Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, I got Jason Ditz on the line.
He is the news director, editor, managing news man at antiwar.com, news.antiwar.com.
And he's on it every day on every single war.
And there's a lot of them.
Welcome back.
How are you doing?
I'm doing good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
You know, people say to me, you know, it took me forever, you saying so over and over again.
And then finally, I started just looking at news.antiwar.com all the time.
Boy, do I know a lot of things now.
I'm paraphrasing, but yeah, something like that.
People very grateful for your work.
I hear from them.
I hope that you do, too.
Listen, there's so much to talk about.
But first of all, let's talk about.
Well, you know, I already talked with Elijah Magnier earlier today about the state of the ceasefire on the border and all of that there.
But we didn't get to talk that much about one.
We even talked about the legality of stealing the oil and the strategic implications and all that.
But I want to hear from you about what's actually happening on the ground there.
You've been doing a good job of covering troop movements in eastern Syria.
And I guess there are late developments surrounding those oil fields on the issue of those oil fields.
Yeah, some more troops have arrived.
They said the well, the armored vehicles that they announced last week were being deployed.
It doesn't sound like any tanks have arrived or at least we haven't seen any photos of them.
But the other vehicles, armored Bradley fighting vehicles and whatnot, are starting to arrive at the scene and they're building up around the around the oil fields.
And then it sounds like that's going to be a pretty long term venture, at least from President Trump's perspective of we're going to keep this oil.
And help us out on the geography, like where around eastern Syria are we talking about?
This is in Deir ez-Zor province, kind of to the southeast of the city of Deir ez-Zor itself.
So it's a fair distance from the Turkish safe zone, but it's not all that far from kind of the de facto border between Kurdish held territory and Syrian government held territory.
And it's also not all that far from the Iraqi border.
That was very important for ISIS because when ISIS controlled those fields and was able to operate them, they tended to try to smuggle a lot of that oil out of the country.
Although they also smuggled some of that oil into Syrian government territory and sold it back to them because the Syrian government didn't have enough oil anymore.
Yeah, mostly they were selling to the Turks and the Israelis through the Turks.
Right.
Yeah, actually, we ran an article at the Libertarian Institute by William Van Wagenen about Assad buying ISIS oil.
It was essentially his oil that they stole.
Well, so to speak, sort of in context anyway, that's closer to the truth.
Right.
I mean, that's obviously not ideal for the Assad government, but they didn't really have any choice because all the sanctions are keeping most of the world from selling him any oil.
We saw how freaked out everybody got when Iran tried to send a tanker there to sell him oil, even temporarily detained that tanker.
So really, buying from ISIS was kind of the only game in town for Syrian government territory.
And they would go through intermediaries, so they weren't directly exchanging funds.
But that's basically what was happening.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so you wrote about here, again, it's news.antiwar.com, about how, well, this is so blatantly illegal that they're just on the face of it.
There are going to be all kinds of obstacles to implementing anything.
And I guess I wonder, did the oil companies themselves respond to Trump that like, oh, yes, sir, we're going to go right in there and invest all this money in extracting all this oil?
Because the whole thing sounds like a figment of Trump's imagination.
Yeah.
I mean, Trump said he thought it would be ExxonMobil or one of our other great oil companies.
And the United States does have a fair number of the sort of major oil and gas consolidated companies that you would need one of them to be involved to do something like this.
The only ones that I know for a fact reporters have asked are ExxonMobil and Chevron, and both have refused any comment on the matter.
So I think the odds of getting one of them who's going to be all in on this is pretty low.
And that's both a testament to all the lawsuits that would be inevitable and almost certainly lost if they tried to do this.
And also just, I mean, Trump says this is, what did he say, $45 million a month worth of oil.
And the margins would no doubt be quite good because you're not paying for the oil, you're just stealing it.
And that's probably better margins that you're going to get in most countries.
I wish it was true that he was just trolling.
You know what I mean?
Like they used to say about Obama, no, see, he's just playing three dimensional chess trying to make you an anti-imperialist.
But that's not it.
He really just likes stealing and having free stuff.
Right.
And $45 million a month sounds like a whole lot of money.
And apparently it sounds like a whole lot of money to Trump.
But the practical matter is for these major oil and gas companies, that's a pittance on their financial statement.
It wouldn't be worth going in there for that little bit of oil, all that negative publicity and all those lawsuits.
It's just, it's a disaster waiting to happen.
And when obviously it would be a short term thing until everything changed in eastern Syria again sometime soon.
And so, yeah, it feels pointless.
I wonder what Trump thinks is going to happen.
He's just going to teach the GIs how to roughneck and they're just going to get in there.
I mean, he still seems, as of most of his statements that I've seen lately, he still seems convinced that some companies are going to come along and see what a great deal this is.
Getting oil for nothing from a country that we're not doing business with in a segment of territory that we just happen to militarily occupy.
And they're going to just start pumping.
Well, I mean, the real deal is they're just going to keep the Syrian government and their Iranian friends and whoever from pumping it.
That's the real deal, right?
Yeah, that's what it's going to boil down to.
Because, in fact, there's been a kind of a disconnect in official statements on the matter.
Some people are saying, some officials, especially Pentagon officials, I think, who are conscious of the law here are saying, well, we're keeping ISIS away from the oil.
We don't want ISIS to take the oil back because they used it before to get money.
Which is true, but there's not really any ISIS around there anymore to try to take the oil.
So it's also sort of beside the point.
And then you have other officials saying, well, we're just keeping the oil away from Syria and Russia.
We're keeping Syria's oil away from Syria.
And apparently they're comfortable saying that, even though legally that's, I mean, that's not even a dicey proposition.
That's just flat out illegal under international law.
The point of Israel's annexation of the Golan Heights and then subsequent drilling for oil there is that if it was still just an occupied territory that you're holding for the sake of holding, even if you're planning to hold it for years and years, you can't just start extracting natural resources like that.
International law doesn't allow that.
And it's pretty obvious why.
Yeah.
Well, and the whole thing, too, like you're saying, where ISIS is gone, where the U.S. is really, am I right, the only thing preventing the Syrian Arab army from occupying, reoccupying all of eastern Syria at this point?
Yeah, I mean, the Kurds are there, but I don't think the Kurds are practically presenting any obstacle from the Syrian government, especially when it comes to oil fields in southern Kurdish territory, because, of course, they've got bigger things to worry about in the north with the Turkish invasion.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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Hey, tell me, what's the status of Raqqa right now?
Is it still under the control of the SDF?
Yeah, I believe that they set up some sort of, it's still technically SDF, but it's sort of an unofficial SDF force that has more than the usual number of local Arab fighters in it to try to keep Raqqa from being just another Arab city occupied by Kurdish fighters because that was a big deal when they first took the city.
So I think they still have those sort of paramilitaries of the SDF fighting there that are still effectively led by the Kurds but have more local representation.
And now I had read that, speaking of which, that the YPG, who are really the dominant force in the SDF, that they had made a deal with the Assad government to be integrated.
But then I read that that was not true and that they had said that they had refused his offer.
And that also raises the whole question of what about the Arab members of the SDF?
Are they more likely to go inside with the FSA and al-Nusra or they're more likely to go over to the Syrian Arab Army?
I think they're probably more likely to go to the Syrian Arab Army, if only because a lot of them were living in ISIS controlled parts of Syria at one point and saw what that led to and were resisting ISIS.
So they joined the Kurds to fight against them, right?
Yeah, I think they're more inclined toward looking to return to a sense of normalcy.
As far as the Kurds merging their forces into the Syrian army, it makes sense for them to do that.
But it also is kind of a complicated issue right now because, well, in fact, I believe it was just yesterday the SDF issued a statement saying that unification of forces could only come after they have some sort of political settlement on what's going to happen to all that Kurdish held territory after the war.
They want a lot of autonomy.
They're probably not going to get a lot of autonomy, but they might be able to negotiate a little.
And their one real bargaining chip at this point is that they have all these fighters, most of them with pretty new halfway advanced U.S. weapons that could be merged into the Syrian army once the deal's made.
So I think they don't want to integrate first and then find they have no bargaining chips left.
But I think that probably is eventually where they're going to go.
Yeah.
And, you know, I don't want to sound on this show in covering this topic, I probably sound like I'm against the Kurds having their own independence to whatever degree they want, which is absolutely not the case.
The only question at issue here is ending the violence and who's going to cut what deal with whom and compromise to which degree so that they can stop killing each other.
And here in this case, the Syrian Kurds and the Syrian government, they never really were killing each other.
The Syrian Kurds just took their opportunity to take their independence while they could.
But now it's led to this crisis and all they have to do to solve it really is go back to the status quo before the war.
So why not do that?
You know, seems obvious enough.
And I guess it's already working.
Like, this is essentially the deal that the Russians, first the Americans, and then the Russians came and made, right?
And I think working with the Russians is probably a little bit better for the Kurds in that regard, because all throughout the Syrian war, Russia has been saying that the way forward would be a more federalized system with more regional autonomy, where the U.S. was very vehemently against that.
They wanted unconditional regime change in Syria, but they also want a strong central government.
And that was kind of the same position the U.S. took in Iraq.
And we saw what happened to Iraqi Kurdistan as soon as the ISIS war quieted down there, was that, well, now the Iraqi military is rolling into Iraqi Kurdistan to make sure that their vote to secede doesn't get implemented.
Wow.
Wait, so how recent of an issue is that?
You're not just talking about the Shia army taking Kirkuk, but rolling up into Erbil, is that right?
Well, they never really rolled into Erbil, but they rolled into some of the surrounding areas.
When was all this?
It was in, I believe the referendum was in September of last year.
In the immediate aftermath of that, you mean?
Right.
I knew they took Kirkuk, but well, that would have been, what, two years ago, right in 2017, when they took Kirkuk.
Yeah.
And then after that, I mean, the Peshmerga had taken a fair amount of territory near Manbij and the like in the ISIS fighting there.
And the Iraqi government took pretty much all of it back because the Kurdistan regional government was saying, oh no, if we liberate that, that's part of Kurdistan now.
Wait, I'm confused.
Did you say Manbij there?
Yeah.
So you're saying the Iraqi Peshmerga, they fought as far west as Manbij, which is like sort of in north central Syria.
Right.
I mean, they did.
I didn't realize that they had gone that far in Iraq war three.
Okay.
Yeah, they didn't get to Manbij, but they got quite close.
In fact, that was a fairly big issue when they were trying to evacuate Manbij during the Iraqi offensive was that a lot of the refugees coming out of the city were trying to flee toward Kurdish territory.
And the Kurds were so close and they were holding all the roads heading that direction and they were saying, well, we don't want all these refugees.
So they were keeping them out of that area.
That's a poor segue into what's going on in Baghdad and this uprising.
I had read some quotes of some Sunnis.
I don't know how representative this is saying, hey, we're keeping our heads down here.
We can't say anything without them calling us ISIS.
So we're staying out of it.
But meanwhile, there's major confrontations going on, protests and people killed and major faction fights within the Iraqi government and competing claims of whether the prime minister is going to resign or not.
Bader versus Sauter.
No, Bader allied with Sauter and then not.
Bader breaking with Skiri.
Go ahead.
Yeah, but the Bader Brigade's political leadership temporarily announced earlier this week that they were allying with Sauter to take down the government, which I don't understand why the government didn't immediately collapse once they said that.
Because those two are, on paper, they're more than half of the MPs in the coalition government.
There's no way you could hold a coalition together without those two.
But the following day, there were stories that Iran wasn't happy with that and that they had kind of talked to Amiri about backing out of that because they didn't want to undercut the existing Iraqi government.
Isn't that funny?
Are we having this conversation in 2008?
Or wait, first, are we having this conversation in 2005 about Jafari?
Are we having this conversation in 2008 about Maliki or 2010 about Maliki?
Or, this has been the whole war since Iraq War II began and it's still going on.
Is America and Iran supporting either Dawah or Skiri against the Iraqi nationalist, Muqtada al-Sauder, who would rather get along with the Sunnis and kick America and Iran both out?
Right.
And the reality is the Sunni Arabs don't have, I mean, right now there's a Sunni Arab party that's part of the coalition.
They probably would be a fairly easy one to pull out of the coalition if there was a serious attempt to force new elections and everything.
But they certainly couldn't topple a government by themselves.
They're just not politically powerful enough.
And a lot of that's because the recent voting has come amid ISIS wars when a lot of people were refugees and there were a lot of places deemed unsafe to have votes in Sunni Arab territory.
So they're even less represented than they usually are right now.
And I mean, the way it's been basically since the U.S. arrived is that the Shiites are such a dominant force that it really just matters which Shiites get together to form a government.
And this current government, Adel Abdel-Mahdi, the current prime minister, was not the first choice of anybody.
I mean, he probably was not the second or third choice of anybody.
He was the eventual compromise choice once everybody had sort of gotten sick of arguing and said, okay, we need somebody that everyone will at least put up with.
And he was the guy.
And now they're not so much putting up with him.
And with the public uprising, it seems like it would be fairly easy to just get rid of him, except that there's no obvious someone else to take that position.
But am I right?
Was I oversimplifying?
Or is it really right that the Americans agree with Iran that they would rather keep this guy from the Supreme Islamic Council?
I mean, if Saud is against him, then I figure America's for him.
Although there were rumors that kind of all of this had started over an American-backed coup attempt where this military leader, this general, was sacked on rumors that he was going to work with the Americans to overthrow Ahmadi now.
Sorry.
So I don't know if there was any truth to that.
The fact that Saud is for forcing this guy out makes it sound like the American position must be the opposite of that.
But I don't know.
It would seem like it would be.
But U.S. governments largely stayed out of this so far.
I think, again, because there's not an obvious successor, either a Saudist successor that the U.S. feels like they have to oppose, or some other officially Shiite, but kind of cynically opportunist, Maliki-type that they have to oppose.
So I don't think there's anything that could replace him that the U.S. might feel like they could buy off easier.
So I think, well, Iran is more worried about near-term stability, I think, chiefly because they want to keep that bridge of militia fighters out of Iraq going into Syria, if need be.
They're worried what happens near-term in Iraq, so long as its long-term stability is not at risk.
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All right, now switching gears for a second here.
Can you give us an update on the war in Yemen?
At ceasefire's been holding.
There really hasn't been a lot of fighting against the Houthi movement, although every once in a while we'll still get a story where Saudi Arabian airplanes blew up a vehicle and killed five civilians or something like that, because that's just always going on.
And most of the stories lately in Yemen are about the negotiated settlement in the south between the UAE-backed separatists and the Saudi-backed government, which isn't going great.
The UAE's pulled out of Aden, and the Saudis have arrived in Aden, although so far they're confining their activities to military bases in the city.
But the separatists have not let any of the government officials back in to take any of the government buildings in Aden.
And they're saying the reason for that is because the government, under this deal to settle the fighting in Aden, they were supposed to get a power-sharing structure where the separatists would be given some important positions within the Yemeni government.
And the Houthi government, as has been the case with pretty much every deal Saudi Arabia's made since the Yemen war began, just stonewalls, never gives up anything, and expects everything will eventually work out without them having to give up anything.
And it's kept that half of the settlement for Aden from making any progress.
And now the air campaign against SANA or SADA, for that matter, is right now suspended?
No, it's continuing.
We don't see as much as had been going on before.
What we hear is, as always, not good.
It's always, Saudi Arabia blew up a bus or blew up this car and killed five civilians.
That was a very recent story.
They said there was a man, two women and two children were killed.
They'll hit a house that was in some remote part of SADA, and it's like why they were even hitting that house was never apparent.
And the Saudis will basically just say no comment and pretend it never happened.
But I mean, they're not completely stopped.
There's still planes in the air.
Every once in a while, they'll still hit something, although it's rarely anything that would have been worth hitting.
But yeah, I mean, militarily, they're not making any progress in the north.
So I'm not sure why the flights are still going.
Yeah, money.
There was actually footage of congressional testimony from Vietnam where they were bombing Laos.
I'm almost positive it was Laos in this instance.
And they asked the base commander, how come you kept bombing them and bombing them all through the summer or whatever it was.
And he says, well, I mean, they kept sending me bombs, so I had to get rid of them.
I couldn't just let the inventory build up.
Business is business.
Yeah.
And with Saudi Arabia, of course, they have no shortage of weapons they can buy from the US, Britain and Germany and to a lesser extent, France.
I mean, despite public outcries in all those countries about the number of civilians getting killed by Saudi Arabia, everybody's still on board for selling them weapons.
And so long as that's true, I think the Saudis more or less have to keep buying them at this point, because Trump's support for the Saudis over the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi is kind of conditional on all this money he thinks he's going to make selling them weapons.
So if those sales dry up, suddenly Trump's support could dry up.
And that's probably the case in the other countries as well.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, you know, as surprising as it's been, the Congress has been out in front on this.
I mean, it's been because of the pressure of activists, but not because of public pressure in any broad sense.
You know, they've been better than regular politics would demand on this.
And so and that ought to be heard loud and clear.
You know, I mean, Trump vetoed their War Powers Resolution invocation, but the Saudis and the UAE and all those little princelings, they must have heard that, man, we don't really want the US Senate to be mad at us, do we?
Kind of thing.
Think of all the free money they get from us.
All the power, all the benefits of their side of our arrangement that jeopardize that goodwill pretty quickly, you know?
And the attempts before the new year, the attempts, especially in the House, to weasel out of having a vote at all on the War Powers Resolution, that's really business as usual for a country like Saudi Arabia.
They're so used to having it be unthinkable that the US would not support them, no matter what they do.
That's sort of the expected outcome.
And when it didn't happen in 2019, I would think they'd have to be panicking.
I mean, the fact that Trump just vetoed the thing, I guess the Senate did try to override it, right?
Right.
And it's sort of weird, the whole structure of War Powers challenges to unauthorized lawyers like that.
It's sort of weird that there even is an option to veto them.
Because the whole point of that challenge is to say that the executive branch is doing something unlawful.
And then just letting the executive branch say no, we're not.
Right.
Kind of cheats the purpose.
You know, I have somebody on the show who explained, and I'll get it all wrong, but it was something like the two kinds of resolutions, the concurrent resolution and something or other, whichever kind.
And one of those he could veto and one of them he couldn't.
And so this was the sneaky congressional thing was to give him the out.
Okay, I'll vote for the resolution, but you have to make it the kind of resolution that he can veto.
Oh, okay.
So then they can do their symbolic protest vote, but still be overruled.
Whereas if they had gone with the other way, he would not legally have been able to.
I mean, I guess at that point, I don't know what we would expect to happen under Trump.
But, you know, legally speaking, the military would have to stop at that point.
It wouldn't be up to him.
It would be up to them, like you're saying.
Yeah.
So they took the weasel way out, unsurprisingly.
Rationally, that seems like that's the way it should work.
Because, again, it's the whole point of the War Powers Challenge is to rebuke the president for fighting in an unauthorized war.
And Congress is the only one that has the power to authorize the war.
So the fact that the president says, no, we're not fighting an unauthorized war should really be beside the point.
Once Congress has already said it's not authorized.
Yeah, you know, it's really too bad.
I wish Rand Paul had done better leading on that.
He did sign it.
He voted against the attempt to table it or whatever, and this kind of thing.
And he did support it.
But if he had really co-signed that and led on that, I know he wants to have influence with Trump.
But he could have done it in a way that was still polite to his golfing friend, the president, and still, you know, of course, just, hell, make it all Obama's fault, which it is.
You know, it's at least three quarters of the story right there.
Go ahead and just stick to that narrative and how we really should not be doing this.
And that was such a great opportunity to lead.
And that could have really made the difference between whether this was just sort of a stunt or whether they really were able to call a halt to the thing.
But anyways, I'm going to always complain about that.
Yeah, and President Trump doesn't take it well when he doesn't get his way.
So Rand may have felt there wasn't a way to do it politely.
Well, you know, he was promised that we're getting out of Afghanistan, we're getting out of Syria.
Okay, so shut your mouth and button your lip about the rest of this stuff.
And then, but then that didn't happen.
Yeah.
But yeah, that's how these things go.
All right.
Well, listen, man, I will let you go and I hope you have a great afternoon.
Thank you so much for coming back on the show and talking with us.
Oh, sure.
Thanks for having me.
You have a good day, too.
All right, you guys.
That is the great Jason Ditz.
He is the managing news editor of Antiwar.com.
That's news.antiwar.com.
