Alright, y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and on the line is John Glazer, assistant editor at AntiWar.com.
Welcome back to the show, John, how are you doing?
Pretty good, Scott, how are you doing?
I'm doing great, appreciate you joining us today.
Hey listen, so I was hoping we could get a rundown on the latest from Libya.
There's got to be a hundred thousand stories just from the last three days here, but I was wondering if you could maybe catch us up a little bit.
Maybe I'll start us off with, U.S. tactics in Libya may be a model for other efforts in today's New York Times.
Yeah, that was an unfortunate article in the New York Times.
It's basically applauding what they call the new Obama doctrine, which is, the whole article is virtually propaganda.
But they say that the relative success, yes, success of Obama's Libya action could be a model for his entire approach to the Middle East.
So that's the model for open disregard for and violation of U.S. domestic law.
It's for disregarding U.N. action that was restricting his ability to institute regime change, which he did anyways.
It's a model for giving support to a ragtag group of rebel militias that at least have some direct ties to Al-Qaeda and who have committed serious war crimes.
It's a model for allowing, intervening in the Middle East in order to give great possibilities for wonderful profits to oil companies.
I mean, this is some model.
But I dispute how sort of new and improved and unique it is.
It's not very novel.
It's continuing along the U.S.'s strategy towards that region for some time.
Yeah, well, it's really no different than the Rumsfeld doctrine from the original Afghan war, which is, outsource the fighting on the ground, bomb them from the air.
That's right.
That's right.
The New York Times article mentioned a thing about the fact that the U.S. and NATO killed a number of civilians, committed war crimes like killing civilians or bombing hospitals or bombing TV and radio stations, which is a war crime under international law.
This is, first of all, it's far from over, because even the most optimistic and sort of pro-war nutjobs regarding the Libya situation, even they admit that this is far from over and there's high possibilities for a descent into chaos, as we saw in Iraq after the fall of Saddam.
So it's just, it's absurd that the New York Times is actually, you know, you can literally hear the clap while I was reading it.
It was absurd.
Yeah, it is, it is like saying, you know, in on April 10th, 2003, hey, look, we were able to pull down Saddam's statue.
So I guess this is a model for all future American foreign policies.
Look at what a great job we did.
You know, the anti-war argument was, we're not sure that the U.S. military will be able to overthrow Baghdad or something.
Right, right.
The article also said that there's two principles that have been laid out by the Obama administration's actions in Libya.
One is that there is a responsibility on the part of the U.S. to prevent what they refer to as a looming genocide in the Libyan city of Benghazi.
So anyone in the world where there's a possible, you know, tragedy happening, atrocity happening, the U.S. has a responsibility to act.
Well, that's obviously not true.
As I've said over and over and over again, everyone in anti-war has been saying consistently since the start of this war, there's a very simple litmus test to determine if that's at all even approaching anything close to reality.
Has the U.S. consistently supported comparable atrocities in many other countries?
And do we totally ignore much worse atrocities if they don't happen to be strategically important?
That is, if they don't happen to have like 46 billion barrels of oil in reserves?
The answer to both of those questions is yes.
So that it excludes any possibility that this excuse about civilian casualties actually motivated our intervention.
Well, and you're not just being a mean old partisan and, you know, using Bush-era, you know, policies and crimes against Barack Obama.
This is Obama years is what you're talking about here, whether America goes right along with these same kind of atrocities in other places.
Hell, on the part of the rebels themselves is what you said before, war crimes that they've committed on the road to Tripoli.
That's exactly right.
And they're still committing, the Human Rights Watch has been documenting incidents where the rebels have executed extra-judicially people they suspect of being mercenaries for Gaddafi, tying their hands behind their back and shooting them in the back of the head.
And this is the type of group that we've, you know, put our full strength and will behind to rule Libya now.
But as an update, I mean, right now they virtually have control over Tripoli, despite some chaotic stuff going on with mercenaries popping up, or suspected mercenaries, we don't know.
The rebels have now left Tripoli and are descending onto Sirte, which is Gaddafi's hometown, where they suspect he has fled to, although they don't know and they haven't yet found him.
They have been conducting negotiations with tribal elders in the town of Sirte, which have gone nowhere, reportedly, because Gaddafi actually still has a lot of support in that town.
And so that's where we are right now.
They're going to that town, Sirte, and after that, I mean, you know, we're not quite sure, but I have some doubt that they'll find Gaddafi.
And if they find other supporters of Gaddafi, who knows, you know, what they're liable to do.
Well, now, on the subject of the killings and the reports of at least supposed mercenaries fighting, there's this piece from the Morningstar online in Britain that we're running on the page somewhere there today, African migrant workers in Libya at risk from rebels.
And this is something that I believe has been going on low these many months since this regime change attempt began.
And that is that basically a lot of the mercenaries, I guess, that Gaddafi hired to work in his own little private army there were from sub-Saharan Africa.
And so to the rebels, that means that any black African up there in Tripoli is suspected of being or maybe is already found guilty of being a mercenary when, in fact, there's all kinds of migrant workers from all over the place who aren't from Libya but work there and are just regular civilians.
And the UN High Commissioner for Refugees representative is saying that these people must be protected and these crimes against them must stop immediately.
That's right.
They have been...
It's an incredibly racist set of actions that have been taken on the part of the rebels.
They have been doing either mass arrests where they don't sort of do police work or sort of investigation.
They don't have a warrant.
Obviously, this is just sort of lawless chaos.
But they're doing mass arrests of people with black skin.
And when they don't do the mass arrest, they do what we've seen previously, which is they tie their hands behind their back and they shoot them in the back of the head.
They even have dragged them to an area where there was bombings by Gaddafi to make it seem like, you know, we hide it and make it seem as if they were killed by Gaddafi.
And now, well, we don't have that much time, but I wanted to point to this article at Wired.com, the Danger Room there.
This is by Adam Ronsley, Gaddafi's loose weapons could number a thousand times Saddam's.
And this is, I guess, rumors of chemical weapons, but certainly gigantic quantities of conventional weapons and including their fear is surface-to-air missiles, shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles.
But anyhow, I guess we'll have to hold that till we get back from this break.
It's John Glazer, assistant editor at Antiwar.com, news.antiwar.com, and on the blog there as well.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all, welcome back to Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton talking with John Glazer, assistant editor at Antiwar.com.
Going over the news here, there's lots of it.
He's writing at news.antiwar.com there with Jason Ditz and also at antiwar.com/blog.
Tons of stuff there, but I was hoping it'd be okay if we get back here, John, to this Weapons on the Loose, the same thing that happened in Iraq.
In fact, I'm trying to remember the name of the place where there was just dump trucks full of explosives that went to the insurgency in Iraq and ended up killing a lot of Americans in the worst part of the war there.
And this is, I guess, the fear that's growing in even Washington, D.C., that who knows who, whoever has to occupy this place is going to have to fight, or whether civil war will be fought with these weapons that are now loose.
You know what?
One of the most amazing things about these weapons stockpiles, specifically, is how obvious and open Washington has been to admitting the fact that they're scared about these rebels' capabilities of handling these weapons.
In the beginning, as soon as Tripoli fell, we had some of the most hawkish neocons who don't admit America has ever done anything wrong being concerned, expressing concern about securing these weapons stockpiles, because they knew Qaddafi had a bunch of weapons.
And they were concerned, and still are, as anyone should be, that these rebels will get their hands on them and, number one, use them in a civil war that could descend into just horrible bloodshed in the coming months, or they'll sell them.
There's been concern that they'll sell them to their...
I mean, they already have ties.
Rebels in Libya already have ties.
They used to go to Iraq and Afghanistan to fight the American occupiers there.
They may sell them further to other insurgencies in the area and throughout the Middle East.
I mean, it's amazing how, in one breath, they express their lack of confidence in the rebels, and in the next breath, they just don't think there's anything wrong, they don't see anything wrong with having just ousted a dictator and put these rebels in charge, who have no experience and no way to really handle the huge task before them in a war-torn country.
What about the so-called transitional government there?
I don't know if it's still transitional, maybe it is.
Are they at least staying together?
They're staying together.
The primary group that heads the TNC, the Transitional National Council, is made up mostly of the rebels that are based out of Benghazi.
Now, the rebel faction is that, you know, ultimately fought every Qaddafi loyalist throughout the country, were from all over the country.
They were from all over the East, primarily, they're from just different neighborhoods and so on and so forth, but the TNC guys and the main head there, the chairman, is from one basic tribe in Benghazi, and they are relatively staying together.
They've made some comments about how they need to protect human rights and clean the dead bodies off of the streets to prevent widespread disease, and they're making all these wonderful comments, mainly to play to their Western supporters and make it seem like they're ready to rule the country, but they're generally staying together.
The rest of the rebel groups that make up this broader support for the council that people should be worried about, there's deep, deep divisions in there, and actually, one problem that's recently just came up is the fact that the rebels have appointed a former Qaddafi thug to head the security operations in the country, and many of the rebels have dissented from this, and it's creating even more divisions.
So, you know, little decisions like that can eventually accumulate and sort of bring on this potential chaos that everyone's worried about.
Yeah, this is what they call learning the lessons of Iraq, right?
Not leaving it alone, but make sure to not disband the army this time, but that means, in effect, betraying the people that we just fought for and overthrowing this government.
That's right.
So, you're judging just the figurehead, but not the state at all.
So, with regard to troops, the UN has just announced recently that they will send a couple hundred peacekeeping troops to train, and so on and so forth, but I personally feel that that could just be the beginning.
Again, politicians continue to say, you know, we don't have troops on the ground, on the table right now.
We're not considering that, but I'm not sure how it can be avoided if instability continues in Libya, and I think it would be too much of a political liability for all this chaos to continue, and I think that eventually, just as U.S. generals and NATO generals have predicted all along for months since April, eventually troops are likely to be introduced on the ground.
You know, I was talking with Pepe Escobar Friday, and he was saying that, well, we were talking about the plan for the Qatari peace force, and these are going to be the soldiers standing around guaranteeing security or whatever, but that very quickly, they're going to have, very probably anyway, two insurgencies on their hand.
One from the former regime people who want their power back, and another from the, especially the al-Qaeda type people that we just fought the war for, who are going to find out and be very disappointed to find out that they are not allowed in the new NATO-backed government, and at that point, then, it's pretty obvious, I think, the Qatari troops aren't going to be able to handle that, and so then again, we'll be right back at 2004, cut and run, or double down and finish the job, and I can't imagine it's really going to be the French, although maybe, it seems more likely it'll be Iowans over there enforcing the peace.
You know, I'm not one to find sort of silver linings in things, I can be a pessimist sometimes, and there's a lot to be pessimistic about with what's going to potentially happen in Libya.
The only upside, the only upside, is that Antiwar.com might get a little increase in their readership, because with the chaos that comes, and with the death, and with the blood, and with the sort of unintended consequences that invariably show up with these kinds of imperial adventures, you know, people start to get concerned, people start to wake up a little bit.
It takes a long time, and it takes, it's always a little too late, but, you know, part of what I think we want to do at Antiwar.com is push people to sort of be able to recognize these mistakes and these crimes from the beginning, as opposed to after the fact.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, that's the whole thing, is, you know, try to take these lessons and learn the right ones.
That's why I spent so much time on this show explaining, no, the surge didn't work, or whatever it is, trying to undo whatever the common narrative seems to be successful in getting people to believe, because it's always, you know, going to come back to haunt us when we let them get away with it.
If the surge worked in Iraq, it better work in Afghanistan, too.
Maybe we just need a surge into Libya and Somalia to clear those messes up, you know?
Surges are great.
David Petraeus taught us that.
That's right.
That's right.
And you know what?
An occupation can get really ugly, and what unfortunately ends up happening in an occupation is that people get so desensitized, they get used to the war, that they end up not paying attention to really serious things.
I just posted a blog right before this interview about WikiLeaks cables that revealed a war crime on the part of U.S. soldiers in Iraq in 2006.
They raided a home and ended up killing a couple guys, four women, and three children, one of whom was three years old, all tied hands behind their backs and shot them in the head.
That's a war crime.
And it happens often, similar things happen often right now in Afghanistan, because night raids are one of the primary strategies of our occupation in Afghanistan to fight the insurgency.
And if that stuff starts happening to a point in Libya where it becomes just so normalized, we'll be in a lot more trouble.
And you know, this fun drive at AntiWar.com is still going on, just throw it out there.
It's not finished yet, it's been going really well.
But I think now is a good time as any to point out to people that we still need people's help and we want to keep going with these anti-imperial educations.
So please, donate what you can.
Thanks very much for throwing that in.
It's AntiWar.com/donate, and we are AntiWar.com and we stay AntiWar.com, whether conservatives or liberals are the ones in power.
Alright, thanks very much John, appreciate it.
That ladies and gentlemen is a good reason to support AntiWar.com right there.
John Glazer, check him out at the blog there.
