08/17/14 – Jason Ditz – The Scott Horton Show

For Pacifica Radio, August 17th, 2014.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
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Today's guest is the great Jason Ditz.
He's the news editor of the most important project on the internet, AntiWar.com.
His particular address is News.
AntiWar.com.
And I will hereby beseech you to read everything he writes all day long there at AntiWar.com.
Five or ten pieces a day, basically.
Giving you the most important summaries of all the most important news on the American empire.
It's really great stuff.
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.
I appreciate you joining us here again on the show today.
And I've got a lot of stuff to ask you.
I've asked you on because I've been off the air for the fun drive the last couple of weeks.
And there's so much to catch up on.
There are very few people who can really answer like an expert on all of these different wars that America is involved in around the world.
And so I'm very happy that I can turn to you and bring you on to get us caught up here.
So, first of all, I want to start with Israel-Palestine.
Is it the case, then, my best understanding is that the ceasefire for now is holding.
Is that right?
Yes, it seems to be.
And it's been about a week since there was any serious fighting now.
There was a little brief period of firing on both sides.
But the ceasefire is holding.
The treace talks in Egypt seem to be moving forward.
There was a leak last night of the draft terms of what Egypt proposed for a final settlement.
Although, so far it's not clear if either side accepts it.
And, well, talk about that a little bit.
Do you know what the terms are?
Yeah.
Well, the big thing is, of course, both sides agree to stop firing on each other.
Israel agrees to stop sending troops into the Gaza Strip.
They agree to stop launching airstrikes against the Gaza Strip.
The Hamas and Islamic Jihad agree to stop firing rockets out of the Gaza Strip.
Fishing zone is doubled from three miles off the Gaza Shore to six miles off the Gaza Shore.
There is also a promise to open the Rafah border crossing from Gaza into Egypt under EU supervision and Palestinian Authority supervision.
Really?
And that's the Egyptian proposal?
Yeah.
And keeping in mind that Egypt is run, again, by an American-backed sock puppet, fascist dictator who does whatever Israel wants most of the time.
Even maybe more than Mubarak, huh?
Oh, very much so.
In fact, that was sort of a big problem this time around, that Mubarak always kept some ties to Hamas.
So he was always the go-to guy when they had to negotiate ceasefires.
Well, since this summer coup last year, the new Egyptian government doesn't really have any Hamas ties.
So they didn't really have contacts with which to actually go get the talks going.
Yeah, so it's taken that much longer to work these things out.
That sounds like a pretty generous proposal, relatively speaking.
I don't mean in real terms, Jason, of course, but compared to the current situation, opening up the Rafah border crossing under the control of European authorities?
Wow.
And that means, in essence, that the Egyptians and the Israelis can't just close it like a light switch whenever they feel like, right?
Well, I mean, I guess they still could.
Politically, it would be more difficult, though, wouldn't it?
It would be much more difficult to actually do so.
And Israel also agreed to open their own border crossings into Gaza to facilitate travel between Gaza and the West Bank and to give more permits for travel in between the two.
Where right now, it's virtually impossible to go from one to the other, and has been for years.
So if you happen to be in Gaza when the split between Hamas and Qatar took place, you're basically stuck in Gaza.
Well, you know, let me ask you this, Jason.
It was a few weeks back now, I interviewed Max Blumenthal for this show.
In fact, a couple of times, but I guess it would be almost four weeks ago, five weeks ago now.
He explained how Netanyahu lied the people of Israel into war on this by pretending that the three kidnapped boys were still alive and being negotiated for, that he was attempting to negotiate for their safe return.
While at the same time, pretending as though it was just some kind of established fact that Hamas had started the war.
And then he did his mass roundups and all the killings on the West Bank and attacks, even airstrikes on the Gaza Strip before they even fired the first rocket.
So we all know that this is all just Israel aggression, a giant canned hunt against their prisoners in the Gaza concentration camp, such as it is there.
But what I don't really get is, why?
Because at best, if you take their, you know, stated goals for it, well, we wanted to get rid, completely destroy their capacity to build and fire rockets.
Well, come on, that doesn't make any sense.
We're talking about rockets made out of plumbing pipe that there's an unlimited supply of, or pretty much, right?
So they couldn't have done anything but get rid of a certain percentage and probably got Hamas to fire off a bigger percentage than they actually found to destroy it.
And I guess there's the tunnels and this and that.
But politically speaking, on a little bit higher level, what do you think that they were actually trying to accomplish with this most recent war against the Gazans?
And did they accomplish it?
Well, I think the big thing that they wanted to accomplish was to split up the unity government pact between Hamas and Fatah.
There was an agreement between the two, well, shortly after the peace talks collapsed earlier this year between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
And there was a plan to have some sort of technocrats run things until an election that was supposed to be later this year.
Israel was, of course, outraged at the idea that Hamas could participate in the elections.
And the reason they were outraged is because Hamas ended up winning the elections last time they were allowed to participate.
And then Israel and the U.S. and everyone had to spend months and months convincing Abbas to not honor the results of the election.
So I really think a big part of this is trying to open that rift again between those two factions.
And whether they succeeded or not, I guess, remains to be seen.
Well, I guess we don't really know then if they haven't had a chance to have a joint meeting yet between Fatah and Hamas, but they haven't really officially broken up, right?
Right.
There hasn't been any official breakup.
There's been some sort of crosswords back and forth during the course of the war with Hamas saying that they don't believe the Palestinian Authority was sufficiently on their side during the war.
The Palestinian Authority saying they thought Hamas was being too difficult in negotiating with truce.
But I don't think the signs are that a split has happened yet.
Now, whether this gulf widens until it is a split, I guess we'll have to wait and see.
Well, you know, obviously the narrative from the Israelis and on American TV was simply that, oh, my God, look, the PLA, who, you know, they've gone from beyond the pale to now the nice guys.
Well, they have gone beyond the pale now signing up with Hamas shows what they care about peace.
But really, isn't it the case, Jason?
I think you wrote about this at news.antiwar.com.
I'm happy to remind people about how really it was Hamas who was signing up to the Palestinian Authority's, you know, stated positions on negotiating with Israel.
And I know the recent peace talks, as you mentioned, had fallen apart, the John Kerry talks and all of that.
But as far as the actual official statements of the PLA, it was Hamas signing on to them rather than the PLA signing on to the old Hamas platform.
Correct?
Right.
Right.
And that is an important distinction, right?
About what was actually taking place with the formation of that unity government.
It's a very important distinction.
And also, there's this constant sort of split in the Israeli narrative where, on the one hand, Hamas absolutely can't be negotiated with under any circumstances.
They're too unreasonable.
And on the other hand, whenever they get negotiations with Fatah and get any sort of serious talks going, they say, well, Fatah doesn't speak for all the Palestinians, so we can't possibly talk to them unless there's a unity deal.
Right.
Yeah, just like they said, oh, we don't have to talk to the PLA, they're not elected.
And then as soon as Hamas got elected, they said, well, we don't have to talk to them, they're Hamas.
Right.
And it just changes to fit the circumstances.
All right.
Well, so, and this is the most important thing, and we should have really started with this, Jason, my fault.
But talk to me a little bit about the circumstances of the people of the Gaza Strip now, assuming that we have peace for the time being.
How many killed?
How many wounded?
Who's coming to help?
What's going to happen to them?
Well, we've got about 2,000 killed.
We've got somewhere around 10,000 wounded, overwhelmingly civilians, 23, 24 percent of them children under the age of 18.
Which means, what, over 300, right?
Something like that?
About 500.
Oh, about 500 children.
Yeah, I'm no good at math on the fly.
And, I mean, the humanitarian situation has, of course, only gotten worse.
The Strip's been under siege for seven years, and now there were airstrikes hitting it for almost a month.
So it's only gotten worse.
The power plant was hit, major damage there.
They're saying they don't think Gaza's only power plant will be able to generate any electricity for at least a year.
And that's assuming they can get parts, which, if the siege continues, of course, they won't be able to.
That's also hindering their ability to pump fresh water.
So there's a lot of water rationing going on in Gaza City right now.
And it's just a real mess.
Yeah, you know, Eric Margulies, the famed war reporter who's reported on, you know, 14 or 15 wars, something like that.
He said on the show, on my other show, that, well, you know, whatever actual targets, not whether you would approve them or not, but actual targets on their list of targets, that would have all been taken care of in the first few days.
The rest of this is simply, as he put it, bouncing the rubble.
You know, to be bullies about it, prove how tough they are, and kill more innocent people, basically.
Right, and they made it out like they had tens of thousands of targets.
But what exactly they were hitting was never really all that clear.
I mean, they hit some Hamas targets in the early days, but they hit UN schools constantly.
Bizarrely, they only seemed to hit the UN schools that were still open and were being used to house refugees from the fighting.
They were seemingly hitting residential neighborhoods more than anything else.
It's some great public relations, though, right?
They released a couple of clips of, here we are warning a house, here's our text messages to civilians.
Run away, because we're going to kill your uncle who's in Hamas, or whatever kind of thing that it is.
But meanwhile, they're just shelling with blind artillery and tanks for a month straight.
They're just blasting whatever they feel like.
And then they, you know, just like the first Gulf War or something, where they show a couple of clips of a laser-guided bomb going down a chimney.
But meanwhile, 95% of the bombs were just dumb bombs dropped like carpet bombing on Vietnam, you know?
Right, and ordering people out of their homes without any place for them to really go.
I mean, the Gaza Strip is not that big.
It would be a smallish American city.
So they say, well, everybody out of Gaza City, so everybody goes to Rafah.
But Rafah is being bombed, too.
So there really wasn't any place to go.
The UN took in some 400,000 or 500,000 displaced people into these shelters.
But the shelters were getting bombed just as much as everything else was.
So fleeing there didn't seem to do anyone a lot of good.
And so in the end, a lot of people just stayed home, knowing that they may well get killed at home, but they may well get killed anyplace else in Gaza, too.
Right.
Yeah, and when they're bombing UN schools and bombing the power plants, all the infrastructure in the country, you can't, you know...
I mean, I guess they can keep claiming it, but they can't get anybody to believe them anymore.
That, oh, that must have been a stray Hamas rocket, or that must have just been an accident or whatever.
You don't accidentally take out the power plant.
Right.
And so many times their own narrative on what happened changes.
I mean, in the case of one of the UN schools, they started by saying it was a Hamas rocket.
Then they said, well, maybe we did it, but it was an accident.
Then they said, well, we did it, but we warned the school first, which totally undercuts their claim that it might have accidentally got hit and totally undercuts the claim that they thought Hamas might have did it.
And then after that, when the UN said, oh, no, we didn't get any warnings, then they went back to, oh, it was an accident narrative.
Yeah, or you were hiding rockets in there.
Right, and that was the other thing.
They found some rockets in one of the closed schools because the UN runs a lot of schools in the Gaza Strip, and a lot of them were boarded up for the summer.
And they found some rockets in a couple of the boarded up schools.
But the ones that were bombing overwhelmingly were not the boarded up schools.
They were the ones that were being opened up as refugee shelters.
All right, Jason, well, let's move on to another major crisis in the region.
In the country formerly known as Iraq, now Shiastan, Kurdistan and the Islamic Caliphate.
America's going back to war there in the name of humanitarianism.
It is the Democrats in power, after all.
So can you talk to us a little bit about the plight of the Yazidis up there in northern Iraq that has necessitated the American reinvasion to at least some degree of that country?
Well, yeah, and it's a fascinating question because the Yazidis themselves are saying that they don't really see this humanitarian crisis against themselves, which was being touted as the excuse for this war.
The claims of 40,000, 50,000 Yazidis trapped on a mountaintop turned out to be just complete nonsense.
The Kurds have been pushing this narrative of imminent genocide, but there really wasn't any evidence to back it up.
The U.S. went into the war on that pretext and having found when they got some troops up onto the mountain that there weren't nearly so many people and the people that were there were mostly people that were already living on the mountain.
They're just looking for a new justification now.
That's just amazing.
I thought something was funny there when no one seemed to be asking the follow-up question, well, how come ISIS can't climb the mount?
What exactly is going on there?
They never really said.
And so, I mean, it sounds like there really was a pretty significant molehill here, but they turned it into a mountain and a fake causes belly with just the snap of a fingers.
Sure, and a lot of Yazidis did flee the area when ISIS got there, but they didn't flee to the top of a mountain where they would get trapped.
Right.
That doesn't make sense.
They fled into Kurdistan.
Right.
Or they fled south into the Shiite areas.
Yeah, it's just absolutely amazing.
And then they went from, we're going to save the Yazidis to, oh, yeah, also we're going to protect Erbil, the capital of Kurdistan.
And, oh, yeah, also we're drawing a line around Baghdad.
And then in two days time, from last Thursday to last Saturday, they went from the Yazidis to we will deny a safe haven to the Islamic State.
And, in fact, the way they put it, they're not even just saying we will regime change the Islamic State and we will drive them out of power in Mosul.
They're saying we won't even let them be an insurgency anymore.
I mean, no safe haven.
That's the doctrine for keeping American soldiers in Afghanistan for the last 10 years in the name of less than 50 Arabs that may or may not be running around somewhere.
Right.
And it's really remarkable just how quick this all escalated and that the administration continues to say with a straight face, oh, there won't be any combat troops, though.
Even though we've already got talk from the governor of the Anbar province two days ago saying he's already made a deal with the United States that, in fact, will include combat troops on the ground in Anbar province and airstrikes there as well.
Which is just madness.
I mean, you would think that the army generals would be kicking and screaming about this.
Or I guess maybe they figure, you know, their guys bled so bad for Iraq, they deserve to keep it and are mad that they ever were forced out in the first place.
It seems at this point they would want nothing to do with going back there.
Right.
And especially the Anbar province, because that was the worst part during during the last American occupation.
It was a site of several terrible battles in Fallujah.
It was a site of the Haditha massacre.
If there's any place in Iraq that U.S. troops would not be welcome, it would be the Anbar province.
And yet that seems to be where they're going first.
Yeah.
Well, and just look at it.
You know, when they say all the top newspapers running this big headline, generals say airstrikes won't be enough to dislodge these guys.
Yeah, of course, that's true.
You probably couldn't even force them out of power, much less completely break them and get rid of them with only airstrikes.
But the last time, like you said, the last time we had a full scale occupation, they never were welcome.
Even that whole time they were there, the best they could ever do about these Mujahideen was bribe other Sunnis to turn on them and do the fighting for them.
At least lead them to, you know, who needed to be killed.
But at the cost of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of guys, thousands of guys.
And so after the awakening, the Islamic State, Al-Qaeda in Iraq was driven underground for a little while.
And yes, they've had a lot of help from America in Syria, as we've talked about all this time, too.
But now they're back.
They're 10,000 strong.
All the Army and Marine Corps killing Al-Qaeda in Iraq for years on end in Iraq did not get rid of them either.
So I don't see any reason to believe if they reinvade and try to find every kook with a black mask and a Toyota truck and kill them, how far is that going to get them?
10 feet down a 10 mile long road?
Right.
And CNN had Bob Bair on a few days ago talking about this.
And, you know, he's not always all that great on war, but I thought what he said was very telling.
He said he thought it would take a million troops a hundred years to handle this.
We don't have a million troops and we certainly don't have a hundred years to have them parked in Iraq.
Well, and, you know, Bob Bair, for those not familiar, former CIA officer and now commentator for CNN.
He also said that if we bomb now, all we're going to do is turn them on the American people, you know, take their attention, especially we drive them out of power.
And the Americans get all the blame for whatever bad stuff happens to their caliphate from here on out.
That's just going to turn them against the American people more.
It's not going to get rid of them.
It's just going to make people in our hometowns targets.
Right.
And we're already starting to see that.
We saw some comments from Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula yesterday urging their followers to attack U.S. targets.
Specifically in retaliation for the U.S. airstrikes in Iraq.
Right.
Yeah.
On one hand, they're celebrating.
Yes.
Perfect.
The Americans are such idiots.
They fell right into our trap.
Now we're fighting the Americans, which is the best PR they could possibly hope for.
And they said, oh, yeah, by the way, we're coming to kill you.
Right.
It couldn't work out better for them.
You could have done this better if you planned it.
Yeah.
And like you said about Bob Bair, he's not necessarily all that good on war compared to a lot of former CIA officers we talked to.
I know, for example, Phil Giraldi, Ray McGovern, Michael Shoyer, they are all saying stay the hell out of there.
They're all saying ISIS really isn't a threat to America unless Obama does what he's doing now.
Oh, great.
So they're even more adamant than Bob Bair.
Right.
The administration has this hornet's nest in Iraq and it's a hornet's nest to some extent of our own making.
But instead of having any sort of specific plan on how to keep those hornets from stinging us, they just every once in a while go over there and throw a few rocks at it.
And the reality is that this Islamic State, it's a state now.
It's not just branding anymore.
It's not just a catchy name for a group of insurgents.
They've got cities with millions of people in them.
They've got some pretty well-defined borders, even if those borders are sometimes growing or shrinking a little bit on the margins.
This is very much something you could draw on a map and say this is the Islamic State.
Well, Jason, I don't know what was the magic that brought so many disparate things together last summer to stop the war on Syria.
I mean, I think first and foremost, the Pentagon really didn't want to do it.
So we had that going for us and I don't know exactly where they stand on Iraq.
I could see the Air Force wanting to go, but it seems like the Army and the Marines would be reluctant now.
I don't know.
But I wonder if you have an opinion about what activists can do here to try to really, you know, nip this thing in the bud before it just grows completely out of control.
I mean, as you've said, it's already begun.
The airstrikes have begun.
Special Forces and CIA are there.
More Marines and Army are there and more coming.
And yet the whole thing just pretends absolute disaster.
And we've all seen this movie before.
We all know exactly how bad this could get, how bad it will get, if we do not force them to turn it around the other way.
So what's a man to do, Jason?
Seriously.
Well, I wish I knew for sure.
I mean, certainly calling a congressman and telling them you oppose that war and that you expect them to oppose the war will help.
But unlike Syria, where President Obama basically was forced into seeking congressional authorization and then realizing that he wasn't going to get the authorization and scrapped it, he went into this war more or less unilaterally.
He took the Yezidi excuse, which wasn't true in the first place, announced an air war, and they're already in.
And he's got William Crystal and Dick Cheney and all those guys riding his right flank, covering his right flank hard for him there.
Right.
And the usual suspects in Congress are condemning him for not going in even more aggressively.
So they've sort of, as they have sometimes in the past, turned this into an argument between going in much more aggressively than we are now or, as the moderate position, continuing this air war that's slowly escalating, with not starting a big air war in Iraq at all really not part of the discussion anymore.
Yeah, it reminds me of the Downing Street memo.
Not the part where they said, ha ha, yeah, we're going to lie him into war.
But the part where they said, well, we have option A and option B.
Option A is a big buildup in Kuwait in a full-scale invasion, which is, of course, what they ended up doing.
But option B that they talked about in, well, I guess it would have been right around this time, 2002, was they could get a UN plane shot down, call it Yezidis stranded on a mountaintop.
They would have had it painted in blue colors, and then they called that option B, rolling start.
We'll just go ahead, start bombing, start inserting troops here and there where we can, and build up in Kuwait as fast as we can and have the invasion catch up with the advanced force.
And I think the Pentagon shot that plan down.
But that's what this looks like, is Obama's just trying to make this thing a fait accompli while the American people are not paying attention.
Right, and they're calling it the Libya model.
In Libya, they, of course, started that war more or less overnight on humanitarian pretexts.
Those, too, weren't necessarily all that realistic.
The claims of massive death tolls in Libya during the revolution against Gaddafi never panned out.
They never found a tenth of the bodies of the people that they claimed were going to have been killed before the NATO invasion started.
Once they started the intervention, it was just a done deal.
And there was no, even though Congress probably would not have given them an authorization, at that point, the administration argued, well, we don't need one.
We're already in there.
There's no reason to authorize a war that's already started.
This was a NATO operation in Libya, and they were saying, well, because it's a NATO operation, we're obliged to continue it because we're a member of NATO.
And this time, there's not that, but there are plenty of other excuses to say, well, look, you can't uncrack an egg.
We've already started bombing ISIS.
We've already stirred up this hornet's nest, and that it's simply too late for them to even ask for Congress to approve it.
And that's never really been mentioned by the administration as something they're even considering.
Instead of seeking congressional authorization, they've only said that, well, we'll keep Congress informed whenever we escalate.
All right, well, Jason, I'm sorry we've got to stop it there.
We're just all out of time, but thank you so much for coming back on the show with the bad news here.
Sure, thank you for having me.
All right, y'all, that is the great Jason Ditz.
He writes at news.antiwar.com, and really about five or ten stories a day on all the most important stuff.
You've got to read it.
You've got to bookmark it.
You've got to keep looking at news.antiwar.com, the great Jason Ditz.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'll be back here next Sunday morning at 8.30 for another episode of Antiwar Radio.
Thanks very much for tuning in.
Check out my website, scotthorton.org.
Follow me on Twitter, at Scott Horton Show.
See ya.
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