming the Houthis and they have their political support.
But the country's under this blockade and all that talk about Iran.
And we don't really know.
But what we do know is that Biden and the United States is completely enabling the Saudis to continue this war.
And without that support, without the maintenance of the Saudi warplanes, you know, their air force would be grounded like in a couple of days.
Right.
So.
And look, if it's really true, Dave, that the Iranians are behind the Houthis, well, all the more reason for us to engage with Iran so that they could we can persuade them to use their influence to get the Houthis to compromise and stop all the violence so that, you know, trade can return and people can eat instead of starving.
But not that's too much to ask, I guess.
We got to go.
We're all out of time.
But thank you very much for your time, everybody.
The great Dave DeCamp, News Editor at Antiwar.com.
That's news.antiwar.com.
Thank you, Dave.
Thanks, Scott.
And that's it for Antiwar Radio for this morning.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm here every Sunday morning from 830 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
See you next week.
