All right 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 Ditz.
He's our news editor at antiwar.com.
That's news.antiwar.com and of course this guy on the job, I gotta always make sure and hit refresh and just make sure nothing else horrible has happened in the last 15 minutes or so.
Welcome back to the show Jason, how are you doing?
I'm doing good Scott, how are you?
I'm doing pretty good.
So I guess, you know, there's always too many wars for us to cover in one interview.
Let's start with Iraq.
This is the big news here.
Muqtada al-Sadr, who's he, what's he want?
Well he's the high-profile Shiite cleric and the leader of the Sadrist trend which is a major political faction in Iraq and what he's wanted and what he's really always wanted is for the U.S. troops to leave.
Now there's been, really over this year we've been, you know, watching really closely about what Sadr is doing and I guess Gareth Porter had that piece a few weeks back about Sadr saying that he would, you know, not reconstitute the Mahdi army, that, and in fact that he would not even threaten to withhold support from Maliki in the parliament and, you know, maybe that was because it would hurt him more than Maliki at this point or something.
I'm not sure but it seems like, you know, rather than it just being a simple narrative, get out or else, which it has been kind of for years now but the or else, the line for the or else was always, you know, pretty far in the future.
It seems like the line out of the Sadrist group is, you know, more complicated now and goes back and forth a little bit but this last statement was, what, clear as day or?
Pretty much, yeah.
I mean, it seems like they've been kind of pushing it to the future but the future is finally here now and now they're saying any troops left after December, no matter what their official title, will be treated as occupation troops and that they'll resist it.
Now for soldiers to stay as, you know, whatever they want to call them, anything but trainers, they'd have to get the parliament to say it's okay but as long as they call them trainers they don't need a parliamentary okay.
Is that what Maliki's saying?
That's right.
That's his claim.
He's saying that since parliament approved the purchase of some of the weapons from the U.S., it amounts to a de facto approval of trainers to use, teach them how to use those weapons.
Well, which could go on forever.
I mean, they're talking about selling them a bunch of Air Force jets now, right?
Right.
So, boy, those things can be really complicated.
Right.
This isn't just point and shoot.
These are some pretty elaborate weapon systems that we're talking about so this is probably a several year, if not several decades, training situation.
Now, what kind of consequences did Sauder threaten or did he?
Well, he threatened to oppose the continued occupation of military force.
Was he specific about the Mahdi army and its future or anything like that?
He wasn't and that's sort of the surprise here.
I guess he's still reluctant to bring that out but that's, of course, always the assumption whenever he's talking about anything like this.
Right.
Well, you know, I wish we could get some better word out of Washington, D.C. about what they think of all this and, you know, how much, to what degree do they believe their own BS about, you know, their position in Iraq?
It's been years since Patrick Coburn said on this show that America is now the bit player.
And it's worked for so long that they just assume that they're going to get away with everything but, I don't know, there seems to be at least some resistance to the idea of keeping those troops there, even if Maliki seems to be more or less backing off on it.
Well, there's got to be some people inside the government, you know, whether or not Obama, I guess we don't know.
But there's got to be some people who are looking at this as an opportunity that, you know, if we can just push it a little bit and cause the conflict to escalate a little bit, then that'll be the excuse to put more troops back in.
And, you know, I guess we didn't really finish this war after all.
We still got to take care of this solder character and then they can wage war for years based on that if they want, you know?
If they want.
And that's really the key.
I mean, this is potentially another very ugly war.
And there may not be a stomach for another several year war in Iraq.
Yeah, although, you know, I wonder about the Iraqis too.
They got to be sick and tired of fighting by now, much more than the Americans.
Oh, absolutely.
Well, you know, I talked with Roy Gutman from McClatchy Newspapers, and he'd just come back from Iraq, and he was saying, I don't know if you heard this one, he was saying that he talked to leaders from all over the place.
I guess not the solderers, but Maliki's group, he talked with Sunni leaders in parliament and with Kurdish leaders up in Kirkuk.
And everybody was agreed that right now, it's still a house of cards.
If America leaves now, it's going to fall apart.
All of them seem to be saying that, you know, if we stayed, we could, you know, put enough goop on this house of cards to hold it together before we go.
But, you know, with an indefinite timeline on it, basically.
So, you know, if the Americans, if solder does get the message through and the Americans go, I guess it really could still, you know, I don't know, because it seemed like to a degree that they had, you know, somewhat kind of representation in the parliament that maybe the government they had created there could stand as the government of Iraq without us.
But I don't know, maybe not.
They don't seem so confident about that there in the country anyway.
Yeah, it really remains to be seen.
Well, and also what the Pentagon is going to do.
I mean, it's amazing, isn't it, to read in the news, like the Washington Post and New York Times articles about it are like, hey, great news, everyone, positive signs that the Iraqis are going to let us stay longer, that kind of thing.
Right.
Especially with all these promises that we were going to leave in X number of months and then all these claims that, well, the war is over.
I mean, it wasn't that long ago that MSNBC and everyone was showing us footage of the last troops leaving Iraq.
Well, I wonder, you know, with all those troops over in Afghanistan and now the beginning of the end of the surge slowly, I wonder whether they're just going to put those troops back in Iraq, get the whole thing started up again, maybe have a war over Kirkuk.
You got all kinds of possibilities there.
That's certainly among the options.
There's plenty of wars to go around, though, so I guess that's one thing they're never going to be short of is possible ways to restart this war and possible ways to make this war worse.
Well, you know, it's worth mentioning, too, as you've reported here at news.antiwar.com, U.S. military raid in Iraq kills young boy, policeman, neighbor.
I know there was a piece last week about all the blowback in the neighborhood from another raid.
The war is not over.
The Americans are not just training and advising.
They are going on combat missions.
The Air Force or the Navy or somebody's even dropping bombs from the sky on Iraq still to this day.
Am I right?
Right.
And a lot of these bombs, it doesn't seem like the Iraqi parliament has any idea why these bombs are being dropped.
And they're really sparking considerable debate there.
All right.
Well, so let's talk about Libya.
Is Qaddafi gone and everything fine yet or what?
This war is supposed to take a few days, I thought.
Well, the man I need to check the clock before I do that to you, Jason.
I'm sorry, man.
I'm terrible.
You know, I listened to Michael Savage interview Ron Paul.
I wonder why he was going on so long.
But it was because he saw the clock.
He had to stall him for about 45 seconds before the commercial.
Brilliant.
All right.
It's Jason.
It's news.antiwar.com.
We'll be right back with Antiwar Radio here.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Jason Ditz.
He's our news editor at antiwar.com.
That's news.antiwar.com.
Now, let's talk about Libya.
This war is supposed to be over a long time ago.
So I'm pretty sure, you know, since government always does what they say, just like they said they would, Gaddafi's gone and there's a brand new democracy allied with America in Libya.
Right, Jason?
Well, to hear the rebels talk, that's certainly what's happened or is certainly about to happen.
Well, that's all I need.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
And in reality, of course, the war, as much as it's been, stalemated with no end in sight.
Well, but you have a headline here.
Rebels vow to push on to Tripoli.
Well, that's true.
And they've always vowed to do that sort of thing, but they never seem to actually manage to complete it.
Well, I wonder about, I guess, the politics.
What's going on in Europe?
I mean, the French and the British governments have got to be under a lot of pressure from their people about this, even if the Americans aren't, no?
It's not really clear.
It seems like the claims that this was a humanitarian war really have stuck in the minds of a lot of people, even after watching migrant ships sinking, of people fleeing the war and all the footage of hospitals and whatnot being blown up by NATO troops.
Yeah, it's madness.
We have this piece at antiwar.com today, between Libya and the deep blue sea, originally an interpress service report.
And it's about just that, what you mentioned there, the sinking of the refugee boats, people trying to escape.
How much of that has happened?
Do you know much about it?
I'm not really sure.
There's been a lot of talk, but...
It says here more than 1800 men, women and children have reportedly drowned trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea in heavily overcrowded, unseaworthy boats since the beginning of the war.
Well, that's not surprising.
This has been a pretty ugly war.
And especially with no end in sight, there's a lot of desperation to get out of it.
Hey, what's all this about Gaddafi's son growing a beard and going on TV and saying he's going to ally with Zawahiri now or whatever?
Well, that was incredible.
He literally just...
All this rhetoric about other things going on in this war, he just literally showed up and started talking nonsense about how the Gaddafi regime is suddenly going to ally with the Islamists and take over the country that way.
I think you said in your original report on this that a lot of people saw right through it and said, well, he's just trying to further play on the divisions between the rebel groups, the different tribes and all this, especially after their head general got whacked.
Right.
And it was pretty well timed, but he showed up on television with the beard and everything.
So he was really playing up the part.
Yeah.
He had the beard and the prayer beads and...
Which is funny because was it, what, just one interview before that or two interviews before that?
He's sitting there actually telling the truth and saying that the jihadists are fighting on the side of the rebels that NATO's backing.
Right.
And that was their big pro-Qaddafi propaganda, which was actually correct, was that this is what al-Qaeda wants.
Right.
And it seems like that rhetoric actually works better than the claim that this is some sort of underlying trick by the Qaddafi regime to ally with the Islamists, because certainly at least some of those NATO nations aren't going to be keen on finding out that they're backing what amounts to an al-Qaeda wannabe group, which some of the rebels are.
Well, I think, what was it that I read last week that said that it's time to begin to ask the question, what are we doing here?
And what's going to happen next?
And what if Qaddafi falls or what if he doesn't?
And should we negotiate?
And I'm thinking, yeah, you guys better start asking those questions now.
It was something at foreignpolicy.com, I thought.
But it's been pretty easy to see as you and I've talked about ever since this thing began.
Once they say no-fly zone, that means war, regime change.
You know, you can't protect civilians and then leave the same tyrant in power if your whole premise was he'll kill them all.
So here we go, purple-fingered elections and occupying troops and training up an army.
And the only other choice is to leave their al-Qaeda friends high and dry in the desert, right?
I mean, what am I missing?
Well, it's not really clear what's going to happen here.
Everybody seems to be talking about this war as if it's going to just continue forever.
And certainly the Obama administration is treating it like negotiation is just out of the question.
So I guess we're going to have to just take a wait-and-see attitude, as unfortunately we have with so much else, and see how long this war can possibly last.
Yeah, the same attitude our government is taking.
Well, we'll just keep bombing them and wait and see.
It's like the Kosovo war, it was supposed to last two or three days.
Remember that?
This will be days, not weeks.
Well, and you know, I guess it's one advantage of having this be a NATO war is that the responsibility is diffused.
So the French and the British and the Americans all can stand around pointing fingers at each other about who's supposed to actually come up with an endgame here, which is, at least so far, seems like preventing them, you know, any one state from taking the responsibility and putting the troops on the ground in there.
I mean, other than CIA and special forces types from I'm sure all three countries, you know, but maybe that's helping prevent a real, like, you know, Marine Corps ground invasion for now.
Maybe, but it doesn't seem like there's a lot of resistance to it.
Yeah, I mean, this war really just went to the back burner, right?
I mean, yeah, it's going on, but it's just another one of the wars going on.
It kind of made news at the beginning.
Now everybody's like, what, the Libya war?
I thought we were talking about the debt ceiling or something.
Well, right.
I mean, even the massive death toll in Afghanistan over the weekend, which was the largest since that war began, really didn't get major press on the TV news.
I mean, it was mentioned certainly, but it was sort of a secondary story.
The debt was first US credit rating dropping, and then that was somewhere way behind that.
Yeah.
Well, and so here's one that won't be on TV at all today.
What's going on with the dictator in Yemen?
Am I reading you right that the Obama administration is trying to get him to quit?
Oh, for quite some time they have been, and not that they're averse to having a dictator in Yemen, but that they sort of see Saleh as a liability at this point, and are hoping that his deputy, Major General Hadi, is a better replacement dictator for him.
And who is he?
Well, he's been a top military figure in Yemen for quite a long time.
He's also the, not really acting president, but people have been treating him as the acting president since Saleh has gone.
But he's been insisting all along that he's not technically the acting president, and that Saleh is still making all the decisions, even though he's not even in the country.
Well, and they got, I guess, I don't understand what's taking so long there.
I mean, the pictures from the streets of Sana'a have just, you know, shown hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people for so long.
But I guess there's a lot of truth that's not revealed in there.
The dictatorship must have some kind of support to have withstood all this, especially with what we already know about the Houthi rebellion in the north and the socialists in the southeast there.
Right, and just general tribesmen in the center.
The opposition to Saleh returning is enormous, and it doesn't seem like he's going to be returning anytime soon, even though he's finally out of the hospital, they're reporting.
There wasn't a timeline for, okay, now he's out of the hospital, he's coming back to Yemen in a week or anything, which is something of a surprise, because they've been saying all along that his return was imminent.
Right.
And now that he's actually out of the hospital and could theoretically return, there's no talk of it.
Well, another one where we're going to have to just wait and see, I guess.
It'll be bad news one way or the other, I'm pretty sure, but who knows.
Let the drones fly on.
Thanks, Jason, appreciate it.
Sure, thanks for having me.
Jason Ditz, everybody, news.antiwar.com
