09/10/14 – Nebojsa Malic – The Scott Horton Show

Oh, John Kerry's Mideast peace talks have gone nowhere.
Hey y'all, Scott Horton here for the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
U.S. military and financial support for Israel's permanent occupations of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is immoral, and it threatens national security by helping generate terrorist attacks against our country.
And face it, it's bad for Israel, too.
Without our unlimited support, they would have much more incentive to reach a lasting peace with their neighbors.
It's past time for us to make our government stop making matters worse.
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Anyway, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And our next guest is our friend Nobodza Malich.
From antiwar.com, he writes the column Moments of Transition.
The most recent is called Of Motes and Beams and Eyeballs, Imperial Hypocrisy.
Welcome back.
How are you doing, Nobodza?
I'm good, Scott.
Thanks for having me back on the show.
Oh, well, you're very welcome.
Very happy to have you here.
So, well, very important goings on in eastern Ukraine.
Let me tell you very quickly that this morning, and I'm leaving a lot of things out, too, but the nutshell this morning on CNN is that there's still a little bit of fighting, but the ceasefire is holding.
So parse that for me.
What's going on?
Well, the ceasefire comes at an interesting moment in the fighting when the forces loyal to the coup government in Kiev had suffered a catastrophic defeat.
I mean, this was, you know, without hyperbole, people have compared this to the complete destruction of the German Sixth Army below Stalingrad.
They essentially, the fighters in eastern Ukraine that refused to recognize the coup government and have declared independence in response, they've essentially captured dozens, if not hundreds, of armored vehicles, tanks, trucks, artillery launchers, essentially outfitting their entire army with Ukrainian castoffs and the casualties of the government forces and especially the volunteer Nazi battalions, which are, you know, what the Western media called them, volunteers.
Most of them are really just, you know, wannabe SS who proudly wear swastikas and such have been horrific.
So the government in Kiev was outright losing the war and trying to blame the Russian invasion for this, which again, there's been no evidence whatsoever of this invasion actually happening.
And it was expecting help from NATO, but that help did not come.
The summit in Wales that was supposed to announce some sort of more belligerent deployment towards Russia remained strangely muted in that respect.
Lots of saber rattling, not really much of concrete action.
So what happened in Minsk on Friday was that the envoys representing the coup government and the envoys representing the rebels, with Russia as an official observer but not an actual party to the conflict, which is very important, initialed this really vague protocol on immediate ceasefire.
And while nobody really expects this to last for very long, because both the people in Kiev have said, okay, this is just a break, we need to rearm, re-equip and, you know, get NATO help and then crush these subhumans once and for all.
Whereas the people in the East have said, you know, this is just a break, we need to refit, train our crews and then march to Kiev.
This is the first time that the government in Kiev has actually recognized the rebels as a legitimate party to the conflict.
So until now they've just kept making noises about, oh, this is Russian aggression, Russian invasion, Russian this, Russian that.
And also this is the first time that Russia has officially been invited as an observer to the whole process, which means that now it actually has an official pretext, should it choose to do so to actually intervene, which I doubt is actually going to happen.
But again, the protocol that was signed in Minsk has all these provisions that can be interpreted in a variety of ways.
The Kiev junta is counting on it being interpreted by the Western media and NATO, but they're not necessarily the forces on the ground.
Um, there's a big question still, too, about, you know, whether the Kiev government can control the Nazi Azov battalion and right sector groups and whatever that are out there.
And I assume, although I don't have as much reason to believe, but I assume you have the same problem on the other side, too, where you have, yeah, volunteer militias of whoever they are, who may or may not necessarily take orders from whoever is, you know, they might see as self-appointed leaders, you know?
Well, there's already been reports of some friction among the Novorussian armed forces, as they call themselves, the formerly known as militias of the republics of Donetsk and Lugansk.
There's also been reports of sporadic fire, including some artillery exchanges, nothing major, nothing to indicate an actual offensive.
Again, this is the information I have.
It's probably, you know, six to 18 hours out of date by now.
But so far, again, the truce appears to be holding and both sides appear to be gearing up for a continuation after its inevitable breakdown.
I would say that it's far more likely that the government in Kiev was not going to be able to control its own militias, because there's a great disparate number of forces on its side.
You have your official recruits, the Army of Ukraine.
You have the volunteer battalions which are essentially private militaries funded by oligarchs like Kolomoisky.
You have the right sector groups that are Nazis and are loyal to their party leaders.
And you have the National Guard, which is conscript militia composed of, you know, your criminals released from prison, as well as some right sector elements, as well as some mercenaries.
It's just a really messy mix of people.
And you can recognize these militia battalions by the fact that they use a mix of adapted civilian gear, like the technicals, you know, armored Toyotas and such, and top of the line NATO equipment that has been delivered to them by their Western sponsors.
None of that has really helped them much, because you can't really make soldiers just by giving them a bunch of gear.
But again, there's definitely been help coming to these very, very unsavory groups from the West.
And already there's been statements, I think one of the advisors to the president has said, you know, we'll just rearm, regroup.
And, you know, when the time is right, with the help of our Western friends, we'll do what Croatia did and launch another Operation Storm and get rid of these people.
And this is, you know, this is something that I've been saying for months that, you know, the Kiev's tactics seems to be copied from the 1990s Croatia and people were saying, Oh, well, that's just Serbian propaganda, you're delusional.
And then here we have confirmation from the horse's mouth, as it were.
Yeah, exactly.
And yeah, I guess that's the big danger.
That's our guy in the chat room right now is saying, why did Nova Russia sign off on the ceasefire when they were winning?
And it just gives the Kiev junta and their Nazi auxiliaries a chance to reload?
Well, that is a legitimate question.
And certainly from the tactical and operational perspective, it seems like madness.
But there are a couple of things to consider.
And without going into too much detail, the NAF, the rebel forces, for lack of a better term, they are not a professional army either.
They also need time to rest and refit and integrate all this captured equipment and train the crews and so on and so forth.
They want to march to Kiev.
That may be their ultimate objective to get rid of the Nazi government and, you know, renegotiate the status of Ukraine.
But they don't really have the capability to do so right now.
The more time passes, the more they have a chance to retrench and repair, resupply their civilians that have been left without basic utilities.
And winter is coming.
The better for them.
Yeah.
For as far as the Russians.
Despite the fact, though, that it's, you know, obviously it was a coup d'etat and the elected president was overthrown and that kind of thing.
For public relations purposes, they couldn't do worse than march west of the territory that they're trying to just break free with.
Oh, absolutely.
And even even the Western reporters sympathetic to the junta have grudgingly admitted that the tactics of the Ukrainian military and the Nazis, that the mass shelling of cities and the disruption of supplies has pushed people in the east over the fence and essentially persuaded them not to have anything to do with this government ever again.
So they've definitely stoked a separatist sentiment through overreacting.
Now, as I was as I was going to say about now, you got to hold that thought in a bush.
I'm sorry.
We got the music playing here and we got to go out to this break, but jot it down so you don't forget it's a four minute long break.
But and for some reason, some Skype callers have a terrible conflict with the bumper music, some not so much, but you do.
So I can't even let you get a last word here edgewise.
But we'll be right back, everybody, with the boats of Malik, the Great Falcon blog and antiwar dot com right after this.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with the boats of Malik Malik.
He writes the Great Falcon blog and also weekly for antiwar dot com for many years now of moats and beams is the latest.
And anyway, I'm sorry that we were interrupted by that heartbreak there in the bush, but you could continue.
I had interrupted you, but you were holding that thought.
Sure thing.
I was just talking about how on the operational level, the truce made sense for both sides, but also on a strategic level.
And this is what a lot of commentators tend to overlook because they're paying too much attention to details and not enough to the big picture.
Strategic analysts that I've been following are saying that, look, you know, the actual fighting in eastern Ukraine or what the country formerly known as Ukraine by this point is only one part of the conflict.
There's also a global aspect of this conflict which pits Russia and its allies around the world, Latin America, China, some African countries, India, which is sort of stealthing through this.
But the Indians recently elected a new government that is far more pro Russian and pro-Chinese than pro-Western on one side.
And you have the United States and NATO and Western Europe on the other side.
And Russians have been very, very careful and very forgiving in their approach in the past six months because one of their goals is to offer, give a hand of friendship to Western Europe and essentially say, you know, make a decision that's in your best interest as opposed to always being America's poodle.
They're not, I mean, this opinion could be controversial, but my position is that Russia is not bent on conquest of any kind.
What they do want is to get a very aggressive military alliance, which is NATO, off their border.
And by doing this, you know, they've been trying to do this by promoting trade and cooperation with Western Europe.
Germany, which has been an invader of Russia twice in the 20th century, is one of the biggest traders in the world.
And they're trying to get a very aggressive military alliance.
And Russia, which has been an invader of Russia twice in the 20th century, is one of the biggest trading partners in Europe of Russia and have maintained the most friendliest of relations until this recent crisis.
And you have the German government that is increasingly pissing off, pardon my expression, the German people by towing the American line on this crisis as opposed to protecting its business interests.
Now, add into this the fact that there are still American boots on the ground in Germany, whereas the Soviets picked up and left 25 years ago.
And the Russians have pointed this out very kindly in saying, look, you know, who's occupying you?
Who's attacking you?
Who's manipulating you?
Who's forcing you to make decisions in your best interests?
Not us.
To the point where, you know, you already have throughout Europe rumors and discontent.
You have this referendum coming up in Scotland.
You've got the French protesting their government's flip-flopping on the issue of these ships that are supposed to be delivered to Russia.
Essentially, the French haven't really gotten anything out of any of their behavior except billions of dollars in fines that they can't afford to pay.
And you start seeing that, you know, the real battle here is for hearts and minds of people in Europe, but also hearts and minds of people in Ukraine and throughout the former Soviet space, because for the past 20 years, they've been listening to propaganda saying that, you know, oh, aren't you, you know, wonderfully off now that you're free of the evil Soviet repression, only to see that repression, which admittedly was, you know, impoverishing and all manner of affronts to individual liberty and human dignity.
But at the same time, it was replaced by this feudalist oligarchy of people that are outright clients of the West.
They make a mockery of democracy.
They make a mockery of elections.
They use their police against their own citizenry.
They loot these these countries mercilessly and then call it democracy.
And they're giving democracy right there in the polls when you have, and I don't know exact numbers, but it's huge pluralities, if not majorities in many of these states in Eastern Europe where they would prefer rule under the USSR, not under Russia, but under a hypothetical recreation of the communist Soviet Union, they'd prefer it.
And the fact that you can find more than 1% of anyone in Eastern Europe who's willing to say that is you got to put, I put all of that blame at the feet of Washington, D.C. for what they've done, kicking them while they're down, instead of being a good sport about winning that war and proving why freedom works best, because that's no longer the American project freedom.
It's this evil empire that you describe.
And so this is how, you know, they used to have nothing except their crappy little box they could live in.
Now they don't even have a place to live.
I mean, it gives freedom a bad name is the problem with the biggest problem with this is, you know, that us here who talk about the benefits of freedom and human rights and human dignity, see these words being distorted and defiled by champions of empire who are only after plunder and murder.
And it drives us nuts as well it should.
I mean, you have a situation, for example, in the former Czechoslovakia in the Czech Republic, you have the tale of two Václavs, as I want to say, you have Václav Havel, who is beloved in the West as this great democrat reformer, and his popularity in actual Czech Republic isn't somewhere in single digits.
He's universally despised, because he took that country and destroyed it.
And then you have Václav Klaus, who just finished his term as president, I believe, or is about to, who is reviled in the West, extremely popular among the Czechs themselves.
And he actually told the European Union a couple of years ago, you know, you are going down the path of communism, we've been there, we can tell you it doesn't work, stop before it's too late, but nobody's listening to him.
Yeah, well, it's just sort of like people are brought up to believe here, if you hate them Republicans, you must be a democrat or where this is the only opposite, you know, which kind of corruption is worse.
And the fact that it's even debatable at all is a nightmare.
You know, the fact that people even that there's even a contest whatsoever between the Western, you know, supposed free way of doing things versus this, the USSR, for crying out loud, my wife grew up in the USSR.
And, you know, they had absolutely nothing.
If you if there was a line, you got in it, you didn't know what it might be.
It might be a pair of pants, it might be a loaf of bread.
It might be, you know, who knows what, but whatever it is, maybe you could trade it for something.
And so look, a line, let's get in line.
And then, you know, everybody has everything for free, everything is equal, no one has anything at all.
And to think that that that state of human slavery is preferable to what America is foisted on them, what the empire is foisted on them instead is just, it's crushing, isn't it?
I mean, you know, it's the cynics are all like, broken hearted, true believers, right?
Right, exactly.
I mean, the irony here is, as I just described the whole Russian relationship with Germany, you know, you talk to an average American, and their first association with Germany would be World War Two and saving private Ryan and the Nazis, right?
The first association in Russia, which has suffered far more in World War Two and doesn't really use Nazi lightly.
I mean, you have to be truly an abominable excuse for a human being to actually be accused of being a Nazi by the Russians.
As I said, you know, 27 million dead, you don't use this lightly.
It's a very serious business, right?
Their first association when it comes to Germany is a trade partner.
You know, they've fought with Germany tooth and nail for over 100 years.
But right now, they're trading, they're peacefully developing a business relationship isn't this this whole Western model of freedom and democracy supposed to be about peaceful peace and trade.
And look what the Western governments are doing.
The first thing they're doing is curtailing trade and slapping trade blockades and what they call sanctions.
So is this peaceful negotiation of disputes?
No, their first resort, their only resort is force and coercion.
Right?
Yeah.
As Ron Paul always says, they're the isolationists.
They do nothing but isolate the American people from these people and those people and whoever it is that they're mad at all the time in the very worst kind of ways.
Right?
I mean, all this talk about isolating Russia.
It's not isolating Russia.
It's isolating Europe from its natural and biggest trade partner.
All these sanctions and all these blockades and this entire conflict that's being pushed by the US and NATO is directly hurting European economies.
The US economy is already in doldrums, but it doesn't do that much trade with Russia to begin with.
Some big oil companies might be hurt very soon because Russians will basically turn them away away from oil and gas exploration in Siberia.
But aside from that, the US and Russia don't trade as much considering their neighbors.
This is really unseemly.
But Europe has a huge trade volume with Russia.
And now this is this is they're directly being hurt by this.
Well, and this is what they said about NATO.
I forget who I'm quoting here.
But the whole thing is keeping the Germans down, the Americans in, the Germans down and the Russians out.
And it used to be Western Europe.
Right.
Right.
This was actually said by Lord Ismay.
He was a British official.
I believe he was either the first general secretary of NATO or the British ambassador to NATO back in the 50s.
Another thing that most people don't know, for example, is that NATO is not a defensive alliance.
Yeah, no, clearly it's not.
Well, but it was even there's this there's this impression that even President Obama has tried to reinforce that this was a great defensive alliance during the Cold War.
It wasn't.
NATO was formed in 1949.
The Warsaw Treaty was formed like three years, was signed three, three or four years later.
NATO was not a response to alleged Soviet aggression.
It was it was essentially a provocation.
Right.
Hey, you know what the problem is?
You're absolutely right about that.
It's very important.
But we're out of time and I got to go.
All right.
We're over time, actually.
But thank you so much.
It's great to have you back on.
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Hey, I'll Scott Horton here coming up this October 18th at Columbia University in New York.
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Hey, I'll Scott Horton here.
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