01/21/15 – Nebojsa Malic – The Scott Horton Show

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All right.
Hey, guys.
Welcome back to The Thing here, man.
I'm Scott.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
All right.
On the line, we got Nibodz Samalich from antiwar.com, moments of transition, as it's called.
Welcome back to the show, Nibodz.
How are you doing?
Good, Scott.
Thank you for having me back.
Very happy to have you here.
Lots to talk about.
Let's start with the president's big speech last night, the State of the Union.
He said America is upholding the principle that bigger nations can't bully the small by opposing Russian aggression, supporting Ukraine's democracy, and reassuring our NATO allies.
How about it?
Tell us about America's support for Ukrainian democracy in their defense against big bully Russia over the last, say, oh, I don't know, year and three months.
Well, if he actually means what he said, I would have expected a full withdrawal of US troops from Kosovo and its reintegration into the constitutional order of Serbia as mandated by the UN Resolution 1244 of July 1999.
So obviously, he's not really being truthful here.
It's a special kind of cynicism to go about this whole Russian aggression thing because in this day and age, to claim invasion and have zero evidence, zero evidence that it's happening takes a special kind of arrogance and stupidity.
I mean, all it would take is one guy with a cell phone camera, and there's been reporters crawling all over that place for a year, and not a single credible picture has been produced, not one.
Well, and, you know, I mean, yeah, they really have claimed invasion repeatedly.
Oh, my God, thousands of troops are coming across the border, blares CNN about at least three or four different times where they've really claimed thousands.
The funny thing is that, you know, every time the troops loyal to the government in Kiev, the junta in Kiev, get their asses handed to them, pardon the expression, in battle, the spokesman in Kiev claims Russian invasion.
The joke is by now, you know, what is this, number 35 already?
Long story short, over the past three or four days, the armistice that was signed in September when the first great disaster befell the government army has been holding more or less until the beginning of this year, and then the artillery attacks on the civilians in Donetsk started, and then this weekend, the infantry and the tanks launched actual attacks against the rebel positions, and they got creamed.
Right now, the entire airport, which has been in government hands almost since the beginning and from which they coordinated the shelling of the city, has been completely taken by the rebels.
The latest report is that one of the high-ranking officers, a brigade commander, who also happened to be one of the leaders of the Nazi right sector, has been taken prisoner, as has been most of his unit.
Several – there hasn't been a major operation in that, you know, we're talking like a dozen tanks and maybe a brigade as opposed to, you know, divisions, but apparently they've been smashed up really badly.
And of course, Kiev's standard response is this is, you know, yet another Russian invasion and whatever, but the facts on the ground are that, you know, they tried a probing attack and they got really badly beaten.
Now everybody that has been monitoring the situation and every analyst and every observer is going, why now?
It's a terrible time, the weather is atrocious, it's just not conducive to a military operation, and why would you go ahead and send, you know, such a small attacking force to get slaughtered?
You know, advantage of surprise, whatever, but that obviously didn't work.
And yesterday I was actually commenting on this for RT, cross-talking this with a couple of Western analysts, and none of us were really sure what was going on.
And it dawned on me this morning, I have to say, it didn't occur to me yesterday, but it dawned on me this morning that these people could have been sent to Luz.
Yeah, I was going to say, is it possible that the Nazis are such bad public relations that the more Western-leaning, you know, more America-friendly technocratic types might have an agreement that let's go ahead and run these guys off into kill zones and thin the herd of right sector Nazis a little bit before they get too powerful in the parliament there?
Well, that's certainly one of the considerations, and a lot of people have been suggesting that, you know, there's a Game of Thrones, you know, I'm wishful thinking on my part that the Americans don't want anything to do with these Nazis or something, but that's a ridiculous premise with no evidence to support it.
So, unfortunately, unfortunately, the Nazis do have the US government's backing, which is, you know, terrifying on so many levels.
But while there is a Game of Thrones mentality in Kiev, and these people are backstabbing each other routinely, there's another, I think there's a more sinister dynamic at play here.
You see, a US general is visiting this week, and according to reports and rumors, his job is to basically evaluate the situation before making recommendations to the government here on whether and how to implement this ridiculous law that was sort of initialed but not yet implemented back in December, something along the lines of Ukrainian Freedom Act.
Honestly, whenever the government puts freedom or patriotism in the name of the law, you know it's a bad thing.
Nothing good can come of it.
But anyway, so this law envisions the American taxpayers providing, quote-unquote, lethal weapons aid to Ukraine to ostensibly repel the non-existent Russian invasion.
And what the government in Kiev is trying to do is make sure that this material, these weapons and the promised training and all of these things at the expense of US taxpayers because Ukraine is broke, come sooner rather than later.
And they've just called for a new wave of mobilization, a new draft of some 50,000 people, including folks over 50 years old, which is somewhat insane if you think about it.
And already there are reports of mass defections and people basically fleeing the draft, a lot of them going to Russia, the aggressor to escape from – this is how much the aggression and invasion narrative holds water.
So my theory right now, my working theory is that they tried to launch an attack that they knew would fail in order to show the visiting US general that they really need all this aid and that there's a huge danger of, quote-unquote, Russian aggression and that therefore if you would pretty please send us a few billion dollars' worth of weapons and equipment and instructors.
Yeah, that makes plenty of sense.
I mean that's basically the game all over the world is, hey, the Americans are here.
We have to show them that we're just strong enough, that we're the horse they ought to bet on, but we're just weak enough that we need a lot of money and guns please, thanks.
The same game is going on in Kurdistan right now and all over the place.
This isn't – you're right.
This isn't the first time.
I mean I've seen this before in Bosnia.
I've seen a regime trying to basically get US intervention to win the war for it and they were willing to do unspeakable, horrible things to even their own people in order to secure this, in order to make this happen and when it finally did happen, it didn't work out at all the way they planned and the peace treaty they ended up getting was the same peace treaty they rejected 40 years prior after the American ambassador said, well, we'll have your back if you don't sign it and then proceeded not to and they remain pissed off to the present day that the Americans, quote-unquote, betrayed them and as a result you have people from – you have frustrated and peeved Bosnian Muslims going to fight in Syria, in Iraq, being caught staging terrorist attacks in this country, that sort of thing.
I mean it's one of those, okay, you have a great plan to manipulate the great big powerful empire but has it occurred to you that the great big powerful empire came into being by essentially being more manipulative than others?
Who are you trying to make it – you're trying to cheat the mafia.
It's not going to work.
Yeah, well we'd like to believe that the people running the American government will only go so far, they wouldn't really sacrifice, you know, D.C. for Kiev but I don't know if we can count on that.
We'll be right back in one second.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And I should not be emailing and tweeting and doing all these things during the break.
I should be reading or recording through it anyway.
All right.
I'm on the line with Nabor Samalich from AntiWar.com, and we're talking about the war in Ukraine.
It's still going on there in the eastern provinces.
It's pretty clear, as even Holland of France said the other day, President of France said, oh, come on, it's not like Russia wants to reconquer eastern Europe or even wants to reconquer eastern Ukraine here.
He's only taking Crimea for the reasons that everybody already knows, and he obviously doesn't even want Donetsk and Luhansk.
So we can put all that – and pardon my pronunciations.
So we can just put away all the narrative here and get back to reasonable business.
We never meant, he said, to try to break the entire Russian economy with these sanctions.
We just wanted to punish them a little bit.
Well, that ain't what Obama said in his speech last night.
He's bragging.
In fact, boy, if this isn't hubris pride before a fall kind of a thing.
Well, today it's America that stands strong and united with our allies while Russia is isolated with its economy in tatters, he crowed.
And that's a specific type of arrogance that is really unbecoming of a man who – much as I want to like the guy, he's been like this for years, just taking credit for stuff he never did, getting recognitions just for showing up, not really ever amounting to much.
And now he's just lying about stuff.
I'm sorry, but he is.
All of the actual economic indicators are showing that yes, while the GDP in Russia has shrunk, so has ours.
And in fact, all of his clever hashtags in the speech and make sure to Twitter and Instagram this.
This is – who are his speechwriters trying to appeal to?
The jobless millennials?
Oh, yeah, our economy is great and strong.
And no, it isn't.
Have you looked around?
I mean I dare anybody to say that.
Hey, we're living here, man.
Yeah.
I mean which bubble does this guy live in?
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C. is a pocket dimension.
I live here too, but come on.
It's impossible that – we're living in the same universe here.
It's easy for somebody to – There's a great article over at Consortium News where the guy points out that – in fact, the guy is quoting even Thomas Friedman getting something right.
I don't know.
How's that confirmation bias for you?
Wow.
Saying that, hey, part of having a globalized economy means that you can't really take down Russia without taking down yourself because if they default on all their bonds, well, guess who's invested in all the European banks that are invested in all those Russian bonds?
American banks.
It's all one big integrated thing, and so you're only shooting yourself in the face.
Well, the thing is – and this is – I've actually spent the past year researching this and going to meetings and listening to experts on all sides just to educate myself about this some more.
What I've walked away with is that the only thing that this quote-unquote sanctions regime, which is essentially a trade blockade in violation of all sorts of international norms – it could be even construed as an act of war.
The Russians have chosen not to do so because they're honestly being quite reasonable about this, more reasonable than they should be.
The only thing it's managed to accomplish is essentially to separate Russia from the Western financial system, and paradoxically, while this hasn't – the thinking in the West is this is going to hurt the Russians so much that they're going to overthrow the government.
The government's never been more popular, and the – essentially what they did was destroy the pro-Western liberals in Russia who have been trying for the past – ever since 1991 and the rise of Boris Yeltsin, who was essentially an American puppet, to reshape Russia in a Western mold and make it yet just another European country that would follow the lead from Washington.
And it's these people that are the most vociferous complaining today because their entire concept has been destroyed by Americans themselves.
Well, and you can see where they're coming from with that.
I mean the Americans couldn't have gotten – I mean the imperialists, not the American people.
The imperialists, they couldn't have been luckier than to have Boris Yeltsin up there for what, nine years or ten years?
It wasn't luck.
I mean – Well, yeah.
No, I mean but – and they couldn't have had it better is what I mean to say.
And you can see why they're not over it, and they want to have that again.
On the other hand, we're talking about Russia here, and just by definition, that means that their military and security services and that kind of thing, they take their job real seriously, obviously under Putin.
The government is virtually coup d'etat proof.
I mean other than an American daisy-cutter bomb on top of the Kremlin when he shows up for work in the morning.
I don't know how in the world they can imagine they could ever have anything like a Boris Yeltsin regime in their hand again.
And that ought to be OK too, that maybe they can be independent but still we can get along.
We have a better relationship with China than we do with Russia, but why?
Well, that's the thing, and the same group of people today that is boasting clever hashtags and clever Tumblr graphics has gone a long way to antagonize China as well.
China is leaving this country afloat by buying all the dollar bonds.
Without the Chinese servicing our debt, this country would have to actually work for a living.
So again, it just boggles the mind that these people have no understanding of economics at all.
They believe that war is peace and that slavery is freedom and that weakness is strength and all these ridiculous things.
That clever graphic at the State of the Union speech showing how the U.S. leads 31 nations.
Yeah, well if they had actually put the graphic of the countries that stand with Russia on this, that would be three-quarters of the world's surface.
Yeah, the graphic is – interestingly, the White House, they posted the text of the State of the Union on Medium.com because I guess that's the trendy thing to do in 2015.
And it has this graphic, it says, the U.S. is leading a coalition of 31 countries in coordinating sanctions against Russia for its aggression against Ukraine.
Hashtag America leads.
This has got to be some sort of joke, right?
I mean last summer at this conference trying to sort of bridge the U.S. and Russian leaderships and find a way out of this restarting Cold War.
I've heard information, fairly reliable data that the U.S. and Russia trade balance is negligible even though the two countries are neighbors.
Whereas the Europeans have a much larger trade volume with Russia and it's essentially the Europeans that are paying the bill right now.
It's the European economies that are being driven into poverty.
I mean the Greeks are on the verge of collapse.
They have an election in a couple of days and most likely the party that will win the election is going to lobby for exiting the European Union.
Because the European Union with the sanctions policy is bankrupting the country yet again after they've just been bankrupted to death a few years back.
You've got Spain, you've got Italy, you've got all these countries that were hoping to rebound from their financial crisis because the bankers had over leveraged them by exporting their agricultural produce to Russia.
Sanctions, can't do it.
Meanwhile the Germans who are most eager to go along with the sanctions regime have safely exempted their own trade with the Russians from it and Lord forbid their gas supplies get cut.
That sort of thing.
The French are suffering because they were exporting their luxury goods to Russia.
Can't do that anymore.
The Baltic states are going nuts because for all of their anti-Russian rhetoric they relied on exporting food to Russia.
Can't do that anymore.
It's only logical if somebody hates your guts why do business with him, right?
From a libertarian standpoint the Russian sanctions on Europe are perfectly legitimate.
You people have decided to boycott us.
Fine.
We'll boycott you back and see who hurts more.
But the US is laughing all the way to the bank because, hey, we got the Europeans to bankrupt themselves for us.
All right, but now let me ask you this as we're running out of time here.
Back to the front as old Metallica would have said.
If the Americans can give enough welfare to the Kiev junta that they can actually win outright in the east, would you expect the Russians to go ahead and intervene like they've been accused of doing all along with actual troops on the ground to prevent that?
It seems like the obvious solution would be some kind of very federalized autonomy type situation is the solution that Kiev is not interested in whatsoever.
So I wonder – they've had quite a few attempts at ceasefires here.
The Russians are saying they want a ceasefire again.
I don't know how ingenuous or disingenuous they're being with that necessarily.
But I don't know.
It seems like peace – what I was saying about the obvious solution.
It seems like peace could break out pretty much immediately if these guys would come to obvious terms.
On the other hand, the war keeps going and the Americans keep backing the junta in the west that refuses to accept that level of autonomy in the east.
Well, the problem is there's two problems at work.
Both are essentially tied to the nature of the government in Kiev.
One, the very identity politics they adopted is rooted in about a hundred-year-old hate project that sought to define Ukrainian identity as intrinsically anti-Russian and hostile to Russia.
And what they're trying to do is impose this identity that has been trying to – every time there was some sort of war, whether it's World War I or World War II, there's been a fringe trying to impose this and failed every time.
This is why there's crying about their glorious World War II past fighting for freedom alongside Hitler.
But – so they can't really have peace with Russia because it's against everything they stand for as a political group and as an identity group.
But on the other side, there's also the notion that, again, America has their back, their belief that the US government – they don't care about the American people.
Neither does the US government for that matter.
But their belief is that the US government has their back and all it takes is money and weapons and whatever.
And they'll just kill all these subhumans, as they've called them before, and liberate our holy land, whatever.
And there's even people dreaming of going into Russia itself and, quote-unquote, reclaiming ancestral Ukrainian territories.
Madness.
On the other hand, there might be even some people in Washington – and this is a topic of much debate – that would like to see Russians intervening openly.
Because their whole agenda is, OK, let's have a new Cold War.
Let's look how well that worked out the first time.
This is a way to revamp our economy.
This is, you know, the war is good for business idea.
And, obviously, they're horribly mistaken.
But, again, this could be – it's an explanation for how some of these people might be thinking.
And so what they've been wanting to do ever since March and the Crimean referendum is basically provoke a Russian intervention.
Basically say, OK, you know, the Russians have invaded.
We must, you know, intervene to curb Russian aggression and so on and so forth.
What they don't realize is that the Russians have nukes.
And so do we.
And, you know, playing this sort of game with the nuclear power is insane.
Yeah.
So, again, what their endgame is, I don't know.
I've heard plenty of speculation that this is some sort of plot to bolster or revive the dollar or whatever.
You know, when you're in a recession, start a war and people have been reading too much Keynes and looking too much into FDR and World War II.
But, again, war can't be good for business if both sides have nuclear weapons.
We're talking sea of glass scenarios here.
So I honestly hope that the people who are in charge downtown here aren't that stupid.
But I wouldn't put money on it.
Yeah.
Well, and even in the worst of the Cold War, we never actually had a H-bomb exchange.
But think of all the dead Koreans and Vietnamese and Indonesians and on and on and on.
Right.
And it could be – Name every Eastern European country dominated by the Soviet Union.
And it could be that they're thinking, OK, well, Ukraine is just another one of these proxy wars, you know, be like just like Vietnam or whatever or Afghanistan.
The crucial thing that escapes them is that Ukraine is not just a neighboring country.
It is the Russian heartland that was partitioned and sort of, you know, they've had this whole new identity created over the course of the 20th century at the hands of Russian enemies.
First the Austro-Hungarians and then the Germans and then the Nazis and then the communists.
And so what they don't understand is this very crucial dynamic.
It's as if, you know, a hostile state started creating an anti-American country in Canada.
And the American public wouldn't stand for this or, you know, Maine declaring independence and becoming rabidly anti-American tomorrow or California or Texas.
You name it.
It's the – it's essentially – it's not considered a foreign country to most – not just ethnic Russians but people in Russia in general.
It's part of their country and culture and part of their cultural space.
And so for the U.S. government to be sponsoring a rabidly anti-Russian Nazi government in that country which the Russians were happy enough to leave well enough alone as an independent state but cannot possibly tolerate from any standpoint politically, morally, culturally, you name it, its existence as an anti-Russian fortress on their very border is madness.
And whoever came up with this idea in Washington thinking it was brilliant is an idiot and needs to be put on trial.
For stupidity.
For stupidity.
Washington DC levels ought to be prosecutable I think.
Yeah, for real.
Absolutely.
All right.
Hey, I kept you over time.
Thank you so much for your time.
I appreciate it.
Thanks for having me on the show.
He's at greyfalcon.blogspot.com and, of course, at antiwar.com slash Malik.
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