12/17/15 – Daniel Larison – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, I'm Scott Horton here.
It's always safe to say that one should keep at least some of your savings in precious metals as a hedge against inflation.
And if this economy ever does heat back up and the banks start expanding credit, rising prices could make metals a very profitable bet.
Since 1977, Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Inc. has been helping people buy and sell gold, silver, platinum, and palladium.
And they do it well.
They're fast, reliable, and trusted for more than 35 years.
And they take Bitcoin.
Call Roberts and Roberts at 1-800-874-9760 or stop by rrbi.co.
Okay guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Again, happy Star Wars Day to everybody.
It's the only kind of words I like.
Although they are the health of the state, as Daniel Sanchez will be discussing with us here in just a little while.
But first, it's our friend Daniel Larrison from the American Conservative Magazine to talk about the bad kind of wars, the real ones, America's most specifically.
Welcome back.
How are you doing, Daniel?
I'm doing well.
Thanks, Scott, for having me back.
Very happy to have you here.
And everybody, you should know, if you don't, that Daniel Larrison is daily holding down peaceful foreign policy at the American Conservative Magazine.
That's theamericanconservative.com.
And very, very valuable stuff there, virtually constantly, always.
So keep your eyeballs open for that.
Yeah, no doubt about it.
OK, so there's a lot to talk about.
And you've got a lot of great commentary on these Republican candidates running for president and all the various insane things that they say and claim and plan.
But first, we got to talk about Obama's war in Yemen.
And hard to believe this thing started in March.
It's still going on.
And of course, as we've discussed previously on the show, the Saudi effort is virtually entirely dependent on the United States of America to aid and abet them.
And as you write here, arm them.
But I guess my first real question for you would be, if I could figure out a way to state it, would be, is this anything but a stalemate?
Does it look to you like either side could possibly win a victory here, especially when we hear that the, you know, pseudo ceasefire and move for talks has broken down?
Or what is going to happen here?
Just years of this still or what?
Well, it depends, I think, pretty heavily on how many losses the Saudis or their allies are willing to take.
They have recently just suffered several dozen more casualties, although a lot of these are mercenaries that they hire and bring in from private contractors from out of the area.
In fact, the UAE has been using Colombian ex-military folks to do a lot of their fighting in Yemen now, because they don't want to lose their own people, because that would become unpopular.
The coalition hasn't been making much progress since it advanced a few months ago in the south, and they seem to be stuck around Taiz, which is one of the central cities of Yemen, south of the capital.
At the moment, it does seem to be a stalemate.
That's one of the reasons why the UN envoy was able to get them to the table, at least, although, as you say, the truce for the peace talks has already started breaking down.
I think the coalition will keep pressing on for as long as is tolerable for them domestically at home.
Unfortunately, that means for the people of Yemen that they're going to continue to be blockaded, they're going to continue to be bombed for the foreseeable future.
Our support doesn't seem to be relenting at any point.
As you may have already mentioned to your audience, the U.S. just approved the sale of another 1.3 billion in weapons, precision-guided munitions and things like that, to the Saudis so that they can continue to drop them on Yemen.
Well, OK, so maybe we should go back to my first premise here, that the Saudi war is entirely dependent on America's help here.
Do you think that that's really right, or if Obama decided to get tough with them and say enough of this, would they just tell them to buzz off and keep going anyway, or what?
Well, it is heavily dependent on our support, both in terms of refueling their planes and in providing them with weapons to replace the weapons that they're expending.
So it's conceivable that they could continue without U.S. support for a while, but they wouldn't be able to keep it going indefinitely.
But what U.S. support does is relieve the pressure on them and allow them to extend their campaign much longer than they would otherwise be able to do it.
So we're directly making a peace settlement more difficult to reach because of this continued support.
All right, now, is there any U.S. interest, and I don't mean, you know, interest of you and me and the American people, but is there any interest that the U.S. government even really has in supporting this war, other than in just kissing the ass of the Saudis here?
At this point, I can't see what it would be.
It started off nominally as an effort to restore the Yemeni government, the government of President Hadi, but Hadi is now so deeply unpopular and has so little support in the country because of his support for the bombing campaign and the blockade that there's no way he or probably anyone else associated with his government would be able to come back into power without some sort of power-sharing agreement with the Houthis and other parts of the forces opposing him.
So, at this point, the U.S. is fighting to restore a government that can't be restored, or we're helping them to fight to restore a government that can't be restored.
And in the meantime, the one security interest that we may have in that place, preventing the growth of jihadist groups, is being completely ignored and, in fact, being undermined because al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and the local ISIS affiliate are making significant gains, both territorially and in terms of their propaganda, as a result of this security vacuum that the war has created.
Yeah, it's amazing.
I mean, after, yeah, Obama's been bombing al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula with drones and regular airstrikes, I guess, too, for years now, supported Saleh, gave him all this money and all these weapons that he used to fight the Houthis and accidentally make them more and more powerful each time he lost to them and helped, you know, to precipitate all of this.
But at least, you know, on the surface, America was fighting against al-Qaeda.
But now, as you say, he's completely undermined that by fighting against al-Qaeda's worst enemies, the Houthis.
And I have read, at least here and there, of a couple of drone strikes against al-Qaeda targets during this, which just makes it where we're fighting on both sides.
But it seems like, you know, we're much more backing al-Qaeda than fighting them in Yemen at this point.
And for light and transient causes, right?
Like isn't that what, out of the Declaration of Independence, there's no other reason here?
I mean, maybe they're paranoid about losing control over the gates of the Red Sea there or something.
I mean, there's got to be some other bogus reason that they're glomming on to here.
It's just because that's what the new Saudi king's son wants to do for, you know, or whatever?
Well, it's what the new Saudi leaders want to do.
It's what a lot of the Gulf states want to do, evidently.
And that's driven by their paranoia about Iran, as we've talked about before.
Iran's role in this is minimal, if it exists at all.
So what we're really doing is indulging the Saudis and their allies in an irrational fear about Iranian influence that isn't even really there.
And for that dubious cause, inflicting a lot of suffering on tens of millions of people.
I just saw a statistic that came, I think, from the UN, that the percentage of people in Yemen that require humanitarian aid is now a bit higher than it used to be, 82%.
And the total number of people in need of humanitarian aid is over 20 million, which is actually significantly higher than the number of people in Syria that need aid.
And all of that has come about just in the last year.
Unreal.
And then, you know, we could do an entire documentary on the silence of the Western media about this, too.
It's just unbelievable.
It's not even noteworthy whatsoever to them.
I mean, I guess I don't watch the nightly news on NBC or whatever, but I watch the cable news and there's no mention of it ever.
No, it is by and large neglected in the U.S. and in Western media more generally.
The BBC has done some good work in covering it.
The New York Times wrote a pretty decent editorial about it the other day.
But it's very hit and miss.
It's very sporadic.
And I think one of the reasons for that is that there's I don't think there's a lot of.
Attention being paid to it because it was so preoccupied with ISIS, with.
The other war going on in Iraq and Syria, yeah, that that ends up driving everything else out, yeah, could make for a great political argument, though, for Trump or Rand or anybody who want even Cruz to try to make a little sense up there.
Hey, these guys got us flying as Al Qaeda's Air Force right now.
What's up with that, guys?
Let's crack some jokes and get some, you know, a little bit of reality into that discussion.
Anyway, hang tight, y'all.
We'll be right back with the great Daniel Larrison from the American conservative dot com.
Hey, I'll start here to tell you about this great new ebook by longtime future freedom author Scott McPherson, freedom and security, the Second Amendment and the right to keep and bear arms.
This is the definitive principled case in favor of gun rights and against gun control.
America is exceptional here.
The people come first and we refuse to allow the state a monopoly on firearms.
Our liberty depends on it.
Get Scott McPherson's freedom and security.
The Second Amendment and the right to keep and bear arms on Kindle at Amazon dot com today.
Hey, I'll start here to tell you about this great new book by Michael Swanson, the war state in the war state.
Swanson examines how Presidents Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy both expanded and fought to limit the rise of the new national security state after World War Two.
This nation is ever to live up to its creed of liberty and prosperity for everyone.
We are going to have to abolish the empire.
Know your enemy.
Get the war state by Michael Swanson.
It's available at your local bookstore or at Amazon dot com and Kindle or in paperback.
Just click the book in the right margin at Scott Horton dot org or the war state dot com.
All right, guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton, it's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Daniel Larrison from the American conservative magazine.
About the disaster in Yemen and.
Well, it just sounds unbelievable, doesn't everybody to hear the man say here, we're talking about a story that no one else even talks about, and I hardly ever cover it.
What?
Once every two weeks on the show or some hardly anybody to interview about it except Daniel.
And then you hear him say things like eighty two percent of the population of this country is in need of food and or medical aid immediately.
Eighty two percent, that's the USA doing that to them.
And, you know, it reminds me of the other most uncovered massacre of the Obama years, and that is the starvation of the Somalis by Barack Obama as well.
I mean, it was obviously a drought in the Horn of Africa in 2011 and 12, but it hit the Somalis the hardest because America had turned their society completely upside down.
It was really more W.
Bush's fault than Obama's, but still it was Obama's, too.
And according to Fuse Net, which is the famine early warning system, part of the U.N. paid for by the U.S. and the U.K., six hundred thousand people starved to death in Somalia in that famine.
And of course, most of them were children under five years old.
That and then Donald Trump says we're going to do a commission, a study to figure out why they hate us.
For now, our working theory is it's because they're Muslim.
Anyway, on famine, the situation in Yemen is many times more severe than the one you just described in Somalia.
The humanitarian crisis there has been ranked a level three, class three emergency, which is the highest level that the U.N. classifies humanitarian disasters as.
And roughly half of the 20 million that I mentioned are exposed to the worst kind of malnutrition and starvation.
They're the ones that are on the real brink of famine.
They haven't officially declared a famine yet, but it's right on the edge.
Absolutely amazing.
And then back to the coverage of it, I guess the real point is there's no Yemen lobby of any description.
It's the poorest country in the region.
They got nothing to barter, withhold.
I guess maybe they've got some coffee businessmen that they used to trade with.
Maybe those guys could get together a single lobbyist to try to do something.
There's no one sticking up for these people in this country because no one has a vested interest in doing so.
Well, and one of the problems is that the official government of Yemen is one of the belligerents that's doing this to their own country.
So they're the one government that might theoretically have an interest in drawing attention to the crisis is actually has incentive to bury the information or to keep people from paying attention to it or to spin it in a way that makes them look better.
Yeah.
So can you can you explain a little bit about how it came about that they were going to have some talks?
How close did they come to really having a ceasefire here?
Is that just smoke put together by foreigners or or their real moves toward peace?
Maybe.
Well, there were more significant moves towards having a truce this time.
There was even possibility of a prisoner exchange.
I think the prisoner exchange may even have gone forward, although there are still lots of violations of the ceasefire happening on both sides.
So this is probably the closest to a real truce that they've had all this year.
Each time they had a ceasefire for humanitarian reasons before that, it's broken down and has only lasted maybe a couple of days.
This one was supposed to last all this week while they were negotiating in Switzerland.
But as you have already mentioned, it's having made it very far into the week.
Yeah, I wanted to mention here to everybody, when you go and look at Daniel Larrison, the American conservative dot com slash Larrison, you'll find a link there to to our friend Kelly Vallejos from the American conservative and formerly from antiwar dot com.
And she's got a great news piece at Fox News dot com.
Critics try but fail to kill billion dollar weapons deal for Saudi Arabia.
That's what America is up to right in the midst of all of this.
And it's a very well done story that I hope you guys will look at that, too.
But so now to the politics.
It seems like maybe somebody, obviously not Rubio, but maybe Rand, Cruz or or even Trump could make hay of this and and point out the absurdity of it and get make, you know, get a little bit of political mileage out of it somehow, something.
It's certainly possible.
I think that it would be the perfect issue for someone like Rand Paul to use against both Obama and Rubio, because Rubio is one of the very few to have come up publicly and endorse what the US is doing in supporting the Saudi war.
And so it makes sense for him to draw attention to that and then to go after it.
But that doesn't seem to be one of the things he wants to talk about.
Yeah, I, I imagine Trump could try to make use of it, but I'm not sure that he's really paying attention to those things.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't think he could know enough about it.
Maybe Cruz could if he wanted to spin it that way.
But yeah, it would have to be Rand.
Well, what did you think of Rand's performance in the debate the other night?
I thought he did pretty well.
I thought he made a number of the right points about the destructive effects of regime change, the destabilizing effects of regime change, how jihadists reap the benefits of those sorts of wars.
So as far as it goes, I think he did fine.
Oh, that was nice.
How about how about further than it goes?
Well, I think he could broaden his critique of both Obama's policies and of prevailing Republican views much more than he does.
I know you and I, we've talked about this before elsewhere, too.
But.
So, for instance, during the debate, there was a lot of raving about the threat from Iran and the Iranian empire Chris Christie was talking about.
And one of the things that I would have loved to hear from Rand Paul was a dose of skepticism or reality being injected into the debate about how Iran's influence isn't actually growing right now.
It's being beaten back and it's receding in a lot of places.
So that would be a useful sort of deflating move that he could do that I think would get people's attention or at least improve the quality of the debate.
Yeah, I mean, one of Ron Paul's greatest lines was, wait a minute, we borrow 20 billion dollars from the dictatorship in China so that we can support the dictatorship in Pakistan while we're invading Iraq in the name of creating a democracy.
Make sure I got all this straight.
And everybody, they don't know how to defend that because he's completely right.
You got huge applause.
And it seems like Rand could do that, too, is just point out all the absurdities and the contradictions of all of this.
You guys cry about Iran all day.
But, you know, ever since 2003, especially the Republican Party, has been a war for Iran in Iraq.
And we still are.
And you guys support that.
So what are you talking about?
You know, he could call him out on all of these contradictions.
And that was that was the greatest thing about his dad's success or the way that he achieved it was he just spoke the simple truth and it was shocking, you know.
Right.
So anyway, but I guess I'm trying to spin it positively because I've been extremely hard on Rand in the past, but it seemed like, hey, maybe he was listening finally and thinking, Jesus, my last chance.
I got to start finally reading my dad's articles and talking like that.
And, you know, maybe it's a start, Daniel.
I hope so.
And I look forward to hearing more of that from him in the next debate next month.
All right, well, that is the great Daniel Larrison.
Thanks so much for all your work.
I really appreciate it, Dan.
Thanks, Scott.
All right, so that's Daniel Larrison.
Check him out at TheAmericanConservative.com slash Larrison for his great blog.
And we'll be back in just one sec to talk with Dan Sanchez about Star Wars.
Hey, all Scott here.
The thing is, I need you guys to help me to get these download numbers up.
So do me a favor and send me an email.
Sign up for the podcast feeds of this show.
You can choose the whole show or just the interviews at iTunes and Stitcher.
All the buttons you need are at the top of the right margin at Scott Horton dot org.
The more subscribers I have, the more iTunes and Stitcher will help promote the show to new listeners.
If you're a hardcore fan, brand new or from way back, please leave them customer ratings and reviews, too.
Trying to get these wars ended.
Hey, guess what?
You can now order transcripts of any interview I've done for the incredibly reasonable price of two and a half bucks each.
Listen, finding a good transcriptionist is near impossible, but I've got one now.
Just go to Scott Horton dot org slash transcripts and the name and date of the interview you want written up.
Click the PayPal button and I'll have it in your email in 72 hours max.
You don't need a PayPal account to do this, man.
I'm really going to have to learn how to talk more good.
That's Scott Horton dot org slash transcripts.
Who says Austrian school libertarians have to be status on immigration?
We should support government goons busting people's heads to keep them out of the country.
Well, some have tried to make that case in the past, but now David Hathaway's hard hitting new book, Immigration, Individual versus National Borders, refutes point by point every argument they've made.
This is a short, well-written book that shuts down the closed borders argument once and for all.
Immigration, Individual versus National Borders by David Hathaway.
Forward by me.
Buy it now on Amazon dot com in both print and Kindle versions.