Alright, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our first guest on the show today is Jason Dentz.
He's our news editor at antiwar.com, news.antiwar.com.
Welcome back, Jason.
How are you, man?
Jason, are you there?
Yes, I am.
Alright.
Hey, so, lots of news coming in, big front page on antiwar.com today.
The U.N. resolution passed last night.
Have the Brits and the French and the Americans and the who-knows-who started bombing Libya yet?
It doesn't sound like they've started yet.
The Qaddafi government declared a ceasefire shortly afterwards, and that seems to have slowed the process.
Of course, that resolution is going to remain in place, as resolutions tend to for years and years, and sooner or later, it'll be used as an excuse to bomb them, but it might not be the way France was talking, that as soon as the vote was done, the bombs would start falling.
It doesn't seem like that's going to be the case.
Well, that's good.
Now, this resolution that the Security Council passed, I guess Russia, China, and then a lot of the other rotating members of the Security Council abstained, but nobody vetoed the thing.
But this thing had pretty broad language, right?
All necessary measures, something like that?
Yeah, all necessary measures to protect civilians, but it explicitly said no occupation forces.
Yeah, well, but that's just a turn of phrase anyway, right?
I mean, they haven't referred to the Americans in Iraq or Afghanistan as occupation forces this whole time.
We're there at their invitation, helping them to create a democracy and all that crap, you know?
Right.
And I think that's going to be probably the case here as well, but another interesting thing to come out of this is that the Qaddafi regime has actually said it's going to comply with this as well, and use all the force necessary to protect the civilians from the rebels.
Because they're a member of the United Nations, too, and they have to comply, too.
So they said they're going to comply by...
Yeah, they have to win the war and ensure the continuity of government to provide security.
I can hear Hillary Clinton making Qaddafi's case right now.
That's funny.
Well, so how goes the war there?
I mean, we've heard nothing but pretty bad news for the last little while, right?
The entire West is now in the hands of Qaddafi, and the rebels are reduced to what at this point?
Well, pretty much the entire West.
There's still some pockets of resistance in the West.
On the East, it's mostly just along the coast.
If you look at a map of Libya, you could kind of cut a line between cities just to the south of Benghazi and Benghazi, and that's pretty much where it ends.
Benghazi North and everything up to the Egypt border still seems to be in rebel hands.
So they do still hold quite a bit of territory.
But it seems like even though the ceasefire is ostensibly about the U.N. resolution, it might be a practical concern for Libya, too, because I think their offensive was starting to stall when they got close to Benghazi.
It took them a lot longer to take over those last couple of towns right before Benghazi, and the rebels are on their home turf now while the Qaddafi supply lines have been stretched all the way across the country from Tripoli.
I think they were getting close to a stalemate anyway.
So what's with these reports that the Saudis are going to be actually flying jets in this thing?
Is that right?
I haven't seen the Saudis.
It wouldn't surprise me, though.
I know the United Arab Emirates and Qatar both confirmed that they were going to be flying jets in this.
The U.N. Security Council resolution actually specifically insists that Arab nations should be involved, which was apparently a U.S. concern because they were worried that it would seem like they're just attacking another Arab country for the heck of it.
Yeah, they have to get that international imprimatur of so-called legitimacy.
Well, and I think that's what's interesting, really, about this whole process, at least so far.
It'll be more interesting when the West starts attacking.
But the fact that the United Nations Security Council declares a monopoly on the right to start an aggressive war, that, you know, any country that attacks another country is in violation of the U.N. Charter, unless the Security Council says it's okay first, including, you know, them.
But I guess if they want, they can authorize Egypt to invade or authorize Chad to invade Libya or whatever, right?
Oh, absolutely.
If the U.N. Security Council says it's okay, it's okay.
Well, and I guess, you know, Congress would go along with any of this madness probably anyway.
But did anybody in any of this news that you've been reading and covering about this, did anybody even contemplate the idea that perhaps Congress should debate this and pass some sort of resolution or another saying that they would approve of the American military being used to intervene here?
I never saw anything to that effect.
It seems like the only time Congress has a problem with the U.N. saying what to do is when the U.N. is telling them not to go to war.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, you know, it's funny, you know, I might as well be asking you, did anybody ride in a horse and buggy to the U.N. meeting or whatever?
Because that's how antiquated Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11 is by now, you know, and certainly beyond the point beside it.
All right.
Well, so let's let's change gears here and talk a little bit about Yemen and Bahrain.
Can you tell us what's been going on there the last few days in those countries?
Well, violence in both countries has gotten a lot, lot worse over the last few days.
Bahrain, especially, of course, because they have about 2000 additional foreign troops that came across the bridge over the course of the week.
That is, the Saudis have come to back up the family dictatorship in Bahrain.
Right.
And again, supposedly there are some United Arab Emirates troops that are really involved.
Yeah.
The Saudis insist that the intervention is on behalf of the whole GCC, which is a six nation group that's basically Saudi Arabia and a bunch of trivially small nations along the coast.
It seems like the troops are almost exclusively Saudis, as one would expect, but they insist that the other nations are involved, too, even though there hasn't been any indication of them from reports of attacks on protesters.
It's always been Saudi troops attacking protesters or the regular Bahraini troops attacking protesters.
Yeah.
I couldn't find any articles that differentiated between who was attacking who really.
I saw some pretty brutal footage of people being shot point blank for no reason.
Not even really protesters, just people standing around being killed by police there.
Well, and attack helicopters attacking the protest site.
There's footage of the helicopters attacking the crowd?
I haven't seen footage of that, but I've seen several reports of it.
And the people, the protest movement, they've been forced out of Pearl Square there, right?
Right.
Once again, they've been chased out of Pearl Square, I think, the third time since protests began that that's happened.
But I'm sure they'll return at some point.
Yeah.
All right, now, so let's talk about Yemen.
Thirty-three killed as Yemen forces attack protesters, it says here.
Well, that's, right, that's today's latest crackdowns, which are, of course, Friday's always the big day of protest in most of these countries, because Friday's the day of prayer.
And in these countries where public gatherings are mostly being prohibited, that's where a lot of people meet is during these prayers to organize these sorts of protests.
So in Yemen in particular, we've seen major protests.
Well, the protests have been every day, but they always are the biggest on Friday.
And this week's no exception.
The interesting thing with Yemen is how broad these protests have gotten.
I mean, of course, when we see footage of protests in Yemen, it's always Sana'a University or one of the other places around the capital city.
But really, the protests are spread across the entire nation.
We have major protests in some of those sparsely populated rural provinces.
And the governments there, the provincial governments, really are doing a terrible job of trying to react to it.
I mean, they're resorting to violence almost instantly the minute people take to the streets.
And that's creating some huge problems for the national government, because it's driving a lot of these very powerful tribes in these areas to the side of the protesters.
Well, and they already have major problems with secessionists in the south and some kind of rebellion in the north anyway.
I wonder how in the world what amounts to the government of that country can hold itself together in the face of all this.
Yeah, it seems like the only thing that's holding them together is that they've never really had tremendous amounts of control over most of the country to begin with.
So the fact that they don't have control over much of the country isn't being treated as all that surprising.
Right, yeah, it's just another day in Yemen, only now with protests.
All right, that makes sense.
But the reality is, Ghana has always sort of been President Saleh's one reliable city that he's controlled.
And he's having tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of protesters even there.
So if he loses that, he's kind of out of control.
Well, you know, AFPAC, as the Democrats call that is clearly the central front in the war on terrorism, or else why would they have expanded it so much?
And I see here that the government of Pakistan is extremely upset about a particular U.S. drone strike.
Was it that particular or have they been that rare lately?
Or what was so bad about this one?
Well, this one was particular, unfortunately, for a few reasons.
The big reason is it was the deadliest drone strike since 2009.
Forty one people were killed in this attack.
And unlike most of the cases where, you know, the Pakistani government says they were militant suspects and it kind of left there.
And then a couple of weeks later, we hear, well, they weren't really militants.
They were just random tribesmen.
But by then, everyone's sort of forgotten about it.
We heard pretty quick the identities of these people.
And they were the leaders of a tribe that's allied with the Pakistani government.
And some of the people there were women and children that were just there with their family members.
And some of the people that are providing security were members of an anti-Taliban militia that this tribe had set up to help the Pakistani government in the area.
Well, but the guy that was flying the drone from Nevada got a medal or something, though, right?
Oh, I'm sure.
Because the U.S.
Direct hit.
Right.
U.S. officials, even though they never officially on the record talk, some of the anonymous officials are still maintaining that they're positive that those weren't really who the Pakistani government's already confirmed that they are.
They were some sort of terrorist group that just happened to be meeting there.
Well, and, you know, that's the whole thing, too, is it's.
You know, I don't know, it seems pretty easy to see how somebody in Nevada flying a robot in the sky on the other side of the planet from where he's sitting with a bird's eye view up there doesn't have really any idea who he's killing other than they tell him to or maybe he spots some people with guns and then so they kill them.
But it's not like they got somebody on the ground there making sure that they're the bad guys, whoever that is.
Right.
And sometimes they do have people on the ground, but those people on the ground are usually members of some tribe or another.
And they're usually informing on people more on self-interest than on specific threat.
A lot of times we've had reports of attacks coming in because the person that informed on them was from a rival faction or they were someone that owed them money and they couldn't get them to pay up.
So instead they just turned them into the Americans as Taliban and then an airstrike come.
I mean, this idea that they have any idea who they're killing, for the most part, is just nonsense.
Every once in a while they get lucky.
But if North Waziristan and South Waziristan are as riddled with militants as it seems that they are, the kill count suggests that they're probably not doing any better than you would just done a random sampling of people in the area.
Yeah.
Well, and who counts as a militant anyway?
Somebody, you know, between the age of 14 and, you know, 58 who owns a rifle or what?
Yeah.
Right.
And, you know, a lot of these people, they say, well, they had association with a foreigner.
But who's a foreigner in North Waziristan?
Is it a Pashtun from Afghanistan that fled there when the war started?
I mean, a lot of these border agencies have a big influx of refugees from the north.
Right.
And in a lot of these cases, they're members of the same tribe.
So they don't think of them as a foreigner just because the border is drawn in some mountain range somewhere around there.
Right.
Well, and hey, even if they're from Chechnya and they're, you know, committed to the global jihad or whatever the hell, who gave them a 10 year long war to go to, you know?
Right.
I mean, and I don't know why a Chechen is scarier than, you know.
A regular Afghan.
But, you know, I mean, really, we've hit on something major here with this whole term militant.
It's just like the kinetic event or whatever.
It's all just newspeak.
It's all just government jargon, rewriting truth with semantics so that nothing means anything anymore.
They just keep having a war.
A militant.
Anybody who dares to shoot back or maybe even run away when, you know, we start shooting at them is a militant.
Well, the Pakistani government has taken that a step farther in a lot of their official comments about who they killed.
They don't even call them militants anymore.
Now they call them miscreants.
The miscreants.
Right, like vandals.
Right.
They could just be spray painting something on a brick wall somewhere and you could call them a miscreant.
Sweet.
I like that.
Why not?
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, this whole thing is the Afghanistan war.
Obviously, we have the military and the CIA and God knows who running around in Pakistan.
But it's the Afghan war spilling over that border.
And yesterday the House had a vote on whether to get out of there.
Dennis Kucinich and Walter Jones sponsored a resolution.
And so how'd that go?
Well, not well, unfortunately.
And I guess that's probably to be expected.
The most recent poll showed 64 percent of Americans believe that the war wasn't worth fighting to begin with.
And now if we take this as a poll of congressmen, we get 77 percent of congressmen saying that the war should continue.
So there seems to be a pretty big disconnect there between what the American public wants and what the Congress wants.
Yeah, well, always is.
And, you know, I wonder how long the disconnect can continue at, you know, with that much of a gap in there in this country, especially right when the world is in revolution in the name of democracy and whatever.
We're supposed to be the.
The model, you know, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton insisted that public opinion couldn't end the war anyway, but I think if it gets serious enough, it probably can.
Well, I sure hope you're right.
Good place to stay informed if you want to change people's minds, news.antiwar.com.
Thanks, Jason.
Thanks for having me.
