I'm Scott Horton.
This is anti-war radio.
All right, y'all welcome to the show.
It is anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our guest tonight is Reese Arlett.
He's a journalist and author.
His most recent book is called conversations with terrorists.
And fun fact, if you just put the term Iran debate in YouTube, you can watch a panel discussion about Iran featuring Reese Arlett and myself from back in late 2010.
Just search YouTube for Iran debate for that.
And he's got a brand new one.
That's in the progressive and I think a couple other places as well.
Uh, malicious become power centers in Libya.
Welcome to show Reese.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great.
Thanks for having me.
Uh, well, you're welcome.
Thank you for showing up.
I appreciate it.
Uh, very interesting journalism.
You got here.
I take it.
You just got back from Libya, correct?
Fairly recently within the last few weeks.
And, uh, where else did you go while you were gone?
Well, uh, before that I was in Tunisia and before that I was in Syria, Egypt, Gaza, Iraq, and Turkey.
So I've been all over the region in the last six months, let's say.
Oh, wow.
Okay.
Uh, yes, I was under the impression that you'd been to Tunisia and Syria as well, but I didn't know that you'd been just all over the place.
Yeah.
I'm researching a new book on the Arab spring and I'm trying to get to as many of the countries as I can.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, so, uh, how goes the Arab spring in Libya?
We bought an air war there and that was the last anybody heard of it in American media anyway.
Well, remember this was the successful war.
This was a prior, no American troops died.
Only a billion dollars spent.
Although that they never revealed how much the CIA and state department spent.
That's how much the Pentagon spent allegedly.
Uh, and, um, you know, uh, anti-U.S. dictators deposed and, uh, democracy is flourishing.
That's the official story, except of course it's not.
And, uh, they're having elections a week from Saturday, July 7th, but a few people expected to resolve the very serious problems brought on by the NATO attack and, uh, and, uh, invasion of Libya.
The militias that the U.S. backed are now warring with each other.
Some have turned into criminal gangs.
They call them a new Libyan mafia.
Others are allied with political parties or sometimes they're the same.
The both groups are doing the same thing.
Uh, and, uh, they are, um, it's a very dangerous trend because when political parties have their own militias, there's absolutely no incentive to dissolve them.
And they become a permanent part of the landscape.
Like we've seen in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other parts of the world.
Well, and are they constantly battling for territory or is there, uh, you know, some kind of basic truce going on?
Money, territory, power, all three.
Um, some of them, I talked to some, uh, oil company executives who said they, within a month, two different militia groups had occupied their buildings demanding extortion money.
So basically we're going to take over your office and kidnap your CEO, uh, in in return for some, uh, we'll only let them go if we give you, if we get some money, um, power because the elections are coming up and political parties are forming and everybody claims that they want to see the militias dissolve, but it's the other guys who aren't doing it.
So meanwhile, everybody keeps their militias.
Uh, and then to some extent, uh, it's territory.
They, uh, set up roadblocks at various parts of the country, uh, inside cities sometimes, uh, use it to extort money or to let their rivals know that they control this territory.
Uh, so it's a very unstable and very dangerous situation.
Well, is there any one militia that's claiming that it is actually the national army of Libya and the rest owe allegiance to it or one that's favored by the ruling council?
Yeah.
It's called the national army.
That's the one that's the militia that claims it's the national army.
The problem is it's very weak.
Um, there's just one of many groups.
I'll give you an example.
Very recently, the, um, Tripoli airport was taken over by a militia and out of town militia, and they had nothing to do with the airport.
They were complaining that one of their leaders had gotten arrested by the, uh, police and they stopped all the air traffic.
They forced passengers off of foreign bound flight, uh, and close the airport down for a day.
And in the people who responded were not the national army.
They were not the national police force.
They were rival militias.
They were the only ones who had the military capability and the leadership structure, et cetera, to common.
So they went in and they negotiated with the other militia and they pulled out and there was a promise of freeing the leader and so on and so forth.
But you'd think if your country's major airport was seized by armed forces, your, your national army or police would be called out, but they weren't.
Well, now is the place crawling with the intelligence services and special forces units of Western Europe and the United States, or we're just letting the pot stew over there for a little while and we'll get back to them later.
What's going on with that?
I didn't see any of them.
That doesn't mean they're not there, but they're, they're certainly not obvious and people aren't talking about them.
Um, I'm sure there are, uh, people out of the U S embassy and British embassy and elsewhere who are, uh, making alliances with these, uh, militias.
And when you say in your article that the oil fields and oil refineries never did come under threat during the war.
And so all that is basically still just humming along.
I suppose the rest of the country doesn't really matter as long as that's true from the point of view of the empire, huh?
Well, the, the foreign, uh, oil companies for sure, our presence, uh, we were talking a moment ago about, uh, you know, military or intelligence services.
They're not operating in the open.
Their foreign oil companies of course are, they have joint ventures.
They have a pipeline to Italy, direct from Libya, you know, longstanding, um, ties to the Libyan oil industry.
And, uh, they've got their back to not quite a hundred percent, but close to it of oil production, uh, mostly benefiting the foreign oil companies.
So that makes them very happy.
They'd like to see a more stable political situation, but you know, they can live with unstable politics if the oil, if the crude is flowing.
And of course the argument of the U S was that oil had nothing to do with the U S invasion and the NATO attacks and so on.
And this is all pretty sure coincidence, presumably, uh, whereas countries that are facing far more greater, uh, humanitarian disasters in Africa, for example, in the Congo or elsewhere, uh, there's no NATO attacks there.
Uh, there's no oil there either.
So there's no question that, uh, the control of the strategic oil supplies of the Middle East are high on the list of, uh, the U S empire.
Well, now would you agree that this started really naturally enough, right?
With the, the suicide by fire and the, the, uh, massive protest movement that inspired the revolution inspired in Tunisia and then spreading to Egypt.
It seems to me like where the counter revolution, the Saudi and American, or I should say American and Saudi counter revolution really kicked in.
First was in Libya where it, you know, in Egypt, they try to keep their dictatorship till the very last minute.
Then they tried to go for Omar Suleyman, the torture dictator guy who lost, you know, their, their influence in Egypt seemed to wane.
They tried to get a handle on things in Libya because Gaddafi, he wasn't really one of their sock puppet dictators.
They'd only just kind of let him in from the cold, uh, a few years back.
And yeah, he was buying some weapons, but not that many.
And he's still kind of arrogant enough to be independent enough so they could get rid of him and pretend they were on the side of the revolutionaries in this one instance, and I guess they're kind of playing the same game in Syria.
Whereas in the rest of the region, all those monarchs already belong to us and we're supporting them against their own people in every case, but they can always just point at Libya and point at Syria and talk about how, you know, it's like that time we liberated France from the Nazis.
Oh, yes.
Yes.
To what you've said, um, it's, uh, the, the revolutions in all of the countries from Tunisia to Egypt, to Libya, to Syria are genuine popular mass uprisings.
Uh, they're also not, um, uh, led by, uh, forces who are capable of, or interested in making complete revolution.
Uh, it's a, it's a coalition in most cases of Islamists or liberal Democrats, leftists, it's a, it's a hodgepodge and the U S and its allies are trying very much to take advantage of the situation to turn it to the U S favor.
Uh, but you have to go country by country.
Uh, Tunisia is relatively stable.
They are voting and fair elections.
Uh, there is a coalition government and most of the most important thing is that there's freedom to organize trade unions and hold street demonstrations and other things that were not legal before.
And so even though the Islamist party and even more right wing extremists, Islamists are vying for power, there is an opportunity for left and progressive forces to organize in Tunisia.
And that's true in Egypt as well.
And, and I would argue in, in Libya and Syria as well.
So on the one hand, you have the U S trying to foment counter-revolution and bring it, use the revolutions as an excuse to bring in some kind of pro U S regimes.
Uh, and on the other hand, you have this groundswell from below.
That's not going to go for that.
And I've interviewed people in all of those countries who are no more interested in having a U S sponsored dictator than they were having interested in having their old dictator.
Well, and yeah, it seems like, especially in Libya, for example, Pandora's box has been open.
The consequences can't be undone.
And we already see the war spreading to Mali where the North is now seceding from the South because they're now armed because all of Gaddafi's mercenaries, Tuareg mercenaries, uh, once his regime fell, well, they went home and brought all their weapons with them and decided autonomy wasn't good enough.
They wanted independence.
And then that, uh, prompted a coup d'etat in the South.
And now they're at war basically down there in Mali.
And Hillary Clinton, uh, says that it's jihadist terrorists.
Nobody knows where they came from, but all of a sudden there might be a need to intervene in Mali.
Yes.
Although I don't think we're going to see that anytime soon, Mali doesn't have any oil, remember.
Uh, but, uh, I'm sure the U S is a meddling in whatever way it can to bring back a pro U S our government in Mali.
Yeah.
I mean, it's exactly like Afghanistan and Iraq.
The U S goes in with one vision of, uh, replacing an old anti U S government with a pro U S government and then going home.
But the world is a lot more complicated than that.
And Afghanistan has become a war in Pakistan next door.
Iraq kicked the U S troops out and, um, has a government more friendly to Iran than it is to the United States.
So while the U S is very, very powerful and they want to dominate wherever they can, they keep running into trouble.
And actually it's a sign of the weakness of the empire that, uh, their plans don't, uh, work out the way they thought they would.
All right, y'all.
This is anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Reese Ehrlich, author of the book conversations with terrorists, and he's writing a new one about the Arab spring.
He's just back from touring all around the middle East, uh, writing about the different States of the revolutions and counter revolutions there.
Now, can you, uh, tell us a little bit about your view of the Muslim brotherhood in Egypt?
Uh, of course they won the parliament, the military dissolved it.
Uh, they won the presidency and the military preemptively stripped the presidency of all of its power before, uh, democracy in action, isn't it?
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
This is the back to the military.
They're paid, bought and paid for by the U S Pentagon.
Right.
In fact, uh, I don't know if you saw this, but the editor of foreign affairs, the council on foreign relations journal, Gideon Rose, uh, went on the layer news hour, I believe it was yesterday, uh, could have been the day before yesterday and said, as long as they deliver stability and peace with Israel, and that is, I guess, by definition, essentially a nice, docile American client, and we'll not push you too hard on domestic concerns, which means we will push you to keep Islamists out of power there.
Am I reading that right?
Uh, yes, that, that is a strain of thinking in the U S foreign policy establishment.
Uh, it's, you know, they consider themselves realist, which is, oh yes, the military does these awkward and, uh, evil things, but you know, they're the force for stability and we've got a, we've got good ties with them.
And, uh, it's more important what the U S and Israel think than what the people of Egypt think.
Luckily, the people of Egypt haven't gotten the program yet and they keep voting for the wrong people and, uh, insisting that the elections be upheld.
Um, your original question was about the Muslim brotherhood.
They are a conservative, I would call them center right party that is willing to abide by elections, uh, so long as it's consistent with their own, uh, maintenance of power.
And they had actually been cooperating a great deal of the top leadership of the Muslim brotherhood had been cooperating a great deal with the military.
They thought they could kind of deal with them and exclude the revolutionaries of Tahir square and the trade unions and the other forces and the military stabbed him in the back by doing all those things you just mentioned.
So now that Boston brotherhood has tacked the other way and seeking an alliance with the, with the other candidates, the more leftist and progressive or let's just say left of center candidates, uh, that ran, uh, in the last presidential election and have some presence in the parliament and they're seeking an alliance with them against the military.
So, uh, they're a real waffling force.
Uh, we'll see in the weeks and months ahead, uh, what they do.
I think they have to have some kind of a turnover of the government from the military, which currently is in control to the civilians.
And then hopefully there'll be at least some kind of freedom to organize and make changes there, but you can't have the military continue running the government.
Uh, among other things are corrupt as hell.
They have, um, they run all kinds of businesses and, and, um, uh, engage in all kinds of extortion and bribery, et cetera.
Uh, just on that level alone, not to mention all the other repressive things they do, the people of Egypt are not going to stand for their continued rule.
Well, and you know, this is how we get into this mess.
I mean, I guess I should say, you know, recently, this is how we get into these messes backing dictators here.
You know, the, over there at the council on foreign relations, they can literally rationalize this to themselves and say, you know, torture whoever you want or whatever, we'll just pretend that's your internal affairs.
When meanwhile, we're propping them up in every way.
They're the military dictatorship of Egypt because we say so in the first place.
Yeah.
And we pretend that we're innocent of their crimes.
Well, let's just take another example.
Syria, you could argue is just engaging in matters internal to its own affairs, right?
I mean, Syria hasn't invaded anybody.
They're not sending their troops to other countries.
That would be some kind of an external threat.
But of course, when we don't like the government, then we feel free to interfere in their internal affairs.
But if we like, or potentially want to have an alliance with somebody, well, then we say we're not going to interfere.
It's the good old consistency of us foreign policy.
I know I do want to ask you all about Syria.
But first, you mentioned that you went to Iraq lately in this trip in the last few months.
And I wonder what's it like in Baghdad?
How much power and influence does the United States of America still have in Baghdad?
I haven't heard a word out of there.
I mean, obviously there's bombings all the time, but do the Americans have any influence left?
Less and less.
By the way, I was in northern Iraq in the Kurdish region, but I follow closely what's going on in Baghdad.
When the U.S. signed the treaty with the Iraqi government under the Bush administration to pull all the troops out by the beginning of this year, they didn't think they'd have to do it.
They had their fingers crossed.
In fact, they had fingers and toes crossed.
And they assumed after the election, they'd just renegotiate.
When Obama came to power, he thought he would just renegotiate and they'd keep 20,000, 30,000 U.S. troops there as a major force for U.S. influence.
Well, the Iraqis made the U.S. live up to the actual wording of the treaty and all the troops are out.
And they're making them reduce the size of the embassy.
And they were going to have, I forget now, 2,000 guards to guard the State Department.
The state, basically the U.S. officials can't leave the compound in Baghdad for security reasons.
They can't even go out to various parts of the country like you would under normal circumstances.
So the U.S. intelligence, military and diplomatic presence is way, way, way reduced compared to what they had wanted to have.
And the Iranians have always had tremendous influence with the Shiite parties there, particularly with al-Maliki, but with a number of others as well.
And I mean, just by example, even when the U.S. troops were there, U.S. presidents visited Iraq in the dead of night.
They'd fly into a U.S. controlled air base.
They'd speak to a few U.S. troops and then they'd leave.
When Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, visited Iraq, he came in an open convertible.
He drove across the border and had a wild crowd supporting him all over Iraq.
And I'm not a supporter of Ahmadinejad by any means and his repression against his people in Iran.
But it just shows you the wild difference.
The U.S. spent 10 years, close to a trillion dollars.
How many, 30,000 American?
No, sorry, 3,000, 4,000 American troops dead.
And the victor is Iran.
Under both Bush and Obama, there was a thinking, we're the United States, we're the number one power in the world.
And yes, Maliki might have his ties to Iran, but we're going to be the counterbalance.
And our troop presence there long term is going to guarantee that the oil flows to the U.S. and Western countries.
It's a stable pro-U.S. regime.
What they didn't calculate was that the Iraqi people were stronger than that.
And the minute you have anything, and I'm not claiming they were free and fair elections, but the minute you have something that approaches an expression of popular will, the U.S. loses.
And that's happening in Libya.
It's certainly what happened in Syria.
If there ever were free elections there, it happens all the time in Afghanistan.
But the U.S. thinking is, well, we can impose our will with troops.
And so when the Iraqis insisted that the status of forces agreement be adhered to and all the troops be withdrawn, the whole rug was pulled out from under.
The U.S. actually lost the war in Iraq somewhere back around 2004, 2005.
It's already lost the war in Afghanistan.
It's just going to be how many more people are going to die prior to the U.S. figuring that out.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, and then the same question goes for Syria.
This is the crisis they just can't wait to wade into.
And I don't think, you know, any discussion of this is complete without introducing it with that quote from Hillary Clinton on CBS News when the question, of course, was, what's taking so long, Madam Secretary, for us to get this war going in full gear?
And her answer was, she's making excuses now for taking so long for the war.
And she says, well, Hamas and Al Qaeda both support the rebels in this thing.
And so are we supporting Hamas?
Are we supporting Al Qaeda in Syria, she asked.
And then ever since then, that's exactly what she's done, apparently, is, you know, have the CIA coordinate with the Turks, the Saudis, the Qataris to funnel weapons in to the revolutionaries, whoever they are in Syria.
Yeah, it's it's a very complicated situation.
I've been in Syria numerous times over the years, including since the uprising started.
It was a genuine, popular uprising against a repressive government.
But particularly now, it's gone on over a year.
The U.S. and the Saudis and the Turks are interfering, trying to not simply support legitimate opposition, but to see that whoever comes to power is going to be pro-U.S., pro-Saudi or pro-Turk, although those three things are not necessarily all the same.
And the people of Syria are suffering.
Meanwhile, the repression by the Syrian government is outrageous.
I mean, just on the level of what kind of government sends tanks and artillery to shell cities?
I mean, that should tell you something about the quality of the government in Damascus.
It it's not clear who's going to end up winning.
Right now, it's a stalemate.
It's possible that the opposition is fighting, you know, it may win.
But as long as these factions, the armed factions, are playing such a strong role armed by the CIA and Saudis and others, the worse it is in the long run, because that's exactly what happened in Libya, which is you get armed militias, in some cases, Islamic right-wing extremists, and they want to hold power when the fighting's done.
And they've got the guns to do it.
So, yeah, the U.S. is, and actually, I've interviewed people in the State Department, and they're in a complete mess because they can't intervene militarily, at least not for the moment, because it would inevitably mean sending in Western troops and getting shot at and being bogged down in a long-term war.
And on the other hand, they're trying to work with, in some cases, right-wing extremists that they know are going to turn on them when the fighting stops.
So the U.S. is in a real bind about what to do.
Well, and, you know, we talked about the possibility of war in Syria since before the invasion of Iraq, even.
It was clear enough that this was the neoconservative agenda, was to have America fight all of Israel's closest enemies anyway in the near term, including Bolivia, was on the list, according to Ariel Sharon.
And then the idea, you know, in the mind of anyone who was not one of these neocons, always sprang next, was, well, but then what would happen?
What if you did have a regime change in Syria?
Who's going to take over then?
And no one could ever imagine anything other than a long-term civil war by all these different ethnic and religious factions until finally the Muslim Brotherhood wins at the end, right?
Or who had a better idea than that for the new democracy that's supposed to spring up there when Assad and the Ba'athists are gone?
If you listen to the neocons or read their material, they had this, they live in this never-never land where their wishes will always come true.
So their plan was, they actually, quite a number of them wanted to invade Iran actually before the Iraq war, but they were split.
Some wanted to attack Iraq first and some wanted to attack Iran first.
But what would happen is the military, US military would come in, they'd have precision bombing and missiles and blah, blah, blah, and the people would rise up and bring to power a pro-US strongman.
And that was going to happen once it happened in Iraq or Iran, then Syria would fall next and, you know, like dominoes, you'd have pro-US regimes throughout the world or throughout the region.
And that was totally disconnected from reality the minute they tried anything when it was obvious in Iraq, within a matter of months of the invasion, that it wasn't going according to plan.
They had their US strongman, Chalabi, and everybody hated him, which, by the way, he's now allied with Iran.
Remember the great hero that was promoted by the US?
Always was, Reece.
That's the big joke, right?
So, you know, the neocons had their plans.
It's not like they didn't know what they planned turned out to be totally disconnected from reality.
Well, I'm sorry, very quickly now, we're almost out of time, but maybe it's not such a big deal.
It's the Ba'athist fall, the Muslim Brotherhood takes power.
That doesn't necessarily mean full-scale war against all the different ethnic and religious factions there, right?
No, it means that the problem is nobody knows exactly the relative strength of the different factions within Syria because they're atomized, because there's a great deal of repression.
I've met with some of the opposition people.
They're left of center.
People, trade unions are trying to get organized, student movements trying to get organized.
So there are different political tendencies.
Nobody can, I mean, there's no question that the Islamists are a strong component force of it, but they, the longer the fighting goes on and the worse the repression is and the more the US meddles, the more these right-wing extremists are going to have some influence.
That's the real danger.
There's got to be an end to the, you know, there's got to be an end.
There's got to be an end to the regime and free and fair elections and let people get organized to turn Syria into at least a non-repressive state.
All right.
Well, I'm sorry.
We're all out of time.
We got to leave it right there.
But thank you very much for your time on the show tonight, Reese.
Thank you for having me.
Everybody, that is Reese Ehrlich.
His website is ReeseEhrlich.com, ReeseEhrlich.com, his recent piece in the progressive is militias become power centers in Libya.
This has been Antiwar Radio for this evening.
We'll be back next Friday from 630 to seven.
I'm Scott Horton.
Full archives are available at Antiwar.com/radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
Full archives are available at Antiwar.com/radio.
