Alright, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and now joining me on the phone is Jason Ditz, our news editor at AntiWar.com.
That's news.antiwar.com.
How's it going, Jason?
I'm doing good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
I appreciate you joining us on the show today.
Let's start with Yemen.
What's the latest news about the former, question mark, dictator, Abdullah Saleh?
Well, according to the government, he's been making good progress in his recovery.
He had surgery over the weekend to repair the damage from injuries he sustained during Friday's missile strike.
And initially, they said he was just slightly injured and it wasn't a big deal.
But then his television interview turned into a radio interview, and the next day, he was rushed to Saudi Arabia for emergency surgery, and they say he's got burns over 40% of his body.
It was more than just minor injuries, and they say it's probably going to take him several months to recover.
But the real question then is, what's going to happen during those several months?
He was pretty much on the way out to begin with, and even though the government insists he's coming back, I don't imagine that there's going to be a lot of desire to just wait out a several month recovery in the middle of what's basically the country falling apart.
Yeah, well, it sure sounds like the game ought to be up for him, if it's not already.
Gee, it seems like it would be hard to come back from Saudi Arabia and dictate over the place with badly burnt skin like that.
I don't know.
So the people in the streets, they're pretty convinced that he's going for good, right?
That they've won?
Well, there were some celebrations over the weekend to that effect, but since then, the repeated comments from the government that he's going to be eventually coming back, and their lack of action towards transitioning to free elections has a lot of people really doubting what's going to happen.
Well, now, as we've talked about before, you've got the Houthis up in the north, you have the socialist types in the southeast part of the country, and they've had their own secessionist movements for quite a while now.
Now, to hear CNN tell it, oh, no, there could be a civil war in Yemen, but neither of those groups are trying to take over the central part of the state.
They've just been trying to secede all this time, right?
And yet, I haven't seen much news saying that they're saying now is their chance to just break away.
Well, they basically broke away several weeks ago.
Those regions weren't very successfully controlled by the government, which has never really been able to exercise power much beyond the central part of the country, and especially the capital city.
But since the protest movement started, they've really been operating more or less independently to begin with.
So for them, I'm not sure there's a big momentum to hurry up and declare independence right now.
So is it then basically the tribes from the central part of the country where the capital Sana'a is, and whatever that, maybe that's the civil war they're referring to, is the people who, the tribes that are still backing Saleh versus whoever the other guys are?
Well, it's definitely that, and I'm not sure that there really are any tribes backing Saleh anymore.
It seems like what he's got left is mostly the loyalist faction of his military, and maybe a few people in the capital city.
When he was giving public speeches every Friday, you'd have two, 300,000 people marching against him, and every week it was a smaller and smaller crowd in favor of him.
In the last few weeks, it's been just a couple thousand.
I think his actual core of supporters is almost none.
Well, it'd be nice to think that with that being the case, and him being wounded, that his reign of terror over those people is over.
I guess, of course, that only begs the question of what's going to come next, but the revolutionary movement there in Sana'a has basically been 21st century youth, right?
Oh, absolutely.
Although, there's sort of a second wing, which is the tribal factions that only recently got involved, and they were the ones that launched the missile attack.
Even that was largely Saleh's own doing, because he moved against Sheikh Ammar about a week and a half ago in an effort to, I don't know what, Ammar was speaking in favor of the protestors, and he marched troops into the neighborhood where Ammar's home was, and a bunch of tribesmen got up and got in a fight with him, and then they shelled Ammar's home, and so the tribesmen attacked the capital.
It's really been a mess.
There are a lot of factions there, and certainly there's the pro-democracy student movement in the capital, which has been there from the start, but there are so many other factions to consider, too.
I'm not sure how this situation ever gets resolved with Yemen staying together as a single country.
Well, to read between the lines of the Washington Post piece about how worried the White House is about what's coming next there, it seems like they must have been doing as much as they could to try to support the dictator over these last few months.
Do you know much about American support for him recently?
Well, they've certainly been supporting him, but in the past couple of weeks, the writing's kind of been on the wall that he was losing what little support he had left, and the U.S. had been pressuring him to accept the GCC deal for his ouster and to replace him with Major General Hadi, who's the vice premier and acting president right now, and it seems like the U.S. has pretty much decided he's their new dictator of choice, but whether he's just there for an interim period or intends to just retain power remains to be seen.
Well, you know, the date on this McClatchy piece by Jonathan Landay, June 6th, just Monday, three days ago, the U.S. says Yemen's Saleh should step aside immediately, betrays the fact that they have not said that this whole time.
They jumped right on Qaddafi, oh, he must go, and whatever, and the fact that they've waited until now certainly shows them to be, you know, basically up against the fact that his days are numbered, that they're not going to be able to keep him there, and so now they're, oh, look at us, we're the Americans, we're on the side of the people, it's time for this guy's illegitimate reign to end, and never mind that we didn't say this three, four months ago.
Well, and in this case, it's really more a question of Saleh not being able to get the job done the way the U.S. feels a dictator ought to.
Sure.
He's not keeping control over the country, he's lost the north, he's lost the southeast, he even lost a couple of towns in the southwest to a faction that's supposedly aligned with al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
And there's been some talk that those losses might have been deliberate to try to convince the west that he needed backing, but if anything, it seems to have gone the other way and convinced the west that he's not worth backing anymore because he can't even keep them from taking over towns.
Right.
Yeah, I guess we'll have to look back in a couple of months to find out exactly what the truth was about that, sounds much more likely the latter to me, without really knowing.
But I know this, the New York Times is running a piece today by Mark Mazzetti, U.S. is intensifying a secret campaign of Yemen airstrikes, says that they're taking advantage, exploiting a growing power vacuum in the country and increasing vastly the number of drone and fighter jet strikes in that country, going after al-Qaeda they say.
Well that probably isn't too surprising, of course Soleil always looked the other way when the U.S. was launching attacks anyway, so I'm not sure why they were waiting for a power vacuum to launch more attacks.
Or how that's supposed to shore up his authority when he's letting us go ahead and get away with that kind of thing on his watch.
But anyway, we'll pick it back up on the other side of this break.
It's Jason Ditz, news.antiwar.com.
Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm talking with Jason Ditz, he's our news editor at antiwar.com, news.antiwar.com.
And now I was wondering if you could keep us up to date here a little bit, Jason, about the shootings at the Israeli occupied Golan Heights and the Syrians coming across the border.
What's happened there?
Is it still happening?
No, that's basically quieted down.
It was mostly a single day protest with a little bit of follow-up the following day.
This was the second such protest in about a month, too, with the first protest coming on the anniversary of the founding of Israel, which Palestinians outside the country commemorate as the day that they got expelled from what was the original borders of Israel.
This most recent protest came on the anniversary of the 1967 invasions in which Israel occupied the West Bank, the Golan Heights, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, and the Sinai Peninsula.
And how many people were killed in this protest at the Golan Heights?
It was...
There have been several different figures, but it's somewhere in the realm of 20 to 25 people killed and several hundred injured.
It's funny.
I wonder, I guess in the Middle East, the narrative must be that all this renewed protest in Palestine is part and parcel of the rest of the Arab Spring, now summer, huh?
Well certainly, Israeli military officials had fully expected this.
There was even some leaking of a report earlier this year saying that there was a good possibility that an Arab Spring-type nonviolent protest might spring up against Israel among the Palestinians and that if it was big enough, there was really nothing the military could do about it.
Well, and it makes me wonder about the future of this thing.
I guess the Israelis have proven that they've said, I guess publicly, how worried they are, as you say, how worried they are about a peaceful protest and how successful it could be.
And I guess, you know, they've shown in their past their willingness to put down a peaceful insurrection with violence and attempt to make it a violent one.
If they can just get one suicide bombing out of the Palestinians or something, then they can make their entire oppression a simple retaliation for what the Palestinians started, that kind of thing.
Well, and that is historically how peaceful protests do get handled across the world.
If a peaceful protest remains peaceful, the ruling power that they're protesting against is going to lose.
So what they do is they start launching some attacks that are outrageous to the protesters but are small enough to keep them out of being just completely condemned internationally and hope that they provoke a reaction.
We've seen that before with some of the protests in the Gaza Strip.
There was a protest a few years back where the protesters marched just short of the Israeli border and sat down in a ring around the Gaza Strip and several of them got shot as well.
And then afterwards, a couple of rockets got launched, so the Israelis said, you see, this wasn't a peaceful protest after all.
I mean, it's an age-old tactic that goes back to the British occupation of India and even before that.
Yeah, well, and you know, par for all Israeli Hasbara, it might as well, you know, it's like the turning in and inside out the old Jedi doctrine that when you're outnumbered attack, you know, when faced with truth, don't just tell them something that ain't true.
Tell them something that's an outright lie, like those horrible Palestinians have been occupying Israel for too long and when will they ever allow the Israelis to live where they want and stop oppressing them under their Jim Crow style tyranny and just turn the entire issue inside out and upside down and throw everyone for a loop so that they have to argue about their terms for so long they're never even able to have a reasonable discussion about what's going on over there, who's paying for it financially and, you know, and dealing with the resulting terrorism and the rest of it.
Well, and the thing is, this works in the United States, of course, because we saw Prime Minister Netanyahu's speech to Congress getting standing ovation after standing ovation for every random thing that came to his head, but...
Yeah, he did kind of seem like he was ad-libbing that thing, didn't he?
It did, and it really doesn't work anywhere else because that speech, despite getting all the massive applause, was roundly condemned in Israel, both by the hawkish members of his party who felt that he wasn't hawkish enough and by the more moderates who felt that all he really did was sabotage the prospect of peace with the Palestinians.
Yeah, well, and I guess they're both right in that sense.
Probably are both right, and it seems like he's trying to chart a middle course here where he's sufficiently hawkish that nothing ever gets done, but also gives enough lip service to peace that everyone thinks he's pro-peace.
And it doesn't seem to be working on either side, except in the United States, where among U.S. officials, he's seen as someone who can basically do no wrong.
The only time the U.S. really got all that upset with anything that the current Israeli government's done was when they announced a massive settlement expansion the day Joe Biden arrived, and that was only because it really embarrassed Biden to have to come in there the day of new protests emerging because of the settlement expansion.
And he sat down with Netanyahu that night anyway.
He did, but...
Yeah, and you gotta give him credit too, Jason, about how well this dialectic played out, whether they planned it this way or not, where Obama gave this speech where he basically made no demands of the Israelis whatsoever.
Oh, yeah, you have to go back to 67 lines as soon as Hamas grows wings and can fly, and whatever, and basically set the deal up where, as we ran the next day, that Haaretz piece that said Obama just gave Netanyahu everything.
And then they spent the next week saying, oh my God, could you have a more anti-Israeli president than this horrible Barack Obama?
And he had to back down basically on every last bit of nothing that he demanded in the first place.
Well, he did, and it was really incredible because, like you say, he didn't really offer anything.
Right, yeah.
I mean, the original speech, if you go back and read it, says, you know, Hamas has to do everything.
The entire thing is on them.
They must agree to every Israeli demand before anybody even sits at a table, whatever.
George Bush couldn't have done worse, you know?
Oh, I'm sure George Bush would have found a way to do worse, but yeah.
He would have tried anyway.
He would have given it the old college try, but certainly I don't think anybody in the Obama administration really believes that what they're doing anymore is going to result in a peace deal.
I think they may have been optimistic about it in that first year, but after giving some lip service to the notion that Israel should stop expanding their settlements and just being roundly condemned both by Israel and by members of Congress, I think they've figured out that there really isn't anything that the U.S. can do one way or another that's going to be politically palatable as far as advancing this to meaningful talk.
Other than just continuing to buy them Lockheed planes.
Right, they can do that, but that's really more about Lockheed than it is about Israel.
Yeah, well, I'm certain that that's true.
In fact, you know, Andrew Coburn defines the neoconservative movement as where the Israel lobby is crossed with the military-industrial complex in America, and I think he makes a pretty good case.
Now, listen, let me skip real quick here.
We only have a minute and a half or something, but I was just wondering if you could tell us from all you've been reading about what's going on in Syria now, does it look like the Assad regime is going to fall?
It's really unclear right now.
Both sides are digging their heels in.
It seems like every violent crackdown that comes from the government produces an even bigger protest the following day.
It doesn't seem like the government has any answers as far as how to calm this down.
Iran apparently sent some advisors to try to talk them into a plan, but despite a lot of people spinning that as Iran being behind the current crackdown, I don't really think that's the case, because as we saw Iran dealing with protests in 2009 in Tehran, they really didn't use massive military power to quell those protests.
They just sort of made a lot of threats and let them burn themselves out.
Yeah, they killed a few people, but they certainly didn't do a giant massacre.
Right, they didn't do anywhere near what Syria did, and I think they're trying to talk Syria into trying that strategy, but it's probably too late.
Well, we'll see what happens, and we'll keep our eyes on news.antiwar.com for all the latest absolutely indispensable work that you do, Jason.
Thank you so much.
Thank you for having me.
