All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
Our next guest is Jason Ditz.
He's our news editor at Antiwar.com.
That's news.antiwar.com.
It's such an invaluable resource.
I just could not emphasize to you how important it is that you read the work of Jason Ditz on a daily, on an all daily basis.
I really mean that.
Welcome back to the show, Jason.
How are you?
I'm doing good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great, but I lied to you during the break.
I don't want to start with Bahrain.
I want to start with Libya.
Okay.
Is it true that Muammar Gaddafi has been trying to sue for peace with NATO?
Yes, yes, he has.
In fact, the African Union also tried to broker a ceasefire deal between Gaddafi's forces and the rebels in East Libya, and the Gaddafi forces accepted it almost immediately.
Well, yeah, but you know how sneaky those Arabs are.
It must have been, you know, he gets to keep everything and NATO completely loses an offer they couldn't possibly accept, right?
Well, the African Union deal seems to have been pretty reasonable.
It was, it would have basically signaled the end of the Gaddafi regime within a few months of its agreement signing.
It would have stopped all hostilities between the East and the West and set the stage for a free African Union supervised elections, which would have finally given the protesters that started the rebellion in East Libya the elections that they wanted.
Well, so the West just rejected this outright?
Right.
And the White House said they didn't believe Gaddafi was serious when he accepted the deal.
But the real issue with the deal was not so much that the White House rejected it, it was that the leadership of the rebel force rejected it.
And once they rejected it, basically there was no other side to cease hostilities with.
You know, you and I had the same conversation four weeks ago or something.
Right.
The, the rebels immediately said, no way there is, we will not negotiate with this guy whatsoever.
And why should they, when they have the world empire at their back?
That's true.
Although having all of NATO backing them and promising them lavish amounts of foreign aid doesn't seem to be changing the situation on the ground very much.
We talked about this four weeks ago and the situation on the ground today is basically the same as it was four weeks ago.
Those cities being contested are basically Misrata and Al Ajdabiya in the West.
The rest of the country is pretty much either under Gaddafi's control or under the rebels control and, and nothing's really changed on the ground.
It's, it's been a stalemate for months now.
Yeah.
Well, you really, you, you read the New Yorker magazine about how there's only a thousand fighting men on the rebel side.
And you know, that's in total, there's only a few hundred at the most available for any particular battle.
Uh, and it becomes no wonder why they haven't gotten anywhere.
Right.
And, uh, and it's not so much the, uh, rebel fighters themselves that are keeping Gaddafi's forces out of these cities that are still under the East's control as the massive amount of, of, uh, public opposition to the Gaddafi forces.
And indeed we've seen in both cases, when one side of the other tries to mount an offensive against the other side and take over a territory, resistance from the local population makes it virtually impossible and they lose in pretty short order.
So there really is no easy military victory here for either side.
And Gaddafi's forces have been saying for a couple of weeks now that they don't even consider, uh, in, in the, uh, East at least military forces and option for retaking those cities is just not going to happen.
Well, you know, I, uh, are you there?
I'm here.
Oh, you are there.
Okay.
There's a terrible click on the line there.
I thought maybe I'd lost you.
Uh, this is the happiest headline I've read from you in a long time.
At least that I can remember, Jason.
It's at news.antiwar.com.
House bars Obama from sending ground troops to Libya.
Are you kidding me?
It's, it's true.
They, they passed a couple of resolutions, uh, well, they, they were amendments to the massive defense spending bill.
Uh, unfortunately the amendment that would have ended the Afghan war lost by just nine votes, but, uh, the two resolutions related to the Libya war both passed the first one was, uh, reiterating that nothing inside this bill is to be considered authorization under the war powers act of 1973.
And that Congress still hasn't authorized this war, which president Obama under the law would have had to had authorized last Friday.
Well, now break that down for me a little bit that what happened exactly last Friday.
I know the Senate passed a thing, basically just saying, well, we like it or something, or at least that was proposed by John Kerry.
Right.
And what the Senate passed was actually short of an authorization.
Uh, it was a non-binding resolution expressing support for the notion of airstrikes just in general.
Well, now this was what Obama had asked, had asked for.
Well, he asked on May 20th, we hit the 60 day deadline, which under, under the war powers act, they've got a 60 day grace period between announcing to Congress that hostilities have begun with a country and getting official congressional authorization for a war.
President Obama didn't even seek that authorization until late in the evening of the 60th day.
So of course, no votes ever took place within the time period required.
The Senate passed a resolution that expressed, you know, vague support for the notion of airstrikes against Libya, but stopped well short of being an authorization for the war itself.
And the house's resolutions were in the first part that they didn't authorize the war and in the second part, banning the use of any, uh, appropriated funds to send ground troops into Libya.
Well, you know, this is something that we talked about over the years, especially with Glenn Greenwald and the other Scott Horton and legal experts along those lines about the Bush years, about how, well, as Greenwald put it in his last interview, they could have got Congress to repeal FISA altogether.
They could have got Congress to legalize torture and indefinite detention and anything else.
The whole time, but they didn't want to do that.
They wanted to set the precedent that the president can break the law.
He has powers that no one can find in the constitution.
Nobody knows which religion bestows them or whether it's the queen of England or what, but somehow the president has the inherent plenary authority to disregard anything in the constitution other than he's the commander in chief and can do whatever he wants.
And I can't come up with another speculative explanation.
I don't have a real one, obviously from them, uh, as to why Obama would not just ask the Congress for that authorization.
If he did, they would authorize it.
Of course.
So what other point is there to this other than he wants to set the precedent that Sarah Palin can nuke Iran if she wants to?
Well, and in this case in particular, it's not just about the president.
Well, and in this case in particular, it's bizarre because president Obama's aid when talking to Congress cited this law as a reason in the first 60 days, why he was able to go to war without an authorization that he had this 60 day grace period before he needed the authorization.
And now that the 60 days has passed, they're arguing that what they're doing isn't really war.
So it doesn't really count under the law, which of course, if you read the, uh, if you read the actual war powers act, it doesn't, uh, give you any sort of minimum level of us troop deployment.
It's any deployment of us troops from, it could be one soldier.
It has to be authorized by Congress.
Yeah.
Well, and it only authorizes defensive war for 60 days anyway, not an aggressive attack like this, but, uh, all right, hold it right there.
We got more like this.
I got to ask all about Yemen and Bahrain and maybe some Syria and Iraq.
Oh, big Iraq news.
We're going to have to go fast.
It's Jason Ditz, news.antiwar.com.
What in the heck are you people doing?
Listening to this radio show?
It's revisionist history day.
You should be out in the backyard, eating barbecue, drinking beer with your friends and your family reading revisionist history.
Oh, well, show's almost over.
We're wrapping up here.
By the way, it looks like the videos of the speeches at the nullify now conference are making it up on YouTube.
Uh, granite grok, G R O K is the channel youtube.com/granite grok.
And it looks like they've already got Michael Bolden, Stuart Rhodes, and Tom Woods up there.
So I expect, I don't know.
Oh, I didn't click see all.
Maybe I'm on there too.
Nope.
Not yet, but, uh, nevermind me.
Anthony Gregory's great speech on habeas corpus will be up there and you definitely want to see that.
All right.
So we have Jason Ditz on the line.
He's our news editor at antiwar.com and it's fun drive time at antiwar.com.
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Jason, talk to me about Iraq.
There was a huge protest the other day in Iraq.
Uh, well, it was a protest.
We've, we've had a few protests in Iraq lately.
There've been some Kurdish protests and some city protests.
This one was a little different though, because it wasn't directed so much at the, uh, she, I dominated government as it was a protest of Shiites led by Mokhtar al-Sadr, whose faction is one of the key, key factions in the government protesting against the notion of the U.S. staying in the country beyond the end of the year.
Well, you know, I've been reading quite well.
We've been talking quite a bit about this.
The empire has made no secret that they are determined to stay.
They want so badly to stay, but they have no UN resolution authorizing the occupation.
Um, uh, they only have the status of forces agreement that Bush signed with Maliki in 2008, and now that says that every last one of our army troops has got to be out of the country and that goes for Air Force, Navy, and Marines too.
Uh, at the end of this year, December 31st, 2011, and, and our guys, uh, are trying to get Nouri al-Maliki and his government to invite us quote unquote, uh, to stay, uh, the way they've been able to successfully coerce the South Koreans and the Japanese into inviting us to occupy their countries.
And, uh, this Sauter guy doesn't seem to be going for it, but then again, seems are, uh, iffy things.
And I read a couple of things that said that the Pentagon is betting that Sauter is bluffing and the only way Sauter can make the United States leave is basically by what he's doing right now saying, listen, you're going to have to start the war all over again and you don't want that.
They stood by when the Americans rolled in from Kuwait to take out Saddam Hussein.
We've been fighting for the Shiite factions, the Iraqi National Alliance, et cetera, this whole time.
They're saying you're going to have to start the war all over again against us.
And the Pentagon is betting, trying at least, they're hoping that he's just bluffing.
And I wonder from all the indications of what you're reading about the situation over there, whether you think Muqtada al-Sauter is really willing to turn the South of Iraq upside down in order to force the Americans out.
It looks like he might well be, but Prime Minister Maliki, of course, came up with ruling out the continuation of the occupation beyond the end of the year several times in public speeches.
And then recently he's backed off that entirely, saying that, well, it's going to be up to the Iraqi parliament to decide whether or not to extend the status of forces agreement.
You know, I wonder, I wonder exactly how to spin that one or which spin on that was most likely, I guess, whether that's him actually beginning to give in to the Americans and really work for them and trying to invite us to stay, or whether that's him just setting the stage for saying, hey, look, I tried to reason with them and they just won't go along, you know, as his excuse to us for not inviting us to stay.
Well, either one is possible, but the several times that he came out publicly and said absolutely not, the U.S. pretty much pretended they didn't hear.
It's like they put their fingers in their ear and said, la la la la, we can't hear you.
And then they would ask again a couple of days later, and they even went so far in one of them, one of their public speeches, I believe it was Secretary Gates, expressing concern that the Iraqi government hadn't responded at all one way or another after several times of Maliki saying absolutely not.
Right.
Yeah, well, boy, oh, boy, I mean, it's not hard to imagine that over at the Pentagon, they figure they stole Iraq fair and square.
They get to keep it.
But, you know, somebody should have told them who they were fighting for and how it wasn't working out so well.
You know, I got to refer again to that book, The Good Soldiers, by Finkel, right, the Washington Post reporter, where he covers the surge in East Baghdad against the Saudis in 2007 and eight.
And these guys had no idea they were fighting for Muqtada al-Saudi in the rest of the country, that that in the Sunni provinces, that our guys are basically the reserve forces for Saudis death squads going in there and, you know, ethnically cleansing or religiously cleansing, whatever, the vast majority of Baghdad and consolidating all that power for the Iraqi National Alliance and their Iranian allies.
All they thought they were doing was going out on patrol, fighting those terrible Saudis.
They had no idea the war that they were even in.
Well, and I think a lot of people still don't realize the type of war that that we're in, and a lot more people seem to figure that this war is over and has been over for a while now.
That's what Rachel Maddow says.
And apparently that's what makes things true.
I guess.
All right.
Well, anyway, so I'm not buying.
You know what?
Well, I got to talk to talk with Patrick Coburn again.
But Patrick Coburn is the best Western reporter on Iraq, period.
And Patrick Coburn's been telling me since the spring of 2008 that there is no way, maybe even before then, that there's no way the Americans are going to stay.
And he's the one who broke the story that they wanted 56 bases, and he's the one who reported for the next six months that Maliki said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, until the number of bases was down to nothing.
And that this is because of Sauter and his support for Maliki is absolutely key to Maliki remaining prime minister and that that's it.
The occupation will end the Americans lost by winning for their enemy.
And until I hear different from him, I'm going to go ahead and I have to believe that it you know, obviously there will be some State Department mercs left behind and there will be something.
But I just man, I've got to see 50,000 troops leave Iraq.
It must happen.
I think it's going to I think they're going to have to give up here sometime this summer and start packing up.
Well, hopefully that'll happen, but there's sure no sign that they're getting ready for it yet.
No, I guess not.
All right.
Well, so we have very little time left.
There's so many developments going on all across the Middle East.
But the one that's so important for people to focus on, I think at least for this minute, is the battle going on in Bahrain.
There's a guy named Roy Gutman writing for McClatchy newspapers from Bahrain who is doing such an incredible job.
I'm sure you're keeping up with his work and much else on the situation there.
And I just wonder maybe we can hopefully take it for granted that people know about the the rebellion in the first place.
And maybe you can update us on the status of it.
Well, the public protests are mostly gone now since since the invasion of the GCC troops into Bahrain and the violent crackdown in the Declaration of Martial Law.
Public protest has been virtually impossible.
And the troops for both the regime and the foreign forces backing them up have shown that they don't really have any qualms about mass arrests or beating or shooting people as necessary to to chase people off the streets.
And unfortunately, in this case, it seems to be working, at least in the short term.
Although, despite all their insistence that they think this is a victory, I think in the long term, they're going to be faced with a lot more dissent among these Shiite, the Shiite majority of Bahrain, because they are a fairly large majority of the population that are being even more politically disaffected by these crackdowns.
All right.
Well, I'm sorry that we're out of time.
We're going to have to leave it there.
But of course, we're going to follow up later in the week to Jason.
It's always great to talk with you.
I learned so much.
Thanks.
Sure.
Thanks for having me.
Everybody, that is the heroic Jason Ditz, News.
Antiwar.com.
