All right, y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, joining me online is Jason Ditz, he's our news editor at antiwar.com, news.antiwar.com.
Welcome back, Jason, how's things?
I'm doing good, Scott, how are you?
I'm doing good, man.
So tell me about what's going on in Libya.
I know it's been, what, day five of the war now, huh?
Yeah, yeah, well, day seven since it was declared by the United Nations, and day five since the bombs started falling.
And the bombs are still falling.
Now, right away, they changed from no-fly zone to we're stopping the Qaddafi assault on Benghazi, and they started bombing tanks and even infantry, turning it into no-walk, no-drive zone, too.
Right, right.
They pretty quickly escalated it, although officials don't seem to be able to agree whether or not the goal is regime change, and sometimes they don't even seem to be able to agree with themselves within their own speeches.
Because President Obama on Monday in Chile gave a speech where he first insisted that the UN resolution was going to be abided by, and it was just a no-fly zone, and that was it.
And then later in the speech, he insisted that the policy is regime change, and that the U.S. would use military and other means to achieve that.
Yeah, you know, it's funny, the way that he set it up, it was almost like, you know, like he's thinking about it, like the first Gulf War.
Yeah, we're going to bomb him now, and then we're going to have this no-fly zone until the government falls somehow, or some kind of thing.
Like, you know, the regime change is scheduled for at some point, but they're getting started on the, you know, protecting the dissidents now, which, you know, I don't know what he's thinking there, but...
Well, and another fascinating comment came from Britain's armed forces minister.
He was talking to the BBC.
He actually made a lot of very interesting comments about the war there.
What did he say?
Well, the big thing was, I mean, he was downplaying the prospect of victory, talking about the stalemate.
He said a stalemate that led to the split up of the country, the two separate countries might be perceived as complying with the U.N. resolution in and of itself, but he also said there's no exit strategy.
There hasn't even been a consideration of what the goals are or how this is going to end.
It's just everybody jumped on the bandwagon for war Thursday, and if a war started, and now everyone's sort of wondering after the fact, okay, now we're in a war, what are we going to do?
God, it really is amazing.
And the thing is, I mean, you can just follow the logic, right?
Once they say all necessary measures to protect civilians, that means Qaddafi can't win, or else in their world, that means that the civilians will no longer be protected.
It means regime change.
It means ultimately the rebels must be victorious, whether it means sending in the Marines or just waiting them out or whatever, splitting the country in half, something.
They can't let Qaddafi take control of, certainly, Benghazi, and yet there are rebel-held towns in the western part of Libya still, right?
It's not just as easy as dividing the place in half or something.
Right, that's the thing.
There's no easy partition here where, and obviously the West is going to want to favor certain factions in the rebel force in the event of a partition, which is going to only cause more trouble.
I mean, a partition, it makes some sense in theory, but if it's carried out as part of a massive bombing campaign by the West, there are bound to be a lot of additional problems added to it that nobody expected.
Yeah, well, it's amazing.
So, at this point, I guess, you know, the attack on Benghazi was stopped, or Qaddafi's forces were on the verge of winning this thing when they intervened, it looks like, but how much has the balance of power on the ground shifted with the addition of American planes and missiles?
It's not real clear.
I mean, American planes and missiles and French bombers and British ships, they certainly blew up a lot of stuff, but it's not real clear that they've changed the reality on the ground, except for that there's a lot more giant holes in the ground than there used to be.
There's not really fighting around Benghazi anymore, but they're still fighting around Misrata and other cities, and the rebels have sort of used the breathing room they got in Benghazi to launch more attacks on Qaddafi-held towns, and it really hasn't stopped the fighting, which seems to be what the UN's resolution was calling for, because you can't really protect civilians if there's still a civil war going on.
But if anything, they just sort of shifted the civil war so that the rebels are in a slightly better position.
Yeah, wow, what a mess.
Geez, I would have thought that, well, for weeks it seemed that Obama didn't want to do this, right?
I mean, was it the oil companies' call, or, you know, is it true that Samantha Power just told him that this was a humanitarian mission that he had to go do?
I don't get it.
I don't understand.
I mean, I know that really crazy should be the definition of, you know, what makes a policy seem likely or something, but this to me is just way too far outside of the realm of what seems doable, even in their eyes.
I mean, Robert Gates said right off the bat, hey, a no-fly zone immediately is going to be a much larger confrontation.
We don't want that.
You know, that was weeks ago.
I don't get it.
It's so obvious what a disaster this is going to be.
Right, and even now, Pentagon officials are talking about this.
Some of them are saying, well, things are going to start quieting down soon.
Some of them are saying that it's going to escalate.
There doesn't seem to be any forethought on what they think is going to happen or what their hopes are for what is going to happen.
They just figured that dropping a bunch of bombs and firing a bunch of tomahawk missiles was going to somehow fix things.
And the timing is also fascinating for President Obama to get that vote at the U.N. Security Council on Thursday evening, because Congress had just gone into recess a couple of hours before the vote, or before the debate started, about four hours before the vote.
So Congress had no opportunity to debate this or vote on it at all.
It just, you know, they went out to recess after passing a temporary budget, and they come back and there's a war on.
Yeah, well, I mean, they probably would have voted to nuke Libya off the face of the earth or something if they'd been given the chance.
That's the unfortunate thing, right?
It's usually the generals or the reasonable ones compared to the congressman.
Well, and that's another interesting thing.
He probably would have won the vote if he would have had one, but doing it without the vote seems to have made a lot of people angry in Congress, at least in the House.
Most of the senators that have talked about it are still saying, well, we need to escalate more and more.
But in the House, there's a lot of people saying, and it's not just Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich, there are a lot of people saying, the president can't just start a war like this.
He can't just, you know, we go to recess and we're all on planes back to our home districts, and then all of a sudden there's a war.
Well, you know, Obama said, don't worry, this will be a matter of days, not weeks.
I think he meant months or years, not weeks.
Right.
We've never heard that before about a U.S. war.
Amazing.
Yeah, I remember Bill Clinton said, the troops will be home from Bosnia by Christmas.
That was 1995.
All right.
Hold it right there, everybody.
It's Jason Ditz, news.antiwar.com.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott.
On the line is Jason Ditz.
He's our news editor at Antiwar.com.
That's news.antiwar.com.
And now we're talking about Libya here.
It's funny, I saw just here on the Facebook, somebody had a quote out of Pat Buchanan's article about Hillary Clinton wearing the pants and the family up there in the White House and how Obama had taken Gates' position.
He didn't want to do this, but Hillary Clinton insisted on regime change and whatever and set him up.
But I guess that's what he gets for making Hillary Clinton the Secretary of State.
I wonder if the Libyan war will be over, Jason, by the time that Obama leaves office after the end of his second term.
By the end of his second term?
That's possible.
I think Hillary Clinton said that she doesn't intend to stick around for the second term, so it won't be her mess anymore.
But I think it's almost certainly going to stick around past then, past the end of the first term.
It really is amazing that, I guess, you know, from out here, it's easy to see that they're going beyond the limits of what the American empire is really up for.
They just can't see it there in Washington, D.C.
They really think that, you know, money and power just grows on trees.
Well, right.
The military budget, we're still on the fiscal year 2009 budget, I believe, which is the largest budget in the history of the world.
They never did pass the, or excuse me, the 2010 budget.
They never passed the fiscal year 2011 budget.
So we're still on the last year's budget.
Why are they doing, like, emergency appropriations to keep the government from shutting down, they call it?
Right.
The Pentagon budget just defaults to the same amount that it was the previous year, which is 500 plus billion dollars, plus however much emergency funding went on top of that for wars, which is an incredible amount, of course.
But the interesting thing is the Pentagon was insisting all along that they're being underfunded here, that all the wars they're being asked to fight, they just don't have the resources to do it.
And that, of course, was being used to try to coax Congress into approving the 700 plus billion upcoming budget.
But we're seeing them now launching yet another war, and presumably that war wasn't included in that last appropriations request.
So one can only imagine how much money the Pentagon is going to think it needs now to fight three major wars.
Right.
And well, plus, you still have the proxy wars in Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan.
Those all cost a lot of money, too.
I don't know whose budget, which emergency appropriation that money comes from, but...
Right.
And the bombings in Pakistan.
And here's the thing, too.
Let me ask you this, because this is just my intuition.
I assume that I'll start hearing things like this.
But I wonder whether you're hearing anything about blowback already and, you know, terrorists type saying, yeah, see, we're right, that kind of thing.
I haven't heard anything like that.
It does kind of seem inevitable that we will hear that.
I guess I read one article where some civilians had been killed on, I think, the first night or the second night.
And, you know, the local townspeople were gathered around complaining about it to the reporters and the reporter wrote that there were cries for jihad from the crowd, that kind of thing.
I don't know.
That's nothing specific.
But you could see.
Oh, in fact, let me ask you specifically.
Was it ever confirmed about what was said to happen to the civilians who came to the rescue of the two downed F-15 pilots?
You know, it really hasn't.
There have been so many different stories.
If the military is still denying that anything happened, or that there were even civilians there, but it seems like every report confirmed that the Marines that arrived on the scene opened fire, that they hit at least six people.
Exactly what their status is.
Some have said that five of them were killed and the little boy is going to lose his leg.
That was the only one that survived.
Some of them say they were all badly wounded, but that none of them were injured.
But the information coming out of Libya is not very reliable, so we don't really know.
It seems like it's a safe bet that the shooting did happen, despite depending on saying they haven't heard anything like that.
But exactly what happened to the people that were shot, I don't think we really can say for sure.
Yeah, well, maybe we will be able to find out at some point some more details about that.
It sounded plausible enough the way I read it, that the rescuers were there.
When the rescuers came over the hill, there were a bunch of Libyans around.
They just assumed they were all bad guys and blasted them.
But I guess we don't really know.
Well, that's another thing.
We've heard that the Marines opened fire with...
They were on foot at the time when they opened fire.
Some of the other reports say that they opened fire while they were in that B-22 Osprey that they sent on the rescue mission.
There's so many contradictory stories.
Nobody seems to have a conclusive, this is exactly what happened, report yet.
And I expect that's probably going to take a while to figure out.
Yeah.
All right, well, let's switch gears here and talk a little bit about Bahrain.
What's been going on there the last few days?
Well, of course, Saudi Arabia and their associated nations invaded several days ago.
What associated nations?
Well, the United Arab Emirates has definitely been confirmed to be involved.
Qatar was suggested as probably having sent something.
Kuwait sent some ships, but I'm not sure if they sent any ground troops or not.
The reports of which nations sent ground troops sort of have varied.
The GCC was the organization that the operation is done under, but it seems like the vast, vast majority of the troops are, of course, from Saudi Arabia, which makes sense because Saudi Arabia is the only really large nation in the GCC.
Yeah, well, it sure is amazing to see them launching a war in the name of protecting the protesters in Libya while at the same time, at the very least, turning a blind eye to Saudi Arabia and the kingdom in Saudi Arabia and in Bahrain, using military force to crack down on the protesters there.
Just because we have the Fifth Fleet station there, it's an American base.
It's as obvious as that.
Even, I'm not sure if you saw the clip of Jon Stewart covering this thing, but they made it real clear the difference between Libya and these other countries is Libya is not that close of an ally.
So we can make an example out of them about what good guys we are when, in fact, we're responsible for propping up all the rest of the dictators in the region.
Well, and Admiral Mullen said as much when he was commenting over the weekend.
He was asked what's the difference between Libya and Bahrain, and his answer was specifically, well, Libya hasn't really been a close ally over the past 30 years, and Bahrain's been a vital ally for us in the past 30 years.
So we have to treat the two situations differently.
Right.
That's funny.
That was on, what, Meet the Press?
Or no, he wasn't on Meet the Press.
I think it was on ABC.
I'm not sure what the show.
I'll have to find that clip.
That's funny.
I like it when these guys, I got this new theory that with the lack of shame in D.C., comes the lack of self-awareness about what they're supposed to be ashamed about.
You know, usually a skilled sociopath can feign shame and sort of realize the line that he shouldn't cross, what he says out loud, that kind of thing.
But a lot of times these people are just brutal with the honest truth.
Oh, yeah, the king of Bahrain, we'll back him.
We don't care how many people he kills.
We've got to station our ships there.
Nuts to those folks.
You know, they don't even care.
They just admit it now.
Well, and a lot of other officials tried to, you know, make a distinction there of, well, Bahrain's got a right, a sovereign right to invite foreign troops to help them stabilize the situation.
And some of the officials, I believe it was Senator Kerry, was on saying, well, all the protests in Bahrain are Iran's fault anyway.
Oh, right.
Yeah, good old John Kerry.
He was the opposite of George Bush back in 2004.
Remember that one?
They actually got away with telling people that.
I thought that was great.
Well, yeah, so, but now what about Yemen?
Is Iran supposed to be behind all the dissent in Yemen then?
Well, they're certainly behind some of the dissent to hear people talk.
I guess there is a Shia group that's a secessionist movement in the far north, but...
Those aren't the protesters.
Right.
Some of them have joined the protesters over the past few days, but the protesters have been mostly just students to start with.
All right, we got to leave it there.
Thanks, Jason.
News.antiwar.com, everybody.
Sure, thanks for having me.
