All right, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I admit I have a problem.
I'm a junkie.
I like Poison Idea.
I'm all strung out and dependent on Jason Ditz at news.antiwar.com.
Thanks to him and my addiction to him, I don't have to read the Washington Post and the New York Times anymore.
I just read Jason Ditz because he writes up the news about all the news in the whole wide world at news.antiwar.com.
Welcome back to the show, Jason.
How are you doing?
I'm doing good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
So tell me what is going on in Libya.
Well, in Libya, basically what's going on today is the same thing that's been going on for the last few days, and that's that the rebels are trying to present the war as being over, even though fighting is continuing, and they're trying to figure out where Gaddafi actually went.
And they have no idea?
It doesn't sound like it at this point.
They've several times over the past few days declared that they have him surrounded, and it turned out that whatever they had surrounded wasn't him.
The latest thing is just them rummaging through his compound for bizarre things that they can report to the media.
Like today, I believe it was the Washington Post or USA Today, one of the two had an article about they found a whole elaborate photo album just full of pictures of Condoleezza Rice.
Yeah, I saw that.
It was pretty funny, like he was stalking her pretty bad.
Yeah.
Apparently they got along really well when she went to Libya to visit and make friends.
People don't remember that too well, I don't guess, but it's good to have that back in the news one way or the other.
But so am I to understand then that the rebels pretty much have taken Tripoli, that the fighting inside the city is dying down or not?
It's not really clear at this point.
They've certainly taken more of the city, but there's still reports coming in all the time of fighting in this neighborhood or fighting in that neighborhood.
So exactly how much control they have isn't clear at all.
And what's left of Qaddafi's forces?
Just a few rebels still inside the city or have they fled en masse anywhere or anything like that?
Well, that's another big question.
The reports really don't say.
I mean, he supposedly had this massive army in Tripoli shortly before the rebels invaded and where it ended up, I don't know.
But we see reports of all 30 soldiers here found massacred apparently by the rebels at some checkpoint, but there's not these huge tank columns or anything that we were told were inside the city.
So I don't think anyone really knows what happened to them.
Well, tell us about this massacre, because this is the top headline on antiwar.com right now, is your piece UN warns rebels amid signs of Tripoli execution.
Well, right, right.
Tripoli reporters came across the scene yesterday of 30 some odd soldiers, apparently Qaddafi soldiers at a makeshift checkpoint just executed.
Some of them were handcuffed or some of them were still in bed that their little makeshift hospital at the checkpoint.
One of them still had the IV in his arm and was shot in his head.
The rebels are denying, of course, that they actually were the ones responsible for this.
But I think that denial is pretty, pretty unlikely.
And now what about U.S. involvement in the war at this point?
It's not our planes flying, it's French and British planes, but it's what American it's the AFRICOM or whatever is directing the war, right?
Well, it depends who you ask to hear U.S. officials, especially in the State Department.
The U.S. has almost nothing to do with the war at this point.
In reality, there are still U.S. planes that are doing surveillance flight and the like and occasionally had been launching some bombing runs up until the past few days when the bombings more or less stopped.
But there still seems to be an active U.S. involvement in the NATO war.
And despite the U.S. claims, NATO is involved in trying to track down Qaddafi because there are British soldiers on the ground, basically going through homes in Tripoli, trying to figure out where he went.
The British special forces are on the ground in Tripoli going door to door looking for him?
Right.
Wow.
Well, and as far as we know, they're British and not Americans, right?
Well, that's right.
According to the reports in the British media, they're SAS.
So they're British special forces.
A few hundred of them were deployed into Tripoli to help with the search.
And now what are the politicians, particularly, I guess I'm interested in the Europeans and their pronouncements since the fall of Tripoli, or at least since the fall of Tripoli, began about what they think the future of NATO's role in the new Libya will be?
Well, they're sort of shying away from the reality, which is that sooner or later, this is going to be a NATO occupation on the ground to try to, quote unquote, restore order.
Right now, they're still quote unquote, restore order.
Right now, they're still sort of savoring the victory and saying, see, this is what we predicted all along, even though, of course, when they started these bombings in mid-March, what they predicted was that his entire regime would collapse in a few days or a week.
And here we are several months later, and it's just now starting to fall apart.
You and your medium term memory, that's not fair.
You're not supposed to hold them to what they said.
You're just supposed to think this is the greatest achievement ever, that the USA was able to, well, and with their European friends, after months and months and months, overthrow the Qaddafi regime in Tripoli.
You ought to feel really good about yourself for Barack Obama's great accomplishment here, Jason.
Well, that does send the message, of course, pretty much universally across the media, that this is vindication for the Obama administration's policy and proof that President Obama knows how to run a war right.
Yeah.
It really is.
In a way, it's kind of entertaining, right?
The learning of no lessons whatsoever by the celebrants here, the changing of places between the Republican and the Democratic partisans and all that.
Well, it is.
And really, I think the funniest message came out of Britain's Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, who we might remember was sort of an anti-war darling for a little while there during the last election, but suddenly is all gung-ho for the Libyan war.
And he's insisting that this isn't like Iraq at all, and it's not going to be like Iraq, and we've learned our lesson.
But, of course, they're doing the same thing they did in Iraq, and they're already talking about sending advisors on the ground.
There are already British troops on the ground.
It's starting a little different from the Iraq war because it's not a full-fledged invasion yet, but it seems pretty clear that what we're looking at is a multi-year, on-the-ground commitment to try to stabilize the country after a regime change.
So, in reality, it's not all that different from what they just got into in Iraq.
Yeah, that's what Scahill said really great on MSNBC the other day.
So, this is a motley crew of former Qaddafi regime guys, tribal leaders, and former al-Qaeda fighters.
And these are the people we just fought for.
So, now, of course, as you and I both predicted, I think before the bombing even started, they'll have to occupy the place to make sure that the guys we just fought for and won for don't take power.
Same day.
All right.
It was different.
Same story, different day.
We'll be right back with Jason Ditz.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm online with Jason Ditz.
He's our news editor at Antiwar.com, news.antiwar.com.
We're talking about the war in Libya.
Hey, Jason, who's getting rich off this thing?
Well, so far, nobody, but there are a lot of people lining up that are pretty sure they're going to with one of the leading candidates being British Petroleum, which is talking about major expansions once new regimes actually settled in place.
I read that an Italian oil company, Eni, was already in there.
They didn't waste one minute.
Right.
They were in there before as one of the primary service companies for the Gaddafi regime.
Now they're back.
Right.
They had to flee when NATO got involved because, of course, they're an Italian company and Italy was involved in the war.
But pretty much the minute it looked like the rebels had a shot at taking Tripoli, they got their their workers on boats and started sending them that way.
And yeah, the Chinese and the Russians are getting pushed out, right?
It does sound like that.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I wonder, I guess, you know, there's no way really to know about the very highest level politics of all this, but you know, I wonder why America would even bother helping at all with this and not just let it be a European thing.
It doesn't sound like it's going to benefit the American imperialists very much.
Maybe the bomb makers.
Right.
And everybody loves a good war.
So it's something that.
It's good politics, right?
It's it's.
Right.
It's it's a good story for the media to cover about, you know, instead of covering all the failures in Afghanistan and the fact that the Iraq war isn't going to end as scheduled again, they can they can focus on the great success of Libya.
Yeah, it's I'm sorry.
I'm just so stuck on Iraq 2003, where, you know, Baghdad had fallen.
It had been a week since Saddam Hussein had been in power and all the warmongers are going, see, everything went great in all your antiwar excuses and reasons didn't come true and whatever when they hadn't even given it a chance at all.
And as you just said, we're still in Iraq right now.
Ain't going nowhere either.
Giant war.
A million people died somewhere in between here and there.
And this is how all these Democrats sound now talking about what a great victory they have.
Let's see what a victory it is when there's an insurgency against the new democracy and whatever else where we're headed toward in a year and two years and three years from now.
Right.
I think the hope is that that will be put off long enough that it can at least get through the next election cycle.
And then when it's obvious that Libya is falling apart, it'll be, you know, 2013 or so, a little bit after the fact, and all the supporters of it won't have to be held accountable in the election.
Right.
Yeah.
We'll just blame it all on the antiwar people and say, see, if only you'd all agreed with John McCain that we just occupy the place with the U.S. Army from the very beginning, then none of this would have happened.
Right.
It's like a school play of Peter Pan, where if you don't clap loud enough, Tinkerbell's going to die.
Right.
Exactly.
Everybody do your part.
Well, and, you know, I remember back when I was just a plain old regular American in my thinking about these kinds of issues when I was in fourth grade and Ronald Reagan bombed Libya.
And I thought it was really cool because, you know, jet planes and explosions and I can't hear Libyans screaming from central Texas.
So why not?
You know, USA and all that problem is, though, then I turned 11 or 12 or something and grew up a little bit.
But I guess that still works on the partisans.
You know, if you have a political hero or whatever, you'll you'll find any opportunity to clap for Tinkerbell.
Well, it's the lesson that we all learn from when we're little kids that the U.S. military could do no wrong.
And that if the president decided to deploy them, no matter how ridiculous the pretext or indeed, in this case, he didn't even give Congress a pretext.
He just said he was going to do it and then made some vague references to a U.N. resolution and let the media sort of spin it as him rescuing Benghazi from a massacre that was never going to happen.
People were more than willing to buy into that.
Yeah, well, and it's because the people on TV won't explain it right.
That's all.
I mean, the deal is until the American people spend their day at news.antiwar.com like I do, they're just not going to get it because TV is never going to say here's the deal, you know, A through F or whatever.
All right.
Well, so you mentioned Iraq and how we're not leaving Iraq.
And I was wondering if you could give us an update on the negotiations.
I know you've been telling us for a long time here that the Americans are pushing very hard to convince the Iraqis to invite us to stay longer.
Right.
And the pushing continues.
But sort of an interesting thing happened last week with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and that he said it was his belief that the Iraqis had already requested the U.S. to stay.
Not that it actually happened, but it was his belief that it happened, which was a strange way to say it.
Right.
And it was quickly rejected by the Iraqi government that said we never asked anything of the sort.
So well, but then again, they're the ones trying to make the false distinction, aren't they, between inviting trainers to stay and inviting combat forces, which are the same thing?
Well, that's that's very true, because they want to avoid a parliamentary vote that they're probably going to lose about keeping the troops in the country.
So Panetta just lost the subtlety of the lie there that he was supposed to stick with.
Right.
Yeah.
Which I think I kind of like that about him, that he's that blunt and plain spoken about his horrible plans and corrupt motivations and everything else.
I appreciate a gaffe, or especially a continual gaffe producer like that in a position like that.
You know what I mean?
It's good to have a secretary of defense who accidentally says what he really meant to say every once in a while.
It does make our jobs easier when he does that.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, and of course, you're going to end up with a ton of great pictures of him like doing that.
Jeez, I don't know, kind of shrug with his palms up sort of thing and whatever.
There's going to be plenty of those for you to use in the future there at news.antiwar.com.
All right.
Now, you also mentioned Afghanistan.
I was wondering if you could give us just a little bit of an update as to what's been going on there lately.
Obviously, you know, it isn't like the war got turned around and we're winning now or anything silly like that.
But have there been any major raids on Kabul hotels lately?
Anything like that?
Nothing like that lately.
There's been some violence, of course, as there always is.
A few NATO troops getting killed here or there.
Really nothing hugely significant has happened since the downing of that Chinook helicopter earlier this month.
Well, now, what about those crooked parliamentarians being thrown out over their votes or about the not their votes in the parliament, but the election fraud?
Well, right.
There was that nine nine members of parliament that lost the election but were given their seats because the other parliamentarians were thrown out for being slightly more corrupt.
The Electoral Complaints Commission and the Independent Election Commission have been bickering over which corrupt politicians should get those seats, and they got overturned.
So now they're getting thrown out in favor of the ones that won the election in the first place.
Yeah.
Well, what about this about the this was a Telegraph article, right, about how was it a British general admitted that the plan is to stay until 2024?
I'm not sure who actually came up with the 2024 date, but that does seem to be the plan at the very least.
And it's not too surprising, of course.
They've been pushing back the date ever since they've set them.
When 2014 got set, it was immediately denounced by the Pentagon as much too soon.
And it wasn't a serious date.
It was just a projection.
And it was just an effort to try to get the Afghan government to be more serious.
And yeah, well, have more kids.
The empire is going to need them, it looks like.
Well, that's the thing.
If you think about 2024, by then, we're going to have soldiers on the ground that weren't even born when this war started occupying a country where the life expectancy is so low that a good chunk of the population won't have been alive when the war started.
Yeah, but there's terrorists around.
People keep picking up rifles and using them.
For some reason.
All right.
Well, anyway, again, I got to say it.
Why not say it?
It's worth pointing out every single time.
There's one alternative to the 2024 deadline for beginning the end of the Afghan war.
And that's Ron Paul.
As simple as that is the only choice we got.
The only hope we got.
Even if you don't like him, at least you got to like he wants us out of Afghanistan.
You know, this is just incredible that they would.
It seems like they would.
You know, Connelly's Rice's time horizon, horizons were always just a couple of years away.
Be patient, you know, but to go ahead and tell us 2024 when we can't even imagine 2024 exactly, you know, what things will be like then in so many ways, our own lives and whatever.
I think if that was to get out, at least that could cause a pretty strong reaction the other way.
It might, but it might do the opposite, too, because people say, well, they finally set a date.
Because people have very short term memories here.
And I've long since forgotten that 2011 was the date and all the dates of the Iraq war in 2014 was supposed to be the firm date.
Yeah, it's just incredible.
Well, I think that I think that, well, never mind Afghanistan, because, of course, Obama promised to escalate that war.
But I think Ron Paul's slogan ought to be, you know, in the Iraq war, you could take that to the bank or whatever like that and just mock Obama all the way through the election.
Anyway, we're over time.
I got to let you go, man.
But I appreciate you joining us on the show, as always, Jason, very much.
Sure.
Thanks for having me.
Everybody, that's the great Jason Ditz.
He's our news editor at Antiwar.com.
That's news.antiwar.com.
And he's covering all six wars for you all day long.
So go check that out.
We'll be right back after this.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
