05/26/14 – Jason Ditz – The Scott Horton Show

Hey y'all, Scott here.
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Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, and this is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
It's Memorial Day 2014, and we're wrapping up the show now with our old friend Jason Ditz, news editor at antiwar.com.
That's news.antiwar.com, and may I hasten to mention that it's their fun drive going on.
And when you talk about banging for your butt, you can't get better than antiwar.com.
Give me a break.
Jason Ditz, Justin Raimondo, Kelly Vallejos, that's all you need to know right there.
Jason and Eric, getting the news together for you from all around the world, all day, every day.
I don't know what I'd do without it.
And yeah, I partially benefit, but just a little.
It's more about everybody else but me.
The institution itself, so give them as much money as you can.
Okay, thank you.
So, let's talk about, first of all, well, I don't know, you pick.
We got an election of sorts, at least, in Ukraine.
The chocolate tycoon has come out on top, and also we've got God knows what's breaking out in Libya right now.
So, I guess, whichever you prefer to get us caught up on, go right ahead, and I'll try to come up with some follow-up questions.
Okay, I guess let's start with Libya, then.
It was eight days ago now that General Khalifa Hifter attacked Parliament with his self-proclaimed Libyan National Army.
They marched into Parliament, took the building over, and announced that Parliament was dissolved.
Parliament's not really dissolved, either, because they still keep meeting, just not in the building.
Right, well, and then, so, has he taken authority over the army?
Has the army given him authority over them, or how's that working out?
Because that's where the rubber really meets the road, or does it even matter how much of an army does he even have to command if he could command it?
Well, there isn't much of an army in Libya.
He has the support of parts of the army.
The Air Force has backed him, military intelligence has backed him.
The Navy is not backing him, and the chief of the Navy narrowly survived an assassination attempt after announcing he wasn't backing him.
There's some dispute as to how much of the Interior Ministry is backing him.
Some say they are, some say they're not.
And the real big question is how much the United States is backing him.
Yeah, well, so, give us some more of that background.
Well, General Hifter, who hasn't actually been a general for almost 30 years now, got his start with Gaddafi.
He helped Gaddafi take power in the 60s.
He was a loyal general throughout, up until the Chad War, when he got captured.
Gaddafi pretty quickly disavowed him once his troops got captured in Chad, and he was recruited by the CIA.
He was fairly openly and fairly common knowledge to join this National Salvation Front faction.
He was in the National Front for Salvation of Libya.
The former Prime Minister, Ali Zaydan, was also a big leader in that group, which was fairly openly backed by the CIA throughout the 80s as a tool for regime change, which never really happened until 2011.
Yeah, it was amazing back in 2011.
I think we talked about him specifically back then, even, because it was so open, and McClatchy Newspapers had the story first, I think.
But I don't even think they tried to really be that sneaky about it, that.
I think they were trying to reassure us, maybe, or reassure factions within the establishment, that, don't worry, we have some guys who are going to come out on top of this.
Because, you know, that Ahmed Chalabi and INC thing worked out so well in Iraq.
Don't worry, we've got some exiles that we're going to put right in power there.
That must have been part of the sales pitch, you know?
Oh, absolutely.
And the incredible thing is, Khalifa Hifter had been living in the region in decades after the regime change in Chad, when Gaddafi's allies took power.
The US evacuated all of the rebels from there, and he'd been living in metro DC for the last 25 years.
He was living, basically, a stone's throw away from Langley, Virginia, for decades.
Yeah, I think you even linked to the Google Map or something, didn't you, back in 2011?
Or was that Justin?
I think that was Justin.
Yeah, like, hey, look, everybody, this is how many times you would have to throw a rock before you hit CIA headquarters from this guy's front door, you know?
I can count it.
Like, walking paces.
Yeah, we had good times.
But then the question is, well, you say he's got, apparently, control of parts of the army.
How much of Libya did the army control before he took them over?
And does it look like they're now expanding that authority, or they're still fighting to hang on to what they had before?
Well, that's kind of the thing.
The Libyan army didn't control all that much of the country.
A lot of it was dependent on the support of Islamist militias, which were the big players in the ouster of Gaddafi.
Misrata's militia, of course, was notoriously brutal against what they saw as Gaddafi sympathizers.
Destroyed the whole neighboring town.
And these factions are still around, and these factions are really the ones that control most of the territory in Libya.
And Hifter's justification for the takeover has sort of morphed.
When he first took over parliament, it was to purge parliament of Islamists.
He made that his official stance for several days, and the State Department disavowed any knowledge of it.
Although, conspicuously, the U.S. had troops dispatched to Sicily in case they had to evacuate the embassy just two days before he took over.
So the idea that it was a surprise to them, I don't think is very credible.
But the real interesting thing is, General Hifter, after the State Department disavowed him, U.S. Ambassador to Libya, Deborah Jones, gave a sort of broad foreign policy speech.
It was broadcast on one of the C-spans, and she was very pro-Hifter, saying, Oh, you know, he's so misunderstood.
The media is really misinterpreting what he's doing.
He's just an anti-terrorism fighter.
And since her speech, Hifter's own official stance has changed to reflect that too.
Now instead of saying he's going to purge parliament of Islamists, he's purging parliament of terrorist supporters.
And says that parliament had turned Libya into a state sponsor of terror, and that was why he had to act.
Right.
And, well, of course that's partly true, right?
I mean, this represents the Americans finally turning against the Mujahideen that they had at least accidentally empowered.
I think maybe they were a little bit naive about how this thing was going to work out.
Not that they weren't warned by you and everybody else about who it was that they were actually fighting the war for back in 2011.
Well, right.
Not that that would justify further intervention from my point of view, but I'm just saying, it's sort of better than outright fighting on behalf of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, veterans of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, right?
Well, and his timing of the takeover was just a couple of hours after a new government was voted in in parliament, a new cabinet that was backed by the Muslim Brotherhood.
So, you know, when Zaydan was prime minister for months and months, Hifter was sort of talking about how he thought there needed to be changes in parliament, but he sort of looked the other way.
And the moment that this prime minister may take over, he launches this coup attempt.
All right.
Now, I already blew the break, but let me hold you here, and when we get right back, we'll pick it up right there.
It's Jason Ditz from news.antiwar.com.
See you there.
All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Jason Ditz, news.antiwar.com.
He's the news editor there at antiwar.com.
All right.
Anyway, before I let Jason talk more, which is what I want to hear, I have to say this one thing real quick that I didn't get a chance to work into the rest of the show.
All the media agrees that Obama surprised the American troops in Afghanistan with a surprise visit because he loves them so much, which made it all that more special for them that they got to be surprised by their heroic leader that they all worship so much.
And yet, isn't it the case that every single one of us in this country and probably everyone in the whole world knows that he has to sneak in at night unannounced because they lost the war and they're beset by enemies.
And if it was known that the heroic victor emperor was coming to see what was, you know, to check on his colony over there, they would blow him out of the sky and they know it and they dare not take the risk.
Same with him this whole time and George Bush this whole time, ever since at least the invasion of Iraq, that's how they've done it.
And every time the media goes along and calls it a surprise, like the surprise is just to make it that much better for the morale of the soldiers, rather than these heroic military conquerors are actually cowards and must sneak in in the middle of the night anonymously and then spin it in some retarded thing that no sixth grader ought to be fooled by.
Anyway, sorry, Jason, where we left off, we were talking about the coup such as it is so far in Libya and how it's come to this and the excuses for it and the degree of American support that I guess is still in question here.
Now, do you want to pick up with that before we get to Ukraine?
Does it seem to you like the Americans are committed to helping this Hifter guy see this through?
Or maybe they're just placing half a bet on him just in case or what?
Because like you said, there's not much of an army to rule the country with, assuming he could get everybody loyal, right?
And nobody wants to train them all up, a new 100,000 man army that their country can never afford, etc., like that?
Right, it does seem like they're hedging their bets here.
The ambassador spoke about him as sort of defending the country from terrorism, but the State Department officially insists he doesn't have anything to do with them.
There seems to be shaping up a civil war between supporters of Parliament and supporters of him.
And it really isn't clear who's going to win, so I think the U.S. is kind of playing both sides to the middle here, figuring that whenever it becomes apparent which side's going to win, that's the side they're going to say they were backing all along.
Alright, so let's switch to Ukraine because there's so much to cover here.
I hope most of the people are familiar with how we got into this mess, but we may not be able to cover all of that.
But anyway, obviously the country's very divided.
They've held this election, and now there were elections just a couple of weeks ago in the East about whether they want some degree of autonomy.
I think they left it sort of vaguely defined, where in some cases it sort of was a declaration of independence, but maybe just a declaration that they really want a lot more autonomy than they had, but still to remain within Ukraine.
But so now comes the presidential election held by the new coup government in Kiev, the American-backed government in Kiev, basically as their attempt to now legitimize their coup, basically, by having an election here.
But I guess, can you first of all maybe update us on how the actual voting went?
Did the people in the East even participate, or did they boycott the thing, or did they have a chance, they wanted to participate, were they able to, that kind of thing?
And then if you could tell us about the guy that everybody's saying is the landslide victor here, the chocolate king.
Yeah, well, most of the East did not vote in this.
There was some voting, some places opened, some places didn't open, a lot of ballots never showed up.
The major city in the protester held East, Donetsk, virtually none of the city itself voted.
People were being told that when their polls didn't open, they were being told, and it's not clear by who, that the voting was going to take place at the airport.
Everybody shows up at the airport, there's no ballots, there's no organization of any kind.
So for the most part, the East just plain didn't vote.
Whether they wanted to or not, most of them didn't really have a choice.
Alright, now, so I guess, when you tell us about the guy, as much as you know about him, could you please include what the people of the East think of him?
I mean, for example, Yulia Tymoshenko, the gas princess, was on the phone, talking about, you know, the entire eastern half of the country, as though they were all illegal aliens trespassing from Russia, and this and that, which, you know, I know she came in a distant fourth or second or whatever it was, pretty distant, but she had basically, you know, renounced any pretension to authority over them with that kind of statement.
But I wonder if, you know, there's a chance that maybe the people of the East, you know, sort of like this guy, maybe they could see him as a compromise type of a candidate, and give everybody an out here, rather than go further down the path toward more of a full-scale civil war.
Already, you know, scores have been killed, of course.
Well, he definitely could be a compromise candidate here.
Petro Poroshenko, the chocolate king, he's a billionaire by a fair bit, mostly chocolate, as you'd imagine from his name.
He also owns a couple of news stations in Ukraine.
But where he stands is sort of unclear right now, because for somebody that's been in politics pretty much non-stop since 2004, he's just constantly changed parties to back whoever happens to be in power or is about to take power at any given time.
He was holding key positions in the last elected government, up until about a year before the ouster by the Maidan protesters.
It was starting to become apparent that that government was losing support.
He was one of the first ones to jump on the protest bandwagon to oust that government, and now here he is as the replacement for that government.
And he was in the Tymoshenko government before that, so he's really sort of the consummate politician being able to read what direction the country is going and jumping on the bandwagon.
Well, I don't know if it's even conceivable that the Kiev government will be able to consolidate control over the East, and things could get much worse before that can be accomplished on their part.
But what about going forward from here?
Has this guy made it clear exactly what his position is on these sort of all-or-nothing trade deals with the EU, with Russia, with the International Monetary Fund, and whether he's willing to try to liquidate all the last assets in the country to transfer all the wealth out, or what the hell he's doing?
They tried to do it their way before, and it's completely blown up in their face here, right?
I just wonder whether, well, maybe a better way to put it, are the Americans conceding, are they telling this guy, go ahead and compromise, rather than sticking with our former demands, which is you can have a deal with us, but not with the Russians?
Well, we're sort of getting mixed signals out of that.
He's given some lip service, at least, to compromise and to making deals with Russia.
He's got some pretty significant business interests in Russia that would certainly make it awfully difficult for him to be the harsh anti-Russian that Turchinov was.
And at the same time, those protesters that ousted the last elected government in Kiev, the Maidan protesters, are still there.
They didn't go anywhere, even after they ousted that government.
All these ultra-nationalist factions, the right sector, they're all still there, and they're all demanding extremely harsh measures be taken against the East to ensure the country's territorial integrity.
So he's got to sort of find a way to, if he does want to make a compromise, do it without alienating the protesters.
And it has this same situation in common with Libya, where just thank goodness that all these different factions are so weak that nobody's going to really be able to kill hundreds of thousands, probably.
They're going to have to figure out some kind of other solution, because nobody really has the ability to wage full-scale mechanized warfare, you know?
Oh, right.
The Ukrainian military is really a joke at this point.
It's mostly still just Soviet equipment, and not even the good Soviet equipment, because Russia kept most of that.
So it's a lot of the gear from the Soviet Union circa the 1960s.
Most of it's in disrepair.
Very little works.
Even Jeeps and things like that that they had, a lot of them have, you know, the battery is dead, half the tires are flat.
When they withdrew from Crimea, there was sort of a two- or three-day period between when Russia gave them a deadline to be out of Crimea, because the annexation had already taken place, and when they actually got out.
And it wasn't so much that they were resisting giving up that territory, it's that their vehicles and whatnot flat out wouldn't start.
And one of the governors from the western part of Ukraine had to loan them some money so that they could buy gasoline for their trucks and new batteries and move these vehicles out of the area.
Yeah.
You know, I read this thing.
It was very biased against him, too, by Yulia, whatever is her name, writing in the New Republic about the grandma warriors.
And this is just the most brilliant tactic of warfare, even if you take at face value the way she describes it, that these are all just vicious old ladies, or whatever her spin is, that when the armored personnel carriers come into town, they are the front.
And she calls them shock troops, the grandma shock troops.
But what they do is they run up unarmed to the APC and dare these young men to massacre them.
And the young men in the APC say, no.
And then all of a sudden, and this is the part where she may be taking liberties, I don't know, but it sounds like a good tactic anyway, then all of a sudden uprush some locals with rifles and disarm them.
And another victory for the grandma brigade.
Not a shot fired.
Another detachment disarmed and defanged.
So it's a hell of a story anyway.
I don't know if you saw that one.
It is.
And I've actually seen some footage of Easterners confronting the military coming in.
And that's not that far off from what's happening, at least the first part.
I mean, you never really see the guys with rifles coming out to disarm them.
You see little old ladies and sometimes little old men along with them coming up and confronting these armored personnel carriers.
And, you know, sometimes a troop commander that's in the armored personnel carrier, you'll see a little old lady slap them in the face or something.
They're not welcome here and tell them to hand over their guns.
For the most part, these troops, you know, they're poorly paid troops, not willing to attack their own people, which is, of course, a blessing here.
Right.
By the way, let me ask you about this, as long as we're over time, but I'll let you go in just a sec.
All this controversy, I don't really care, but there's a big controversy, well, I guess it kind of matters just because it shows the honesty or not of the way the Russians are dealing in this.
They have said that they're pulling the troops back from the border and then perhaps in different circumstances, they're recalling their troops to their bases or something.
And all along, they've been saying this for weeks, and all along the Westerners and the head of NATO and American politicians and others have said they haven't seen a shred of evidence that the Russians are pulling back from the border, etc., etc., and so you know how they are.
You just can't believe a word they say about anything.
Maybe that's right, but I just wonder whether you could help fill in some of the gaps there.
Yeah, well, I mean, the problem is there's not this conspicuous military presence at the border to begin with.
The fact that Russia is doing training operations somewhat near the Ukrainian border was seen as a provocative action on paper, but NBC News did a great job when this first started being a story of sending some people actually to that border, crossing the Ukraine-Russia border, taking pictures, and you don't see troops there, by and large.
I mean, there were some tanks, a lot of trucks.
If you look hard enough, you could find them, because they were taking part in military exercises a few miles off the border, but the fact that there wasn't this big, obvious invasion force massing at the Ukrainian border in the first place means that it's not that obvious when they're withdrawing.
Makes a great talking point, though, to spin.
Right, and Russia's sort of been not very clear about their intentions with when they're going to withdraw that training force.
Some have said it's going to happen in a few weeks.
Some have said it's already starting to happen.
Ukraine's border patrols have said they've seen some signs of movement away from the border, but they can't tell how much, and a lot of it just seems like it's not very well organized at all, and it's not clear what they're doing.
Right.
All right, well, we're already over time, so I'll let you go, but thank you very much for your time, and I hope we can talk again soon.
Sure, sure, thanks for having me.
Great talking to you.
All right, that's the great Jason Ditz, news.antiwar.com.
And you know what?
Honestly, out of everything that there is on the Internet, if you've got limited time, you want to keep up, news.antiwar.com.
That's what you need to know the most, and Jason is really on top of it for you.
That's news.antiwar.com.
And this week especially, antiwar.com.donate as well.
And that's it for the show.
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