All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I'm the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the brand new Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism, and I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you at scotthorton.org.
You can sign up for the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right, you guys, on the line, I've got the great Doug Bondo.
He is Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and Contributing Editor at Antiwar.com.
He wrote the book Foreign Follies and about 100,000 articles about why America's government ought to be doing less in the world, and so happy to have you back on the show here, Doug.
How are you, sir?
Always happy to be on.
Always good to talk to you.
Great, great.
So, first of all, let's talk about the worst thing in the world, and then second of all, we'll talk about the potentially worst thing in the world.
So first, then, would be the war in Yemen.
The Biden administration goes all in for Saudis and Emiratis, and if we had more space, the headline would have read, one year after promising to end the war in Yemen, or at least American support for the Saudi and UAE war against Yemen.
So what is this escalation to which you refer?
Well, what we see is we're now putting F-15s over there so we can shoot down drones from the Houthis.
The USS Cole is going to be moved to a more advanced position, and beyond that, they're talking about declaring the Houthis to be a terrorist organization, just as the Trump administration had done, and actually coming into office, one of the good things they did was eliminate that designation.
Now they're debating putting it back on.
But the big thing is putting actually U.S. forces in that really would be shooting for them against the Houthis, against the Yemeni insurgents.
That is a step up that we have not had in the past.
Yeah, and I guess they did send the F-22s to the UAE, so I guess that means, I mean, it was funny, the way I read it, they spun it like it was some kind of anti-aircraft, like what, they're going to shoot down drones or something?
Sounds more like they're going to be used for airstrikes inside Yemen, do you think?
I guess they're going to hit drone bases with U.S. jets?
I mean, they presented it as being a defensive measure to shoot down drones.
I think for them to actually put U.S. forces directly into action, I mean, that would be an incredible escalation.
How do you shoot down a drone with an F-22?
Doesn't a drone travel like 20 miles an hour or something?
Yeah, I mean, the problem, they travel real low.
I mean, it's trying to, the idea of kind of buzzing.
I don't know how they planned on doing that.
If there's a, maybe if they're over the ocean, I mean, I can't imagine doing it over developed territory, it's very hard to see how they would do that.
I don't know.
I mean, I agree, it sounded very strange, but I don't believe that this administration wants the blowback that would come from directly intervening in the war, I mean, because this would allow, this would be something, a dramatic change from even Trump, to allow people to accuse you of being more warlike than Donald Trump, even though he didn't start any new wars, ironically.
But still, for Biden, I think it'd be, hey, the last thing he needs is that kind of controversy.
That would reinforce the whole debate over Yemen, it would bring it to a whole new level, and I think it'd be much tougher for him.
There are some Democrats who will vote and say, yeah, yeah, send weapons to the Saudis, let them kill people.
We don't care.
But if suddenly American jets are doing the, you know, the shooting and the killing, wow.
Yeah.
It's just amazing.
Now, in your piece, you clearly identify the Saudi and UAE side, parentheses, USA, as the aggressors here.
And I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but I think it's pretty important, actually, that recently, our friend, the comic Dave Smith was on the Joe Rogan show and gave a little spiel about Yemen for a while.
And that got quite a bit of attention.
And then what happened was there's this other very important Internet show with millions of viewers, The Tim Pool Show, that had a conservative Republican congressman on there who said, oh, this Smith guy doesn't know what he's talking about.
Everybody knows that what's going on here, essentially, is that Iran has invaded Yemen and the Saudis are trying to prevent the horrible Iranians from taking over this place.
And that's what old Dave Smith doesn't mention.
So I wonder if you could talk about what is the truth of Iran's role in the Yemen war as you understand it, are the Houthis an invasion force from Persia?
If you listen to, you know, the Saudi lobby, you'd certainly think so.
Now, it's quite outrageous.
I mean, look, let's be clear.
The Houthis, you know, the group's formal name is Ansar, you know, Ansar Allah.
And it's called Houthis because that was the name of the first leader who was killed as part of kind of early, early revolt.
Now, this is not a friendly organization.
This is not one that we would welcome in America.
It's not a pro-liberty organization.
We have no illusions about that.
It treats other Yemenis pretty badly.
It's committed its own atrocities.
So, I mean, no one should be out there saying, oh, aren't these wonderful people?
They aren't.
Nor are the Iranians.
But the Houthis are Yemeni.
The Houthis have been involved in fighting the central government since the mid-2000s.
They started their fight against the previous president, Saleh.
Now, he was tossed out as part of the Arab Spring.
The new guy came in, Hadi, who wasn't particularly, you know, kind of popular.
So the Houthis joined with Saleh, the guy they used to fight, you know, to, in 2014, 2015, toss out Hadi.
So they drove him from the capital.
They took control of the capital of Sana'a.
This is all internal stuff.
I mean, if you want to read about Yemeni history, you should go get a good book on it, get a good study on it.
You know, the specialists out there affirm, you know, the Houthis are not Iranian proxies.
The Houthis are, I mean, they're called Zaydis.
They are Shia, but they're not the same kind of Shia as Iran.
Now, the distinctions utterly escape me.
But there is a difference that is significant.
They're actually closer to Sunnis than other Shia.
And they've never been controlled by Iran.
These are folks who come from, you know, very much Yemen.
And the history of Yemen, I mean, you go back about 60, 70 years, I mean, one of them was the kingdom, excuse me, one of them is a British protectorate.
There are actually two of them.
You know, people talked about South and North Yemen.
At one point, the Egyptians were shooting at the Saudis because the Saudis were supporting the royal government against the military insurrection that was supported by the Egyptians.
And eventually, both of those guys got tired of it, and the royals got beaten anyway.
You know, they eventually united the two countries, and then all of the fighting basically went internal.
That's when Saleh took over.
I mean, there's a history here of decades of internal fighting, confrontation, trouble, discord, et cetera.
So I mean, it's a very complicated situation.
The Houthis are part of that, and they're part of that internally.
Now, so in 2015, the Saudis decided, and this is when, you know, our friend Mohammed bin Salman, at that point, he wasn't crown prince yet.
He was deputy crown prince, took over as defense minister, and apparently decided he'd show how tough he was.
So he figured he'd have a short little war, kick out these insurgents, put Hadi back in power.
You know, they have a puppet ruler who's going to listen to you, put him back in power, and it'd show how great they were.
And this is supposed to last a few weeks, and everything was supposed to go swell.
Well, that was seven years ago.
So obviously things didn't go terribly well.
So the Iranians show up.
Why?
Well, because the Saudis, who are supported by the most powerful country on earth that sells them tens of billions of dollars of weapons, plus unisons, plus services those weapons, plus provides personnel to provide intelligence, plus early on was providing refueling for the planes.
So the Houthis needed some weapons.
So the Iranians were happy to oblige.
The Saudis gave the Iranians a perfect opportunity to bleed them, because it turns out the Saudi military isn't very good.
And it has lost to the Houthis.
So yes, the Iranians are supporting the Houthis.
But guess who started supporting who first?
The U.S. is supporting the Saudis.
The notion that this is somehow the Saudis.
Now, the Saudis didn't want the Houthis in charge of Yemen.
And great powers like to meddle in next door neighbors.
The U.S. certainly knows that.
But they turned out they blundered it away.
But this has nothing to do with kind of, oh, we've got to stop the menace of Iran.
The Saudis and Yemen, Emiratis, the Emiratis and Saudis created, they're the main players.
They created their own coalition that at one point had Sudan involved and some other countries.
This was all local geopolitics that actually didn't have much to do with Iran.
The fact that Iran is involved today is a response to Saudi Arabia and the Emiratis getting involved.
You know, so they create the problem, then they blame what they're doing on the problem.
You know, I mean, it's very typical.
But Doug, as Hillary Clinton says, when you find yourself in a hole, you've got to grab a shovel and keep digging.
Oh, well, we've certainly done that.
The Saudis certainly have.
Yeah, they certainly have.
And so, okay, but now, worst case scenario, and I'm some guy from the Atlantic Council or some horrible thing like that, and I say to you that, hey, but you're right, okay, you're right about everything.
However, if we leave now, the Houthis are better friends with Iran than ever before.
And if the Houthis just rule Sana'a uncontested, and especially if they're able to conquer Aden and the rest and reunite Yemen under their rule, then they'll control the gates of the Red Sea, and they'll be the Ayatollah's sock puppet then.
And so we can't let that happen, even though you're right, this is all Barack Obama and Donald Trump and Joe Biden's fault so far for making it this way.
What if I said that to you, what do you think?
Well, there's no proof of that.
I mean, the Yemenis have always been independent.
They've shown an extraordinary ability to fight.
Nothing suggests that the Houthis want to be run from Tehran.
I mean, if you talk to area specialists, I mean, they all agree that in the past, the Houthis never have been puppets of the Iranians, so there's no reason to think they're going to want to become so now.
And this is where, and certainly the U.S. has done this on occasion, where you realize that if you have certain interests, what you do is you talk about protecting those interests as opposed to going to war and then wondering how you protect your interests.
That is, if the Saudis had said to the Houthis, you know, hey guys, now, I mean, we're a little bit nervous about you all.
We can live with you, but you got to realize if you start doing X, whatever X is, now X could be shooting missiles, you know, at Saudi Arabia, of course, the Houthis didn't do that until the Saudis had spent years bombing, you know, civilians in Yemen, but, you know, you could imagine the Saudis saying, look, we want to make sure that Gulf traffic is open.
I mean, any number of things like that.
There's no reason to think that the Houthis have any interest in having, you know, the world come down upon them.
They understand the power of the United States and Saudi Arabia and stuff.
Why would they do that?
What do they gain by trying to shoot up ships going by?
Their focus always has been internal.
It's winning the internal struggle.
And again, you look at Yemeni history, it's been violent and crazy for decades.
We've never seen Yemeni say, now is our chance.
Let's conquer the Middle East.
I mean, that's never been on the agenda.
This is the poorest country in the Middle East today, one of the poorest in the world.
The idea that it's going to manage to, you know, kind of hold the region hostage, you know, is laughable.
And, you know, the Saudis and the Emiratis and the U.S. all could have said, you know, we're not going to get involved, but if you guys do X, again, whatever X might be, this is what happens.
You know, but instead, the Saudis and the Emiratis wanted the puppet in power.
You know, and what they got then was a disaster where the Houthis are winning, you know, control most of the population, you know, and are in a position where they could actually cause trouble in Gulf traffic.
Hang on just one second.
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So I was interviewing Shireen Al-Ademi, and she pointed this out to me, this article by a guy named Jamal Ben Amar.
He was the former UN Special Envoy for Yemen.
And I already knew about this, but just not this much.
And this guy wrote this whole thing about it in Newsweek, where I knew that there was some kind of compromise going on, but this guy really describes it and how he was overseeing it.
The UN guy was kind of overseeing it and helping the Houthis after they seized power in alliance with the former dictator that we'd backed for 30 years, Abdullah Saleh, who Hillary had overthrown, but just a few years before.
And we had this long-term relationship before that.
Here he is allied with his old enemies, the Houthis, and they sit down and they're willing to negotiate with everybody and form a coalition and a new thing, and they want to create a new lower house of representatives for women and young people and all these proposals.
Well, I learned that somewhere else, not here.
But anyway, they were really making progress on it, is what this guy's talking about.
It wasn't just, oh, the Houthis have seized power in the capital city.
Remember, the war didn't break out until March, right?
So they were there for two, three months.
And they knew that they can't just enslave the whole country under their rule, that they have to immediately start negotiating with all these different dominant factions in the different regions of the country and all this stuff, and they were playing ball with everybody.
In other words, even from the Saudis' point of view, they didn't need to do this stupid thing, you know?
Whatever influence they needed to retain in Yemen, they would have had enough of it to satisfy them.
If only they'd held their horses kind of thing, you know?
No, the Saudis had had a perfectly acceptable relationship with Saleh, and he was involved in this.
And you're right, at that point, I mean, the Houthis were not in a position to conquer Yemen.
I mean, the extraordinary thing is how they've gained support from a lot of other forces.
Otherwise, they wouldn't be winning.
I mean, the way you unify a country is have outsiders show up.
I mean, Hadi called in airstrikes on his own people.
He's not very popular today, so he's the formally recognized president, but who on earth would vote for this guy?
Yeah, I mean, didn't he live in a hotel in Riyadh?
Exactly.
I mean, he lives in luxury.
Nobody pays attention to him.
I mean, he doesn't have, you know, who's loyal to him?
I mean, down south, the Emiratis have worked with separatists, and the Emiratis have done their best to split the country.
They've even been grabbing islands and territory, you know, for themselves.
So, no, I mean, what they set in motion, I mean, you're absolutely right, is the Houthis, you know, again, historically, I mean, you've got faction after faction.
I mean, so Saleh had, you know, I mean, this is a guy who survived for decades in a snake pit of politics, you know, in a region where, you know, who can get through that kind of tribal and religious and ethnic, you know, fighting?
And he did it.
And, you know, like, he switched sides, you know, and then they decided to switch sides again.
He wanted to make a deal with the Saudis and ended up dead that, you know, this is a political situation where early on the Houthis had no choice, really, but to deal with locals and come up with some kind of a reigning coalition.
Again, we might not like it, but this was not going to be some group that wanted to challenge the Saudis or the Gulf or America.
They wanted to rule locally.
That's all they were into.
And we've seen after seven years now they are more powerful.
And that's the scary thing.
And it shows the unintended consequences.
You start a war, you're going to win in a few weeks.
It turns out, no, you know, seven years later, you're still stuck and the other guys are advancing.
Yeah.
Well, and it also goes to show, right, why the as we record this, neither side wants to give at all because the Houthis, as you say, are ascendant.
I mean, they've had a few setbacks recently, but certainly they're not in any danger of losing the capital city or anything like that.
And the Saudis mostly have been losing.
But in somebody else's country with, you know, slave soldiers, you know, child soldiers brought in from Sudan and, you know, other mercenary fighters and whatever.
It's not like little princelings are dying in the war, you know.
So the Saudis have essentially only face to lose from their point of view.
If they end the war, if they could just keep it going and put off the face losing.
And so and the Americans and the British are making a bunch of money and so they don't give a damn.
And so who's got the incentive built up to stop this thing except a few American Yemeni expats crying, please quit genociding my country to deaf ears?
No, it truly is shocking.
I mean, the Trump administration viewed, you know, selling weapons to the Saudis as a jobs program.
The New York Times had a story of Peter Navarro played a very important role in that in convincing Trump that this is a great way.
You know, we get a lot of money out of the Saudis and isn't this fabulous economically without any discussion about what was used by those planes, what they were used for and where the bombs went and who they were dropped on that day.
And that's absolutely atrocious.
And what we see is that the Iran card then is used to kind of wave at every and you hear it from everyone.
I mean, it's always out there, you know, people and from people who know better, you know, they tell Iranian proxies this, that, you know, they don't know what everyone knows.
That's not true.
That's simply ridiculous.
They understand where this has come from.
And of course, what I find extraordinary, I mean, is that the Houthis are now shooting back.
Now, they're wrong to shoot at the civilians.
I mean, so I don't I don't endorse, you know, I'm trying to blow up airports and stuff, you know, and hit cities, which they've been doing.
The problem is they lack anything precision guided in the same way that the supposedly, you know, Saudis and Emiratis are doing now and have the Saudis and Emiratis come forward and saying, oh, this is terrible.
They're terrorists.
Look at this.
They're bombing us after spending seven years killing Yemeni civilians, bombing cities, bombing school buses, bombing weddings, bombing funerals, bombing commercial buildings, apartments.
I mean, it's extraordinary.
And that gets repeated.
The Biden administration has repeatedly criticized the Houthis for shooting, and it has never criticized the Saudis or the Emiratis when they bomb civilians.
You know, that tells you that they think the lives of the royals are more important, you know, or it's simply, you know, these are our buddies and we make a lot of money off of them.
So I guess we shouldn't, you know, kind of rock the boat.
Yeah, man.
All right.
So we'll leave it there because it's on autopilot anyway.
The damn thing.
Let's talk about Ukraine and Russia.
I'm dying to know everything on your mind about America's relationship with Russia and Ukraine in between us right now here, Doug.
Well, I mean, this is I mean, no one knows how this is going to turn out.
I mean, I've listened separately this morning to a couple of different webinars, one of which everyone is absolutely certain that war was going to happen.
It could happen this weekend.
Really, really, really.
This time, all the troops are lined up, you know, most of the Russian army, etc.
And then the next one came on.
And all of these are all of these are right wing hawks who, you know, would be happy to start bombing Russia if they could.
The second group said, oh, no, no.
Putin knows that would really be a bad deal for him.
Now, I mean, he might do something small.
He might do this.
And it was, you know, and you're thinking the same set of facts.
No one knows what's going to happen.
Now, I it's Putin's not a nice guy, but it's clear to me that he doesn't want war.
War is not in his interest.
But the problem in all of this is we've shown what happens when you don't pay attention to the interests of great powers.
You know, we pushed Russia around when we could, you know, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, didn't matter what they wanted.
And so we expanded NATO and we took Serbia apart and we promoted color revolutions.
And it's fine if you want to argue for all those things, but you can't argue for them without realizing there might be consequences.
And we're paying the consequence now.
And, you know, people who argue, oh, this is only about Putin being afraid of democracy in Iran.
Like in 2007, he spoke to the Munich Security Conference.
And I mean, this is a serious speech.
And at that time, he talked about these issues.
I mean, he had a great paragraph in there about America that's constantly going to war, you know, which came after Iraq and after Afghanistan.
But, you know, so it strikes me that our problem was we ignored him until now.
And in many ways, that's you know, he's voiced these complaints at different occasions.
We just blew it off because we thought, so what?
You can't do anything.
And what he's done is he's proved that he can do something.
And to my mind, the stupidity here is the refusal to be to be willing to say, look, I mean, no one really thinks Ukraine's going to come into NATO.
No one wants to defend Ukraine.
Let's get real here.
Instead, we're going to have this principle which no one actually wants to act on that.
And we're willing to have a war because we don't want to go back on that principle.
And I think that shows the problem with this.
We want to dominate.
The U.S. wants essentially the U.S. wants a an expanded Monroe Doctrine for the world.
That is, the U.S. gets to dominate every country up to its border.
You know that that that's kind of a principle of international law.
And that's what the feeling you get here is that the U.S. believes that if it wanted, it should be able to have troops on Russia's border, even in Ukraine.
So, you know, no, of course we're not going to prevent this.
And that's a great tragedy, because I think that, you know, there are a lot of there's a lot that goes into this.
And again, I in no way should we justify Russia going to war with Ukraine.
You know, but what the U.S. and the allies have played a role in the buildup to this, that they cannot escape.
It doesn't excuse Russian action, but it explains it.
We've got to understand it.
Well, and the thing is, the Americans have no face to lose here when they're just acting like little babies and saying, well, you can't close the door on Ukrainian membership to NATO.
When whatever, man, you close it then.
We all know we're not bringing them into NATO anyway.
And that's the big, you know, sticking point here that we have to maybe have a real fight about.
Or I mean, I think everybody knows that even if Russia did invade Ukraine, that America is not going to intervene and get in a war over it anyway.
So this is something that the Ukrainians should all have to die for in greater numbers than they already are in the, you know, fighting that continues in the east.
By the way, I saw where Russia is saying this is how close they are to invading.
They're saying, you know, we also really want to get back to trying to implement Minsk, too.
Can we have some talks about that?
Because, of course, what they're implying there, or I guess saying outright, is that Kiev has not implemented Minsk, too, where they said that they would reintegrate the Donbass.
But under this, you know, greatly expanded new autonomy that the, you know, Donbass region groups sponsored by the Russians had agreed to and that they had agreed to as well.
And that was back seven years ago now, 2015, when they signed that thing.
Now, that's right.
I mean, the problem is the internal dynamics in Ukraine.
You know, I mean, the nationalists are very strong that, you know, and they don't want to implement that.
And, you know, so they've refused to.
You know, the West likes to blame Russia for failing to fully enforce a ceasefire or this, that and the other.
But, of course, you have this major breach of giving autonomy to the Donbass, which the Ukrainians never have done.
So it's pretty hard for them to complain about Russia being out of compliance when they haven't bothered complying themselves.
And that's why I think the Russians are right to have a discussion about that.
It would be quite useful that and I think that's where one could, to my mind, you know, you you make it clear to Putin on the essential point of NATO membership that, yeah, we can deal on this.
I mean, everybody says, well, countries should be able to choose their alliances.
Well, that's not how NATO works.
Go read Article 10.
It says that NATO NATO members as unanimous vote will invite countries to join.
Well, well, I mean, they don't you can't go to NATO and say, I have my right, you know, kind of invite me.
NATO invites you if they want to invite you.
They don't invite you if they don't want to invite you.
You know, and the point is, you know, it's quite fair for members of an alliance to say, you know, bringing you in actually is dangerous.
So no, thanks.
You know, good luck.
I mean, you know, we're very sorry, but don't call us.
We'll call you kind of thing.
Yeah.
And look, isn't it right that if you were just like the average Brazilian looking at this, we don't really have a dog in this hunt or something.
You would say, well, geez, they ought to all treat Ukraine like a neutral country instead of fighting over it or something like that.
Is that outlandish and radical?
No, I mean, you know, the point is, again, you can understand the Ukrainian saying we don't want to act that way.
And then the response, I think, is, folks, you're in a bad neighborhood.
That's unfortunate.
But it's not America's job to get you out of the bad neighborhood.
We can't.
You're there.
And that's where you look at, you know, the models are, you know, not just Finland, which a lot of people point to, but Austria.
I mean, the Soviets occupied Austria after, you know, I mean, the World War Two ended and there was a negotiation treaty was signed.
All the troops left.
Austria agreed not to join either military bloc.
You know, the point is, eventually the Soviet Union disappeared.
Now Austria can do what it wants.
You know, so this is the question of what you do now.
You know, 50 years from now, the world may look dramatically different.
You know, it may not matter.
Russia will evolve.
Everything else will change.
Who knows?
But Ukraine has to look at this and say, is it worth fighting again over a principle which if they're smart, they realize the West is not going to honor, you know, they are not going to be in NATO.
That's simply not going to happen.
It should be obvious to them.
I mean, the Germans and the French certainly don't want that.
Who imagines the Portuguese and the Spanish and the Italians want to fight over?
And they don't want to fight over anybody.
They're not going to fight over Ukraine.
So from Ukraine's standpoint, it should be offering up essentially a deal saying, look, military neutrality.
But you leave us alone if we decide we want to join the European Union.
You know, you know, we can trade with whoever we want.
But militarily, they're going to be no foreign troops, et cetera, et cetera.
You know, that's that's that's fine.
My guess is that Putin will be happy with that.
I mean, that's essentially where he would have been, you know, back in 2014.
You know, they got into the if and I don't think he would have invaded had Yanukovych signed the EU treaty, even though Putin would have been would not have been happy about that.
But for Putin, it's when the guy gets overthrown and then you start wondering what's going to happen to your naval base and then you wonder what the government's going to look like, et cetera.
Right.
And today the problem is everyone says, well, Putin should realize that they're not getting into NATO.
Well, but if he listens to Stoltenberg, you know, the general secretary, if he listens to the U.S. secretary of defense, if he listens to a lot of other countries, they're constantly reassuring Ukraine.
Oh, yes, we know.
We hope you will kind of meet the criteria.
Yeah.
So why would he believe us?
I mean, he hears that and tells him that, yeah, well, we actually want to bring Ukraine in that we're lying.
You know, we're in a position where we're trying to tell Putin trust us.
We're lying to Ukrainians, not to you.
Right.
So don't worry about it.
Well, that's not entirely convincing.
Yeah.
I'm so sorry, Doug.
This conversation is not over, but I got to go.
I'm supposed to be getting interviewed by some other guy right now.
But thank you so much for doing my show.
I always learn so much from you.
It's the only reason I know anything to tell these other people when they ask me.
So I really appreciate you as always, my friend.
I was going to talk to you.
Have a good one now.
Take care.
OK, you too.
The great Doug Bandau there, you know, Doug Bondo, Cato and antiwar dot com.
The Scott Horton Show, antiwar radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
APS radio dot com, antiwar dot com, Scott Horton dot org and Libertarian Institute dot org.
