08/28/14 – Jason Ditz – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, guys.
Welcome back to the show here.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Well, I'm relieved to see that Ukraine is not the top headline right now.
That would be bad news.
Syria's still got the top slot for worst thing today.
Antiwar.com.
That's a little bit of a relief.
But then again, I don't like the sound of this at all.
The top Ukraine headline does say, East Ukraine war escalates.
Rebels seize key port.
Welcome back to the show, Jason Ditz.
How are you doing?
I'm doing good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing real good.
Appreciate you joining us here again today.
News.
Antiwar.com.
That's where Jason Ditz writes.
He's the news editor there at Antiwar.com.
East Ukraine war escalates.
Rebels seize key port.
Please tell us everything you know, Jason.
Well, unfortunately, it's not all that clear what's happening today.
There's a lot of rumors of a Russian invasion.
NATO's saying that they have satellite footage of a thousand Russian troops somewhere around the Ukrainian border.
Exactly where somewhere is, we're not really sure.
And the city of Novoazovsk, which fell yesterday to the rebels, now they're reporting Russia took it over, which doesn't seem to be backed up by anything other than Ukrainian allegations.
And so now, as far as, well, what have the Russian, what has the Russian government admitted to or confirmed as far as these accusations go?
Well, Russia is saying they didn't do anything.
They're saying there is no invasion going on, nothing of the sort's happening, and that there aren't Russian troops in the Ukraine fighting.
Okay, so then I guess I had seen some headlines.
I'm sorry I don't have them here, but I had seen some headlines claiming that the Russians are conceding, you know, at least some of this or something.
But the answer to that is still no.
Right, right.
The most recent statements from Russian ambassadors to the European Union, Russia's OSCE rep, they're all saying that this is just complete nonsense.
They're saying other than those ten Russian troops that strayed across the border the other day that got captured by Ukraine, there are no troops in Ukraine right now.
And then, now, what are those guys?
Because when we talked yesterday, I guess, I don't know if you had seen the video before that.
I was only just watching the video right there during the interview where at least the subtitles say that, yeah, I knew we were on our way to Ukraine, that kind of thing.
Was there any explanation as to why there were ten guys there?
Maybe they were special forces guys who were going to help lead the rebels in some way or another?
Or it really did seem like just a mistake?
It's really not clear at this point.
I mean, the confession video certainly makes it sound like they were special forces, which is the official Ukrainian narrative.
But it's not clear exactly who these guys were, what they were doing that close to the border to begin with.
Were they just border patrol type people or what?
We really don't know.
All right, well, so, I don't know, man.
Part of the problem here, you and I have the same problem as everybody else, is this is a long way from here.
There's not very much good reporting coming out of there.
There's a hell of a lot of what people would have us believe coming out of there and in all angles of analysis of the situation as well.
And so, in these kind of circumstances, the war party and their echo chamber, they get to push pretty much whatever they want.
On Twitter today, at least among the right-wingers that I follow, well, and the neocons, their whole thing is, oh my God, the Russians are invading and Obama's doing nothing about it, of course, because of what a feckless Jimmy Carter he is, et cetera, et cetera.
And there's really no one to contradict them with the facts because no one else really has any.
They get to fill up the vacuum with their narrative.
Right, and right now their narrative is pretty much just whatever Ukraine happens to say at the time, whether it makes sense or not.
The interesting thing, I think, is a lot of the media reporting, AP articles and things like that, the photographs associated with those reports of Russian tank columns rolling in Ukraine and things like that, the photos they show are not even Russian tanks.
They're showing stock photos of Ukrainian tanks in cities that aren't even where the fighting is supposedly taking place.
So they're just whatever fits the situation.
Nobody has any good photos that prove what they're saying is happening.
Well, then I guess the question is whether this thing escalates along the lines of the narrative at all or whether really these idiots can say whatever they want because the facts on the ground aren't really changing, so the war really isn't escalating any different than it was the day before yesterday.
Well, I mean, it's not clear, but it certainly doesn't seem like it.
It seems like the primary things that are happening today are the European Union, some of their nations are using this alleged invasion as an excuse to push more sanctions.
The stock market's taking a hit in Europe and in Russia on speculation that this invasion might have happened, but it doesn't seem like on the ground there's all that much evidence that anything's happening.
Yeah.
You know, when it comes to the American and the Ukrainian side of this narrative, in my mind, the strongest thing they have going for them is that they have lied so much that it's almost unbelievable that they would continue to tell such blatant, disprovable lies that, you know, at some point, the boy who cried wolf has got to be right.
I mean, they can only get away with so much without at least possibly provoking the Russians into making them stop or something, you know, so, I mean, I don't know.
And because they're pretty big lies, giant armored columns, huh?
So that either happened or it didn't, and a narrative like that cannot stand for very long without them having to take it back before they try again, you know, in another few days, I guess.
Right.
And we saw that before with the last armored column that Russia supposedly sent in that Ukraine supposedly wiped out and then turned out not to have even happened.
But it seems like they're just, they're pushing these narratives without providing any evidence and NATO, I think, has their fingers crossed because this would be a great excuse for their plans to send more troops to Eastern Europe and they're figuring a broken clock is right twice a day, so maybe this will be the one time when Ukraine says something that's actually true.
Well, now, so the Americans, I mean, and the Europeans, I guess, caught up with American policy here, seem to be determined to really, I don't know, how much damage do you think they're really trying to do to the Russian economy?
They're trying to really break it?
Or do they have the ability?
I mean, aren't they so dependent on Russian oil and gas that they just, you know, basically they can talk tough, but otherwise they've got to continue to cooperate, don't they?
Right.
That's the problem here all along.
This is not 1979 Iran that you're talking about where it's connections to the world or basically some oil exports and that's about it.
This is a 21st century connected economy that's intimately tied with the rest of Europe and trying to cut it off, I mean, yeah, in theory the European Union could probably break the Russian economy, but they couldn't do it without breaking the German economy, breaking the Austrian economy, breaking the economies of pretty much all of Eastern Europe.
I can see them thinking, you know, like chemotherapy, it's worth it to take a hit because they'll take it harder than we will, but it's just like in Syria.
Really, who do you think is going to be better than the guys that are in charge now, you know?
Right, and David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, has actually made that argument publicly that we're willing to take the hit if it means hitting them back.
And it would certainly hurt investment in London because London is pretty heavily linked to the European economy, but the damage that complete sanctions on Russia would do to Britain are pretty small compared to what it would do to much of the rest of Europe.
So I don't think everyone else is necessarily on board for that.
Right.
Yeah, well, I wonder if the British are taking that into account or not.
You know, Mearsheimer the other day said he wasn't seeing any daylight between America and Germany on this at all, so I thought I'd seen some.
I guess I'll ask you what you think of that on the other side of this break.
It's Jason Ditz from news.antiwar.com.
Just click the book in the right margin at scotthorton.org or thewarstate.com.
All right.
I'm talking with Jason Ditz about the situation in Ukraine.
He's the news editor at antiwar.com.
That's news.antiwar.com.
In fact, I think here in a minute I'm going to start asking you some Afghanistan questions and other things, too, Jason.
But more on Ukraine here.
Another big, phony, trumped up bunch of headlines about a Russian invasion.
It still ain't true.
When guys cross the border, no one really knows exactly what they were doing, but as far as all this stuff about armored columns, etc., etc., you're telling me these claims have evaporated, just another narrative, and we're still where we were two, three days ago.
Is that correct?
It seems like it.
I mean, like I say, what we don't know about what's going on in eastern Ukraine could fill an awful lot more time than what we do know.
There's certainly no evidence that any of these new allegations are true, so in the absence of that, it seems like we're still at the same situation we were yesterday or the day before.
Yeah.
Still waiting for a reason to believe.
All right.
And you know, at this point, it really is a boy who cried wolf situation.
They've been saying that Russia's on the verge of invading eastern Ukraine at least for eight months now.
I guess it'll catch us by surprise if it ever becomes true, you know?
Yeah, and I think that's what NATO was kind of counting on, that sooner or later they'd be right on this, but after months and months, it's starting to look like maybe they're not right on this.
I wonder if he's ever actually just sent them a letter, Putin, that says, hey, no, really, seriously, man, you guys can knock it off now.
I bet he probably has.
All right.
So now, well, let's go back to where we were right before the break there about U.S. and Germany.
I had thought, and we talked about this somewhat, about how the Germans, I thought on two different occasions here at the end of June and then just a couple of weeks ago, that they'd really been trying, or at least reportedly had been trying to get the Kiev government to really work this out, and then America keeps encouraging them to be intransigent and keep fighting anyway, kind of a thing.
Mearsheimer hadn't apparently ever heard of any of that.
He didn't know what I was talking about.
He said he's searching in vain for a sign of really any discrepancy between America and Germany's policy here, regardless of how different our interests are in this matter, America does not import a bunch of oil and gas from Russia, but the Germans very much do.
Yeah, well, there's a pretty big disconnect between what the Merkel government is saying publicly and what we're hearing reports from German officials saying is going on behind the scenes.
The grand bargain that Germany was pushing was never publicly announced as a German policy.
It was sort of something that they were trying to get going on the table at the talks, but publicly, yeah, they really haven't offered any sort of indication that they're any different from the U.S. on their position on Russia.
Yeah.
All right.
And then, so now, fill us in as much as you can about this story of the port, the rebels seizing the port.
I think you said they did take it, but then they left, or did that even pan out?
Well, it's not clear.
Last night it was reported they took the port.
The rebels took the port.
And then this morning, we hear that there's fighting at the port, and it's Russia and the Ukrainian military, and that the rebels aren't there.
So whether this is an indication that the rebels left, or whether they're fighting the rebels and just calling them Russia for the sake of the narrative, I don't know.
And now, well, I'm looking at Google Maps now, trying to figure out where exactly this is.
This is in the south of the Donetsk region?
Yeah.
It's basically the first city on the southeast, if you follow the Sea of Azov along the coast next to Russia.
If you follow the road in from Russia, it's the first town you get to, which is probably why the rebels would want it, because it gives them another link to Russia, as opposed to the Ukrainian narrative, which is that this is part of some sort of plot to take the entire 120-mile stretch from the Russian border to Crimea and create a land route to Crimea, which seems like an incredibly ambitious plan that I don't think there's any evidence to support, and certainly not something the rebels could probably pull off.
Right.
All right.
Man, the clock ticks fast on this show.
Talk to me a little bit about Abdullah Abdullah in Afghanistan and the runoff that never ends and the future of the presidency there.
Well, right now the talk is that we're going to have an end to the audit on September 10th, so eight days after when the inauguration is supposed to take place.
Both sides have withdrawn all their observers from the audit now.
Abdullah, because he says the audit process is corrupt and they're not counting fairly, and on the Ghani side, they withdrew because the UN asked them to for some reason.
Now, why the UN wanted them to withdraw too, I don't know, but now it seems like there are no observers at all for the audit, and it's just sort of going through the motions.
That's interesting.
So, but who's doing the audit?
The Afghan Independent Election Commission, which is the same group that Abdullah issued audio tapes from early on in the audit process showing that one of their leaders was ordering them to stuff ballots on behalf of Ghani.
Of course, Abdullah Abdullah was the CIA's choice when they tried to regime change Karzai in 2009, and it didn't work out, and they were stuck with him again anyway.
He stole the election better than they could, I guess.
But this guy and his opposition, Ghani, they're both equally CIA stooges, as far as you can tell, or not?
Yeah, as far as we can tell, Ghani's more closely connected with the Karzai government than Abdullah is, so that's sort of given him the advantage in ballot stuffing.
But is it just a matter of one is a front man for Dostum, and the other is a front man for Hekmatyar, or some kind of madness like that, or more to it than that?
Well, it's more of an ethnic division right now, because Ghani is a Pashtun, whereas Abdullah is half Pashtun, half Tajik.
So a lot of the Pashtuns don't like the idea of someone that's only half Pashtun running the country, and that's what's dominating the Karzai cabinet right now.
All right, well, we'll have to stop it right there, music's playing, we gotta go, but thanks very much for your time again, Jason, I appreciate it.
Sure, thanks for having me.
All right, so that's the great Jason Ditz, news.antiwar.com.
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