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 hacked.
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.
Introducing foreign correspondent, Reese Ehrlich.
And boy, I really mean that.
This guy travels the world getting a first-hand view of all of these things.
And so here he is at the Progressive for one example.
Sex, Russia, and impeachment.
I like this.
Trump has committed multiple impeachable offenses.
Colluding with Putin isn't one of them.
Genocide in Yemen certainly is, or isn't it?
I'm not sure.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Reese?
I'm doing great.
Thank you, Scott.
I'm really just stalling for time here, my friend, as I page down to look at the bottom so I can remember the name of your new book.
And it doesn't say it here.
So now tell me.
I'm sorry.
The book is The Iran Agenda Today, The Real Story from Inside Iran, and What's Wrong with U.S. Policy.
There you go.
The Iran Agenda Today, etc.
And you know what?
So look, let's start with the genocide because it's a genocide.
But then let's talk about Iran.
A war with Iran could get really bad.
So I haven't read the book yet, but I sure do want to hear your take on some of that.
But can we start with some progress on the case of Yemen?
I just spoke with Nasser Arabi, a journalist out of Sana'a that I've been speaking with for, well, through the whole war long now, four years almost.
And he's pretty optimistic about the new deal over the Hodeida port that was achieved in the talks in Sweden because the commander, there's international forces are going to come to be peacekeepers and enforce the thing.
And it's going to be commanded by a guy from the Netherlands, I think he said.
So this is, and the UN will take control, not of the city, but of the actual ports themselves, all three major ports there at Hodeida.
And so that this is really huge.
And then he's really hoping it'll be the beginning of the end for the deal.
And then, you know, another major event that has taken place, of course, is the vote in the US Senate to invoke the War Powers Act for the first time ever, in order to try to attempt to force the president to end the war.
So I guess my first question will just be generally speaking, what do you think of those two things?
Well, in Yemen, I think lots of folks are hopeful, although it's time to be very cautious because the Saudis in the past have agreed to one kind of ceasefire or another, allegedly supporting international efforts, and then proceeded to bomb the hell out of the country.
So the danger is, and indeed new fighting broke out just in the last 24 hours or so, 48 hours in Yemen around Hodeida.
So it's still quite difficult.
And I certainly hope that the ceasefire takes hold there and elsewhere.
It's the beginning of some peace talks.
But basically, I don't think you can trust the Saudis or the Emiratis to live up to their agreement.
In terms of the US Senate, it was a very, very significant vote last week, by a vote of 56 to 41, to invoke the War Powers Act, to call on Trump to pull out US support for Yemen in the fight against the Houthis.
It has some holes in it because it allows troops to stay to fight al Qaeda and a few other shortcomings.
But still, it's a tremendous step forward compared to this unilateral war that was waged first by the United States under Obama, cooperating with Saudi Arabia, and now under Trump.
Yeah, now, so I guess, you know, I saw a thing about these five Democrats who helped the Republicans kill it in the House.
Do I understand it right, Rhys, that if both houses pass it, it's not the kind of thing that they submit to the President to veto that they'd have to override his veto or any of that?
A bare majority, and it is essentially the law enforces his hand, or it's supposed to.
No, no, that's not correct.
It's subject to a veto by the President.
Oh, it is subject to veto, so they would have to override it with super majorities.
Yeah, it's true.
Parliamentarily speaking, it's very difficult because although the Senate passed the resolution in this session of Congress, Paul Ryan and the Republican leadership made it impossible to have a vote on it in the House, although it would have passed overwhelmingly because it passed previously.
And so, therefore, both resolutions have to be introduced again in the new session of Congress in January.
And even if they both pass it, it then is subject to a veto by the President.
Well, you know, my thing is, I'm hoping it won't even come to that.
Just the fact that the U.S. Senate has passed this thing, it doesn't legally force his hand, but it should politically force his hand on this.
Especially if he's forced to veto the thing, and then they have to have a debate about overriding his veto and enforcing the War Powers Act over his veto.
I mean, politically speaking, that's certainly the fight I would love to have if it has to come to that sort of thing.
If we're going to impeach him for something, how about war crimes?
Yeah, I agree with you completely.
And what's significant is, according to the most recent opinion polls, some 75% of Americans oppose the war in Yemen, 57% oppose all arms sales to Saudi Arabia.
There is very strong anti-war sentiment in the United States, ranging from libertarians and principled conservatives to progressives and people on the left.
There is a widespread consensus about that, and it's finally getting expressed in the Senate and the House.
You know, the worst part of that poll was some, I think a majority, or no, I guess it wasn't a majority, but it was a huge minority of people, maybe even the plurality or something, didn't have any idea that America was involved in a war in Yemen at all.
True.
And that's just remarkable to me.
I don't think Trump could find Yemen on a map, if you know the honest truth.
Yes, and because basically the war has been waged without deaths, or acknowledged deaths of American soldiers.
We're spending billions of dollars, but nobody knows exactly how much.
It turns out that the U.S. had been refueling the Saudi planes for free, and now they're going to hand him a bill for $330 million.
I mean, it's really scandalous.
Hey, let me ask you something, man.
I'm sorry, because I may have asked you this before, Rhys, but I have three different hearsay sources, three different journalists, one of them a former ambassador, but a writer, and two different journalists who each themselves have one source, who have told them that there are American mercenaries, contractors, and or Air Force personnel sitting in the back seats of those Saudi F-15s.
Helping them fly, at least at some points in this war.
Helping the Saudi princelings fly their F-15s all the way to commit their war crimes and back again.
And I wonder if you've heard that, and or if I could ask you to do me a favor and really track that down and see if you can verify it.
Well, I have heard it.
I've not found any sources to confirm it.
I wouldn't doubt it.
So that's four hearsay sources now.
That still doesn't amount to anything though, right?
You still need...
Scott, I've got better than that.
There was an investigative story recently that the UAE has hired American mercenaries to act as hit squads in southern Yemen to go around assassinating members of the Muslim Brotherhood.
That's Aram Rostam at BuzzFeed.
He's the author of the book on Ahmed Chalabi, by the way.
Yes, exactly.
And that is confirmed.
And so if you want U.S. mercenaries fighting in Yemen, they're there.
U.S. troops are on the ground supposedly to be fighting AQAP, you know, the al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
And what you've heard from me, I think exclusively, is that the U.S. provides civilian technicians, mechanics, people who fuel the planes on the ground, who repair them, who load the missiles, all of whom can be called home in a day if the U.S. president so orders.
Well, not to sell you short, because it's great journalism, and I know it's original journalism on your part, but actually the Wall Street Journal and the L.A. Times and the Washington Post have all covered that as well.
It's as official as it could be.
At one time or another, they have covered it.
Not that they ever made a big deal out of it or anything.
But in any case, good.
I'm glad if they confirmed what I've reported, that's wonderful.
Yeah.
No, and I would put it that way as well.
I mean, I'm certainly not, I don't know who wrote it first, but I know that your journalism there is its own separate thing from what they say.
All right, now, so anyway, I don't know where else to go with the Yemen story for now.
Well, let me ask you this.
I know you've been traveling a bit, so I don't know if that helps or hurts.
I haven't been watching TV at all, but it seems like for the Senate to do this is a pretty big deal.
And I wonder if it's really, I know the New York Times is covering it more now and that kind of thing.
So has this really made a difference in terms of the so-called public debate as it exists, you know, or the important part of it in Washington, D.C. and New York City there?
I just finished up a three-week East Coast tour talking about my book, The Iran Agenda, today.
And I had a chance to meet with everybody from peace activists to union folks to independent business people.
And I even spoke to the, gave a briefing at this Massachusetts State House of Representatives.
So it was a pretty wide range of kinds of folks.
And there for sure is a growing anti-war sentiment.
I wouldn't call it an anti-war movement like we've seen around previous wars, but certainly the sentiment is growing and it's combining with anger at Trump for many of his other policies, whether it be towards African Americans and Black Lives Matter or the anti-folks who were upset with his tax policies and so on.
And there is a broad anti-Trump movement that was seen exhibited in the midterm elections.
And I think the anti-war sentiment is one component of that.
Speaking objectively, the movement doesn't really grow large.
I'm a veteran of the anti-Vietnam War and anti-draft movement of the 1960s.
And the movement really became huge in large numbers of people who were in the streets when two things happened.
When there were American soldiers dying and the spending on the war was so great that it was impacting the economy.
So I don't think we're quite, we're not there yet.
But I do think that there is growing sentiment and it will be, and the time will come when more and more people kind of connect the dots between Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen.
You know, we're involved in seven wars around the Middle East these days and people are coming to understand that.
Tom Woods, Liberty Classroom, learn from the greats.
Click through from the link in the right hand margin at scotthorton.org.
So I'll get a kickback.
That's Tom Woods, Liberty Classroom, libertyclassroom.com.
You know, it's funny.
I was talking with a friend of mine who's an Air Force vet and you know, pretty worldly.
I don't think he keeps up with everything all the time, that kind of thing.
But I talked about how I mentioned how Trump had escalated all seven wars that he had inherited from Obama.
And then my friend says, yeah, and he inherited them from Bush.
And I said, no, he only inherited three from Bush, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia.
But then he escalated into Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Iraq War Three, down into Mali, Niger.
And my friend who ought to know all of this because TV should have told him or something was just, I think he kind of somewhere in the back of his head like he knew it was true when I said it, but he couldn't have come up with it himself before.
Basically, he thought that it was basically status quo since 08.
And of course, it's true that Trump has deliberately, and I think for political reasons, has told the military to relax the rules as far as they can legally and to devolve the authority to conduct and to order strikes and to say always, hey, I told the military do your best and no LBJ or Barack Obama style micromanaging for me.
You guys, if it didn't work, it's their fault, not mine.
Basically, what that's amounted to is war crimes committed where they bombed Afghanistan this year more than any other year this whole time.
They've escalated even infantry now into Somalia.
Especially the worst side of it against the Houthis.
And of course, killed tens of thousands of people in Iraq and Syria, mopping up Iraq War 3 and still bombing Libya as well and Pakistan.
Yeah, I was just going to say don't forget the drone wars in Pakistan.
That's right.
And I think Obama, I may be wrong about the numbers.
I'll have to go back and check air wars and stuff.
But I think Obama had basically more or less quit bombing in the early years of his presidency.
But Trump has started bombing them again.
Yeah, no, I think he continued, but it definitely escalated under Trump.
You know, this is the great irony, Scott.
The United States isn't at war unless significant numbers of American soldiers are dying and it costs somewhere close to a trillion dollars.
Otherwise, it doesn't count as a war.
The fact that we're dropping bombs on people, that we have troops on the ground, that we have mercenaries fighting with the okey-doke of the U.S. government, none of that counts unless, of course, you want to attack the Russians or the Chinese or somebody else.
And when they do, particularly the Russians, do anything like that, well, then they're obviously waging war in Ukraine, et cetera, et cetera.
Isn't that funny?
So, like, that means when we say things like, you know, kids these days, they've spent their whole lives in wartime that, actually, no, not really.
To them, it's been peacetime.
To them, it's no different than like the 1980s where the worst thing going on was outsourced death squads in El Salvador and that kind of thing.
But if you're talking about the general public perception, yeah, you're right.
Exactly.
Yeah, as far as they know, whatever, you know, drone bombing little babies to death all day in Yemen is, that's peacetime.
That's just business.
That's not, that doesn't count as a conflict at all.
Just like Obama said, it's, you know, it's a kinetic action or something maybe, but...
Yeah, they have all kinds of euphemisms they come up with.
Yeah, no, it really is something else.
And, you know, part of this dynamic, which I don't really know what to do about this other than just wait it out.
But, you know, this whole thing with Trump supposedly being an agent of a foreign power here, as you pretty critically debunk in your latest piece, in fact, has really spun the center left liberal types, especially, there are a lot of leftists who see through this kind of thing as you do.
But for the liberal, you know, Hillary Clinton supporters and, you know, New Republic readers and whatever, this whole thing of rallying around the permanent, unelected, secret national security state, the FBI, counterintelligence division, the CIA, the FBI, the, pardon me, the NSA and all of this.
And in order to protect us, to protect the country from the elected president, who is, as we talked about, a dangerous war criminal and everything.
But that has put them in such an odd position, not that odd for them, but a somewhat odd position of really rallying around the CIA against the leader, sort of in the way the Egyptian liberals did, rallying around the military to protect them from the Muslim Brotherhood when they should have stuck with the regular elections thing and tried their hand at that for a while first, maybe.
That seems to be the trap that the liberals have fallen in here.
And so that really puts the whole kibosh on them noticing that the very worst things about Donald Trump are his foreign policies, the massive violence that he's inflicting on people and particularly, of course, in carrying on all of Obama's wars and doubling them.
And so with the Obama factor and the Trump is not some kind of American, you know, dangerous super patriot, but is a traitor, agent of the Kremlin and all of this, it's really disrupted, I think, the liberals' natural inclinations, which is to be, I wouldn't say anti-interventionist, but certainly not pro-war mongers, you know, most of the time.
Yeah, no, it's disgusting when the liberals are calling for greater sanctions and thumping the war drums to go after Russia or China or Iran and getting support.
You know, the liberals, as well as the mainstream conservatives, are following those policies.
I think it's both wrong and counterproductive because most people in the United States do not want to see us involved in another war.
Most people want to see better relations with Russia, not worse relations.
And that's certainly not, I think, too many people like Nadler from the Foreign Affairs Committee and Pelosi, you know, going to be the head of the House, they're attacking Trump from the right.
They're trying to, on national security issues, more patriotic, more nationalistic than Trump.
And I think it's a huge mistake.
I think it's wrong on principle and it's wrong in terms of the impact it's going to have.
All right, Sean, here's a message for all you Redditors out there.
I quit Twitter and I quit Facebook and all those things, but I am on Reddit.
It's my own private Reddit group for donors only at r slash Scott Horton Show.
And we've got this great new project going on.
Car Camp It is organizing it and we're crowdsourcing and having the listeners are going back through the old interviews, taking notes toward the writing of my new book.
We got a great system set up and you can check out all about that if you want to participate in that.
Those of you who've already signed up for the Reddit group or those of you who wish to do so, check us out at slash r slash Scott Horton Show.
Okay, so now what's funny, right, is that if all of the accusations about Trump and Russia were true, boy, that would really seem to add up to a lot of something.
But instead, to me, the closest parallel is obviously Iraq War II, where they had so many claims about Saddam's regime, the weapons, the ties to Osama and the threats and his refusal to negotiate and hiding all his weapons and all these things.
None of it was true.
And that's at least how this one seems to me, where it's just claim after claim after claim.
Most recently, or maybe not most recently, but just last week or two weeks ago was one in the Guardian where Manafort went to the Ecuadorian embassy in London and met with Assange, which couldn't possibly have been right and which was debunked even by, you know, pro-Russiagate kooks immediately were saying, wait, this is too kooky even for us.
But there's been like a hundred of those.
And I don't know, I just, you've written about this in your most recent piece.
What do you make of all this?
Yeah, I think the Russians did in a clumsy way try to influence the US elections in favor of Trump because Hillary Clinton was a liberal interventionist.
She had made her stand antagonistic to Russia clear.
And Trump at various times had said things that might lead you to believe that he would change policies.
So I think, you know, there were fake news sites and attempts to influence people through social media.
But, you know, the US does that kind of stuff all the time all around the world, as do other powers.
And that doesn't make you, that doesn't make for a criminal conspiracy.
Well, I'm with you on motive, but I'm not even so sure about that.
Like all the fake news was all teenagers in Macedonia and that kind of thing, right?
Well, some of it, there seemed to be some indication there were folks in Moscow who were involved in this.
And just as the US engages in espionage and attempts to discredit, you know, using fake news and so on, so do the Russians.
They don't have clean hands in this.
But that doesn't mean they actually had an impact.
That's where the dots stop connecting, which is that, you know, Trump won the election because he appealed, in my view, to white racism among a sector of folks, a small sector, but a sector nonetheless.
And Hillary Clinton ran a bad campaign.
She tilted right instead of tilting left in her campaign.
But it wasn't because people read things on the internet that were constructed by some Russian trolls.
That's where it breaks down.
I think Trump did wanna set up hotel deals in Moscow.
There's indications from Michael Cohen that those negotiations continued.
Remember, Trump didn't think he was gonna win.
He mainly entered this campaign to hype his business, to raise his profile.
And only later, very late in the day, did they begin to realize that they might actually win this thing.
And during that earlier period, he was gonna make as much money as he could.
He was selling his steaks and his vodka during his campaign.
And I'm sure he would have loved to have had a hotel deal with Moscow.
But again, that being the fact does not mean that you therefore connect the dots and say, well, Trump was in the pay of Putin or that there was payments of some kind and quid pro quo policies.
That's where the whole conspiracy theory breaks down.
I mean, but the thing is though, so then that means that Manafort and Page and Papadopoulos and Flynn and Sessions were not all secret agents of Vladimir Putin controlling Trump and telling him what to do.
None of that has held up at all.
In fact, Flynn's entire intervention was on behalf of Israel, trying to get Russia to back off of the UN resolution condemning the expansion of settlements on the West Bank.
And they told them to piss off as a great measure of who's Zoom and who there.
If you wanna talk about collusion, look at Flynn and Turkey.
He was in the pay of the Turkish government.
He's had to plead guilty to being a foreign agent for Turkey.
And the minute he got into power, he started to try to reverse US policy in Syria in a way that would benefit Turkey.
He wanted to pull support for the Syrian Kurds who were fighting with the US.
Now that's a whole nother question and a whole discussion, but- I mean, and that's huge.
But yeah, it sure ain't nothing about, that's what Putin said to do.
But there's a direct ABC, one, two, three connection there where there was collusion.
But because Turkey is a NATO member, because embarrassing details could come out, we'll have to see if that investigation is carried through to the end.
By the way, it's in the news today that they are working on extraditing Fethullah Gulen.
What do you think about that?
Oh boy, we really are on the topical news cycle here, huh?
Yeah, well, you know, you know a lot about a lot of stuff, Rhys.
Well, I was in Turkey actually fairly, just a couple of months ago.
Gulen- Exactly, my point, see?
Is a, you know, he's a conservative political Islamist.
He's not some kind of human rights defender by any means.
And he had an alliance with Erdogan, the president of Turkey.
And they, early on, ran together and Gulen's people started staffing the bureaucracy and they had a falling out.
And of course, the Erdogan claims that Gulen was behind the coup that took place nearly two years ago in Turkey, an effort to overthrow him.
There certainly was a coup.
Whether Gulen was involved or not remains a point of dispute.
But the U.S. has been holding Gulen as a- Do you have an opinion on that, whether you think that was instigated by him?
Well, there's some, I've read some press, first of all, I have not done that story directly, so it's speculation.
But there were some indications that at least some of Gulen's supporters in the military were indeed involved in the coup.
Not that it was planned and controlled by Gulen himself, but at least there was some participation by Gulen supporters.
But that doesn't justify this incredible crackdown, firing of 100,000 professors and teachers, most of whom had nothing to do with Gulen.
It was, you know, this was used as a means by Erdogan to consolidate his power, crush all opposition, crush the Kurdish opposition, et cetera, et cetera.
Governments do like those Reichstag fires, don't they?
Say again?
Governments really do like those Reichstag fires, don't they?
They do, because this gives them the excuse, look at 9-11 and the excuse it gave to Trump, to Bush, to violate civil liberties and cause all kinds of problems in this country.
So Erdogan is no different.
Well, the famous quote of him, which actually now that I think about it, I don't know that it's real, but presumably he had said that, look, democracy is like a streetcar.
You ride on it until you get to where you're going and then you get off.
In other words, give me the power and then see what happens if you ever get to vote again.
And you don't get a transfer either.
Yeah, exactly.
I don't know if he said that, but it certainly is consistent with what he's done.
All right, well, thanks very much, Reese, for coming on the show.
I sure appreciate it.
Sure thing.
All right, you guys, that is Reese Ehrlich, foreign correspondent.
His new book is The Iran Agenda Today.
And I didn't get to ask him about Pompeo's missile speech.
I guess that'll have to wait.
Check him out very often at antiwar.com.
All right, y'all, thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
