All right, welcome back to the show, it's Antiwar Radio.
Next up is Jason Ditz, he's our news editor at Antiwar.com, news.antiwar.com.
Welcome back, Jason.
Hi, Scott.
How are you doing, man?
I'm doing good.
How are you?
I'm doing good.
Thanks for joining us today.
And you know what?
Sorry, I just lied to you.
I don't want to start with Libya.
I want to start with Tunisia, where there's big news from the birthplace of the Arab Spring, the Arab year of revolt here.
Right.
The first place to have major anti-government protests, and the first to successfully oust their dictator, Tunisia had their first free elections over the weekend.
And it was something of a surprise, but the Hezbollah, the moderate Islamist party, won pretty handily.
The final counts aren't in yet, so we don't know exactly how big a majority they have, but they do have the largest number of seats in the new parliament.
What's their platform?
Their platform is somewhat right of center.
I would say more conservative than extremist sort of Islamists.
Roughly in line with, say, the Pakistan Muslim League or the Christian Democrats in Germany.
They're the little bit right of center religious conservative types.
Now is there a more radical Islamist party that they are not?
Well, there are more radical Islamist factions.
I don't know if any of them actually competed in this election or not.
They certainly weren't major factions.
Most parties had traditionally been a major opposition force in Tunisia, although they were banned in 1989 after doing a little too well as the opposition party in that election.
And were just finally unbanned this year after the revolution.
How much authority does the newly elected whatever-it-is have?
What's the system?
A parliamentary system?
Well, it's sort of hard to say right now.
The current system is very sort of tentative about who has what power.
Well, you know, really what I should ask first was how much of the old state remains?
Did they just change the regime in power?
Did they really tear down the whole kind of system to start over?
Well, it's still a work in progress, but it looks like it's going to be a complete teardown.
This election, this parliament and inevitably prime ministers and presidents are going to be pretty much interim officials as they write a new constitution.
But winning a large number of seats in parliament is still significant because it gives them more influence over what the new constitution is going to look like.
So the local police agencies and whatever, though, they all still exist but have changed in their leadership?
Right.
Right.
For the time being, most of it is still in place, although a lot of the emergency laws and bans on public demonstrations and things like that have been cut back significantly.
Well, you know, as we always would point out, you know, when discussing the hypocrisy of the Republicans who support all these dictators, while the Americans support all these dictators while claiming that they support democracy, the problem is whenever they do have democracy like an election in Lebanon or an election in Gaza or I guess now an election in Tunisia, it only proves that the people of the Middle East don't want us.
That's why we have to support these dictators.
Look at Iraq.
We've got majority rule in Iraq.
They're kicking us out and doing the best they can to anyway.
And so I really wonder, you know, how this is going to shape up.
I think, you know, maybe as we get into Libya, we can talk about who we who the Americans have put in power there.
But it seems like all of this is just, you know, a midpoint in 30 years type war here where, you know, the chess pieces move around a little bit and then we end up going to war with the people who we pretend to be on the side of now who've overthrown our dictators over there.
You know, you can't let Islamists win.
That's my concern.
You know, is that that kind of narrative will take over in regards to Tunisia, Libya and the rest of them?
Well, right.
And Tunisia might be small enough and insignificant enough as a trading partner that the U.S. might look the other way more or less.
But that's already starting to take place in Libya with the government that the U.S. is backing in the first place, because on their Day of Liberation announcement on Friday, the Libyan government, well, the Transitional Council announced that they're an Islamic nation that's going to follow Sharia law as a basis for their legal system.
And there were all sorts of scare pieces about that in in the U.S. media.
Well, you know, with the election coming up, I guess if I have to place bets, I'd say be after the next election is when they'll put ground troops, you know, after the 2012 election like when they invaded Fallujah in 2004, it'll be like that.
But they can't do it before the election or I don't know, what do you think?
I wouldn't underestimate their ability to just do it nowadays.
It seems like the Associated Press was talking about Libya as a new model for U.S. intervention, primarily defending it on the basis that it's been cheaper than Iraq so far.
But I think the only real precedent that it's set is that the president can basically do what he wants.
And there's going to be very little, very little question from Congress about what happened.
Well, you know, these Democrats like to fantasize about, you know, baby blue UN peacekeepers going in there and making sure that everything's all right.
But I think the people of Iraq prove that, you know, occupy us, you better really mean it with hundreds of thousands of troops or you're not going to be able to.
And you know, these people's model for how to deploy the empire continues to crash against the rocks of reality time and time again, you know, which, of course, as we've discussed on the show before, is all to the good for them.
The worse it goes, the more war they get to have.
So who cares, you know, from the Pentagon's point of view.
But it never seems to go the way they thought it would.
So who lies to, you know, a side?
Right.
And Libya has, of course, been cheaper than Iraq so far, but Libya hasn't exactly gone to plan either.
Libya was supposed to be over in a matter of days as well.
And it's been eight months now.
God only knows how much longer.
Supposedly, the NATO is going to end the bombing campaigns in the next few days.
But whether that actually happens or not remains to be seen.
And even if they do, that's far from the end of NATO's involvement in the country.
Well, and now what's the word with this guy, al-Hakim Belhaj, the formerly CIA abducted and tortured leader of the Libyan Egyptian or Libyan Islamic fighting group?
Well, he's basically the military commander in Libya at this point.
And his faction, although he doesn't seem to have tons of political ambition himself as far as being the president or anything, his Islamist faction seems to be one of the two major factions within the National Transitional Council, along with the group of defectors from Qaddafi's government.
And they're starting to draw out battle lines for an internal fight now that Qaddafi's out of the picture.
Well, I don't know.
I mean, I guess they're asking in the chat room why I think they would even need to put troops in there.
But it just seems to me like if there's endless civil war, they're going to have to pick sides and train up an army and do purple-fingered elections in the same Iraq sort of model in order to someday build up an army strong enough to kick our guys out, I guess.
That's the way they do things pretty much, it seems like.
And I guess, you know, as long as the oil keeps pumping and all our allies keep getting it and getting the profits from doing the pumping and whatever, then maybe they don't care if the civil war rages.
But I don't know how you can have oil security and a civil war raging at the same time.
That's why I'm so negative about, you know, the future prospects of putting troops in there, man, or why I think it's so likely.
I don't know.
Anyway, I'm sorry to talk so much.
It's your interview.
We'll be right back, everybody.
Jason Ditz, news.antiwar.com.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Jason Ditz, news editor at antiwar.com, news.antiwar.com.
And I don't know if there was really a question in there, Jason, but I was wondering what you think about my calculation that you can't steal the oil without stability and you can't have stability in the eyes of the Pentagon unless you conquer the place.
And so therefore, there's going to be troops sooner or later, Western ones, probably American ones.
I think you're right on that.
It seems like sooner or later, there's going to be some sort of excuse for putting troops on the ground.
We've already got senators like Lindsey Graham calling for massive funding for the new government, whatever it looks like, and it seems like the next step is going to be backing them with military force.
Yeah, isn't that funny the way Graham says, yeah, we ought to spend a lot of money there at the same time.
He says, we're going to make a lot of money back off of this.
Boy, he's planning on stealing a lot of oil, I guess.
I didn't even know he owned an oil company, that Lindsey Graham.
Really, I don't know.
I think it's part of the, you know, like Justin says, Jus Ramondo says in his recent article that evil makes you stupid, where they just don't even know what's supposed to stay in the dark, smoky room in the back in the conspiracy and what they're supposed to say right into a TV camera.
Yeah, we're killing these people so we can steal their property.
Lots of it.
Great.
It was incredible.
He was literally talking about all the money that was going to be made by American companies and oil projects and other, presumably, arms companies making money selling new weapons after all the old weapons were looted and ferreted out of the country to various arms bazaars.
Yeah, you know, we tried to sell him a bunch of C-130s and armored personnel carriers and he just wouldn't spend the money we wanted him to spend, that Qaddafi.
Lindsey Graham was one of the ones over there trying to make that deal.
Just incredible.
All right, well, so which war?
I guess, let's talk about Somalia, because there's been major developments with the Kenyan invasion of Somalia.
Do I have it right that the State Department claimed that, gee, this took us by surprise?
We don't know the first thing about it.
Right, it seems like it took everybody by surprise and the thing I think is most interesting is the self-proclaimed Somali government is saying they oppose this, even as the Kenyan government is saying, oh, we talked to the Somalis, they're fine with this.
Well, and as you point out today at news.antiwar.com, the blowback's already hit.
Right, we've already had two grenade attacks in Kenya's capital city of Nairobi and, presumably, a lot more to come.
Of course, the U.S. warned Kenya that there was going to be blowback because the U.S. is an expert on that sort of thing, but they predicted that it would be foreigners that were targeted, and so Kenya ratcheted up their security for foreigners, and both of the attacks have come against regular Kenyans.
Well, you know, everybody, it's really Jason Ditz and only Jason Ditz who did the journalism, what, about a year ago, or maybe it was more than that now, when Uganda escalated their troop presence in Somalia under the African Union and bombed a soccer game that led directly to the blowback of the bombing at the watch party, I guess, for the World Cup in Uganda just a couple of weeks later.
There was no one else, nowhere else in the world you could have read that truth except at news.antiwar.com, and it's the same kind of thing here, it's, you know, it's like your Michael Shoyer, Robert Pape controlled laboratory experiment.
Is this guy, are these guys' thesis correct, is these guys' thesis correct, that actions have consequences?
Let's test it out.
Let's see what happens when countries invade Somalia.
Yep, they start getting blown up.
Right, and it seems like Ken, you could have taken Uganda's example there and realized that was going to happen, but I guess they decided to test it out for themselves anyhow.
Yeah, well, this Justin, the McRib is back for a limited time.
That's the news right now, seriously, on MSNBC.
It's not a commercial during the commercial break, it's the news on MSNBC as we're talking about this.
Now, here's the thing.
Speaking of news, it was a big deal that there was a famine in Somalia a couple of weeks ago for maybe one, possibly two news cycles in a row.
But whatever happened to that?
Was the message getting across that somehow this was Uncle Sam's fault?
Well, I think the thing which really seemed to be the most embarrassing part of it was that every time the UN or some other international group would send food aid into Mogadishu, they would have it all laid out in the refugee camp ready to be distributed.
And then troops for the self-proclaimed Somali government would show up and loot it all.
So they just decided it's better to change the subject.
Right.
Because, of course, those are the good guys, those troops.
And the fact that they keep showing up and stealing food from starving people doesn't play well with that narrative.
Yeah, well, and it is hundreds of thousands of people.
So it's, as far as I know, anyway, the worst famine going on on the planet Earth right now.
Well, it's not too hard to imagine why, of course.
We've got African Union troops attacking around the capital.
Ethiopia's invaded a few years ago and devastated most of the north and central part of Somalia.
Now we've got Kenyan troops invading the south.
The country is not prepared to handle a bad weather condition, a bad growing season.
There's very little savings among those people as far as being able to import food or anything like that.
Well, and you know, with this Kenyan intervention, if and maybe it's not ironclad, but it seems reasonable to assume that the Ethiopian intervention sponsored by the United States, the Ugandan intervention sponsored by the United States, since so far all they've done is empower this group, Al-Shabaab, from being the least part of the Islamic Courts Union to being this, you know, pretty destructive fighting force able to defeat the Ethiopians and drive them out of the country.
After all, you know, that was how much reaction they got just out of that first invasion.
And I think it was one of your pieces at News.
Antiwar.com, Jason, where you talked about the possibility that this will only strengthen Al-Shabaab more.
Now, I suppose maybe the Kenyans are especially, you know, well-equipped fighters and could just completely wipe them out or something.
But it seems much more likely, doesn't it, that they'll just melt away to fight another day and that ultimately they will just gain from this because they'll have just more recruitment shtick for the young and angry and armed to join their group.
Right.
And once again, we've got Al-Shabaab's leadership going around southern Somalia saying this is a Christian invasion because Kenya is a majority Christian nation.
So it fits well into their narrative of this being some sort of religious crusade against Somalia.
And the fact that French warships and U.S. drones are helping the Kenyans only adds to that.
So I think this will definitely in the long run be a big recruiting tool for them.
Yeah.
Well, and even for the war on terror supporters who blame Islam for all this, just look at the situation in Somalia, where the vast majority of Muslims are Sufis who are like, you know, the Unitarians of Muslims and are not like the Salafi, Takfiri, whatever secret caliphate thing you've been made to fear at all.
And yet the Al-Shabaab, I don't know how mystical they are.
I think they're probably at least they're much more vulnerable to the kind of radical Islam, supposedly, as they call it, that Osama bin Laden liked to talk about back when he wasn't dead.
Right.
And once again, I think a lot of it is just for rhetoric's sake.
I don't know how religious Al-Shabaab's leadership actually is in real life, but.
Well, they were acting like the Saudis and cutting people's hands off for stealing and things like that, you know.
Right.
And when you're resisting foreign invaders that are another religion, it plays pretty well in the streets to be the religious opposition to the foreign invasion.
It just goes right back to the heart of the whole thing from back before September 11th.
There's always going to be a crazy guy ranting on the street corner about some crazy thing that needs to be done.
But how do you get a regular person whose primary interest in life is getting by and providing for their family to follow a lunatic ranting on a street corner?
Well, try some drone attacks and some regime changes and sponsoring a different religious majority countries invading their nation time after time and see where that gets you.
You know, Somalia has one of the fastest growing economies in Africa before this transitional government set itself up.
And now they're starving to death, literally starving to death.
That's a shame.
Listen, thanks for all your coverage of that subject and everything else that you do there at news.antiwar.com.
Jason, I really appreciate it.
Sure.
Thanks for having me.
