All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am 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 I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, guys, on the line, I've got the great Dave DeCamp.
He's our news editor at antiwar.com.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Dave?
I'm good, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
ABCnews.antiwar.com, and of course, the front page every day is where you find what's going on in the world as written by Dave, i.e., you know, that is correctly.
This isn't good.
Russia recalls its U.S. ambassador after Biden calls Putin a killer.
Tell me more.
Yeah, so this was an interview, ABC News interview that aired on Wednesday, and Biden, you know, he was kind of, a lot of these interviews with him, you know, he seems pretty out of it and they ask him questions and he nods his head and stuff, but George Stephanopoulos, the ABC guy, he asked Biden if he thinks Putin's a killer, and Biden said, uh-huh, I do.
So it wasn't even really his words.
It was Stephanopoulos basically asked him to assent to this claim kind of thing.
I got you.
Yeah, but he, you know, he agreed and then he told a story about one time where he told Putin that he had no soul.
What?
Yeah, he said he was alone with Putin and he looked him in the eyes and I said, you have no soul, is how he put it.
So yeah, I mean, it's just kind of crazy escalations, and he was also asked about the recent intelligence assessment from the DNI that claimed Putin ordered an influence campaign to denigrate Biden in the 2020 election was how they put it.
Just, you know, it didn't provide any evidence or explain how the intelligence agencies reached this conclusion, but Biden said Putin will pay a price for the allegation.
And you know, responding to this later that day, Russia, they recalled their U.S. ambassador.
How they put it, they said that they were going to like discuss U.S. relations going forward with their ambassadors to the U.S.
And yeah, it's not, I mean, in other words, wait a minute, on that last point, they softened it.
They didn't say, well, we're recalling our ambassador.
And then they said, well, we're going to recall our ambassador so that we can have an updated discussion on how we want to proceed.
Yeah.
Okay.
That's how they're, I believe it was the foreign ministry put it in a statement.
I mean, that's important.
Anyway, go ahead.
Yeah.
So, and the rhetoric, you know, it's not just rhetoric.
There's also, there's been sanctions over Navalny.
There was new sanctions on Wednesday.
They kind of expanded these sanctions over the alleged poisoning of the opposition figure in Russia there, Alexei Navalny, who I'm sure people are familiar with at this point.
And he's in jail.
So they sanctioned a few Russian officials, some Russian entities.
And then yesterday they increased export restrictions for certain goods that the idea is that they, to prevent Russia from making chemical weapons.
But yeah, so there's all these sanctions, Biden calling Putin a killer and Putin responded today.
He said it takes one to know one is how he put it.
It's kind of funny response.
Yeah.
Honestly, the chairman of the foreign relations committee in 2002 is calling someone else violent.
The hell out of here.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, that's, that's a good point.
And I'd like to see Biden tricked into that one.
Hey Biden, Putin says that he's killed more people than you.
And watch Biden respond like, you know, you know how many people I killed me and George Bush.
Yeah, no, it's, it is a lot of these Biden quotes that we get.
It is people asking him questions and him nodding along.
But it's still though, I mean, it's pretty hostile rhetoric.
And a Kremlin spokesman also said today that it's a sign that, you know, he has no, he doesn't want to improve US Russia relations.
He has no interest in it.
Which would, you know, really benefit the world if we ease tensions with Moscow.
But one thing Biden did say in the interview, and it is true, is that he decided to renew the new START treaty, which is the last piece of arms control between the US and Russia.
It was set to expire in February and they renewed it right away, which is good because if that expired, it probably would have sparked a new arms race.
But, but really, I mean, that's the kind of the bare minimum that Biden could do when it comes to arms control.
Right.
And the problem is what he said was, see, I can talk all this and say whatever I want, do whatever I want and also work with them too on things.
But that's really not right.
You can only go so far while you're doing this.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And by the way, I don't know, cause I was too young.
I mean, I remember the eighties and Ronald Reagan did not talk like this.
You know, he cracked some jokes occasionally about the bombing starts in five minutes and this kind of thing.
But I was still a little kid.
I was like 14 when the wall came down and all that.
But I know from, you know, real experts, people like, you know, Ray McGovern or Peter Van Buren, people like this who were in the government at the time that they never talked about the Soviets this way.
I mean, lower level people might, but the presidents, the national security advisors, the secretaries of state, they didn't go around saying, this guy's a soulless killer.
Even when they were soulless killers, you know, who were avowedly soulless, you know, there's no such thing as the soul.
They would say being, you know, Marxist atheists, that's me being not funny anyway.
They still treated them with basic respect because these guys do have an H-bomb point, you know, held to your head and vice versa, obviously, too.
But still.
Yeah.
And you look at it, it's not just, it's not just Biden, it's everybody in Congress just about that says these types of things about Putin and the Russian government.
It's the whole media landscape.
Putin also said that he wishes Biden good health.
And I saw these journalists took that as like as a threat, as if Putin was threatening to assassinate Biden.
They really just...
Tell me, tell me the name.
I mean, I'm sure that's right, but just so I can make fun of them later.
I forget.
I saw it on Twitter.
If I find it again, I'll take it.
These people are so pathetic.
Jesus Christ.
Can you imagine being afraid of Vladimir Putin?
Every time I've ever seen this guy talk about the US, he goes, well, you know, our American partners have some disagreements with us.
This kind of thing.
Like, I don't know.
For being the psychopathic killer they claim he is, he seems a lot more sociopathic to me and I'll take it.
I prefer the emotionless head of state to somebody like Biden, who, you know, when George Stephanopoulos asked him a question, the first thing he thinks is, boy, I better act tough.
I better say something stupid or else people are going to make fun of me for not being stupid enough.
And then, you know, on the other hand, they gave Trump all this crap for saying nice things about Putin.
But in the meantime, you know, he was extremely, he had an extremely anti-Russia foreign policy, you know, tore up nuclear treaties and, you know, armed, sent missiles to Ukraine and bombed the government of Assad in Syria, you know.
So at the same time, there's like, there's the rhetoric and then what's actually happening.
But right now with Russia, they're, you know, all these sanctions and stuff.
So it's not just rhetoric, but it is, there is action happening too.
And you know, something that's interesting that you'll find funny is that since the Biden administration, you know, started, all these Biden officials are like, oh, we got to go after Russia for the solar winds hack, for this, for that, for all these things that there's no proof that Russia was responsible.
But one thing that kind of disappeared from the talking points is the Russian bounty story, the fake claim that Russia was paying the Taliban bounties in Afghanistan.
It's kind of just disappeared.
Biden has mentioned it a couple of times, but everybody else seems to have forgotten it.
Tammy Duckworth.
Well, she asked for, to release the intelligence and that was, and it kind of just, people started, stopped talking about it after that.
Yeah.
Some analysts have advised her that, listen, just because Charlie Savage wrote something in the New York Times, doesn't mean that you can go around repeating it.
You might make a fool out of yourself.
Yeah.
And this is another piece of news that's pretty interesting.
Russia is hosting a summit, an Afghanistan summit, and it's pushing for the Taliban and the U.S.-backed government to accept a recent power sharing proposal that the U.S. just put in, put forward to try to end the, to try to, it seems like the May 1st deadline set by the U.S.-Taliban peace deal, it seems like the Biden administration is looking to kind of extend it.
They want to get the Taliban to agree because they know that if they stay, the Taliban's going to start attacking the U.S. troops again.
So they kind of, at this last minute- You're saying that the Russians are trying to intervene with the Taliban to get them to agree to give the Americans more time to phase out of there?
No.
No, they're trying to get the Taliban and the government to agree to this kind of power sharing deal.
Not necessarily- Oh, I see.
They're trying to get them to accept the deal so that America can leave on time.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that's, you know, to people who might've been misled by Charlie Savage, the way it really works is that the Russians have supported the same government the Americans have supported the whole time because we're the ones who switched sides in the war, not them.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They're hosting it today, Khalilzad, the U.S. envoy for Afghanistan that negotiated the deal.
He's there.
He's in Moscow for this?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Really?
Yeah.
So it's kind of a big, because Russia has been apparently, well, they've had these summits with the Taliban.
Right.
And the Americans always refuse to have anything to do with it.
Yeah.
So- So Khalilzad's in Moscow where the Russians are encouraging the Ghani government to go ahead and accept the new American plan, which was, is it the version that says you're going to have a new bicameral Congress where the Taliban gets one house to itself and all this?
I'm not sure of the specific details, but it's for an interim government that includes the Taliban to pave the way for elections.
About the different things in Congress, I'm not exactly sure, but- Man.
You know, I don't know.
There's so much at stake for Ghani and Dostum and those guys to refuse.
Yeah.
What are they supposed to do?
I don't know.
I mean, they made their peace with Hekmatyar.
Well, it'll be interesting.
I hate to see civil war.
I mean, what happened last time when the Russians left and the communists finally lost, Hekmatyar was unable to take Kabul.
So he killed like 50,000 people just launching artillery shells at the capital city in random directions for four or five years or something like that.
Now they got him inside the tent.
I don't know.
But I guess all indications are that Ghani refuses to cooperate, right?
Or maybe the Russians holding the same gun to his head will convince him.
Yeah, that's what it looks like.
But I mean, it'll be interesting if the Taliban accepts it and Ghani doesn't.
But- Yeah.
Well, I mean, they've got nothing to lose.
If they don't accept it, they're as dumb as they are cruel.
Yeah.
That's true.
But yeah, I think, I don't know if the Taliban, it's possible that the Taliban will agree to push back the withdrawal deadline.
But I don't know how much, you know, how much they would be willing to push it back.
I got to say, May 1st is coming fast and the Americans, I'm going to interview Gareth later about his new piece about how the Pentagon has figured out how to pretend to believe that the Taliban have broken the deal.
Therefore we're not bound by it any longer when that doesn't seem to be the message that the other side is willing to accept.
A message that the other side is willing to accept.
Yeah.
The U.S. bombed the Taliban directly yesterday, well, they announced it on Wednesday.
They said over the past 48 hours, they launched airstrikes against the Taliban and they frame it as like, because as per the deal that they signed last year, both sides agreed not to attack each other.
The U.S. kind of occasionally bombed, launched airstrikes on the Taliban.
They frame it as defensive.
They say they're defending the Afghan military, but that, you know, who knows?
But I mean, you know, a really big- It's not who knows.
They're clearly trying to screw up the deal by violating it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, they are.
Yeah.
They definitely are.
Yeah.
But, you know, probably the best argument for leaving Afghanistan is that February 8th, it marked the first full year that the war started that no U.S. troops died in combat in Afghanistan.
So pretty much if you stay past May 1st, then you're going to put troops at risk again.
So, yeah, I mean, it's just such a mess.
There's no reason to stay.
I think even Biden kind of realizes that, but, you know, he's just kind of being told what to do.
So- Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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They're full of nicotine is the thing about it.
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Use promo code Scott Horton and get 10% off Zippix Toothpicks at ZippixToothpicks.com Yeah, I mean, he's out of options.
The war's lost.
But, you know, I mean, let's talk about Gareth's piece.
I'm sure you read it.
Yeah.
Where the order was drawn up for Donald Trump and he signed it.
And it said all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan by the end of 2020.
And then the Pentagon said, no.
And he said, oh, okay.
And he changed it to reduce them to half.
I could have guessed that.
We didn't know that until now.
But he gave them all they needed.
And this is after he already knew that he was going to be out, you know.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, it's the second or maybe third time it happened because I believe he ordered a full withdrawal.
I'm not sure if he signed it or you probably know better.
From Syria, he ordered it, full withdrawal.
And then he got convinced to stop it and turned it around.
Yep, twice.
In 2018 and 2019.
Yeah, yeah.
And then, you know, it's just only because of his moral cowardice.
He knew it was smart to end these wars.
But he didn't have the courage to tell them, no, actually, you're fired, General.
How do you like that?
You know?
Yeah.
I mean, give me a break, dude.
That's what I would do.
Somebody told me a story once.
I don't know this much history about World War II.
But somebody told me about all the generals who told Roosevelt, we're not going back to Europe.
And he said, you're fired, you're fired, you're fired, you're fired, you're fired.
Now, who wants to be a general?
And then he hired a bunch of new guys.
You're promoted, you're promoted, you're promoted, you're promoted.
We're going back to Europe.
Yes, sir.
Well, if FDR can do that, well, then you could do the exact same thing in reverse.
You know, if you were a president who had any moral courage whatsoever and any intent to roll this stuff back.
And that's the thing about Biden is, you know, he is a believer in all this American World Order stuff.
But he's been really burned on the particulars of the implementation of this policy over and over and over again.
So, like you said, he knows better.
He was the least worst, even though he did want some escalation.
But he was the least worst of Obama's cabinet on this question at the time, him and Douglas Lute.
And he really tried to stop Gates and Petraeus from doing the Afghan surge and the counterinsurgency strategy and all that crap.
But just like with Obama and Trump, he already said the other day, well, it'd be really hard to meet that deadline.
You know, he's already given it away.
He doesn't have that.
Again, he knows what's right, but he didn't have the moral courage to tell those generals no.
They're the boss of them, not the other way around.
Same as always.
Interesting, though, about the Russians putting the pressure on.
And, you know, Blinken did write that pretty sternly worded letter to Ghani for what it's worth.
I don't know.
But with the Russians, if they're really telling Ghani, look, man, you have to do this.
Maybe they're willing to make some promises to continue helping him in the future.
I mean, maybe he can be made to make a deal here because the game is up.
The Taliban rules more than half the country.
It's not a shadow government.
They are the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.
And the government that we have, the U.S. has created there is the government of Kabul and a couple of the other northern cities, essentially.
And I guess they do rule in the major provincial capitals.
But once American air power is gone, the Taliban can just see Kargat and Kandahar City and, you know, the rest of the major provisional provincial capitals, Jalalabad or whatever, in no time.
I guess they just probably walk right in in most of those places.
But anyway, yeah.
Rock hard place painted into a corner, whatever kind of cliche or analogy, sort of a metaphor of a thing where, like, at some point, you got to admit, we really only have the Bagram Air Base.
You know, the only place the only other place the Americans have influence is where JSOC is flying drones as air cover for the Taliban fighting against ISIS.
So what's that tell you?
War's over.
We lost.
Yeah.
And one thing I think we might have talked about this, that you said they might the Taliban probably launch some sort of like Tet Offensive if the U.S. stays kind of against their will.
I mean, because they're in the position to just launch a major offensive.
Another thing that hasn't happened in a while, it's toned down as insider attacks.
And, you know, they could have sleeper cells just ready to go if the U.S. stays.
And it could just be just a total disaster.
I don't remember if I said Tet or not, but if I did, I disagree with that.
I think it probably wouldn't be a giant thing like that because, again, once they have major fixed positions, then the Americans can call in the B1s and blast the hell out of them.
So they're better off not seizing the provincial capitals until, you know, they could do.
Well, in fact, Tet is more like a bunch of raids, right?
A bunch of raids at the same time.
Maybe that is a better analogy, but I don't think they'd probably grab cities that are biting off more than they could chew at the time.
But once American air power is gone, they certainly could do that.
But then, yeah, if they break the deal, if the U.S. breaks the deal, the Taliban will go back to war, you know, to whatever degree.
I wouldn't predict, you know, when and where and to what strength.
But it could be pretty ugly, man.
And in fact, I think as you were hinting there about the no Americans have died in the last year and boy, is Biden really willing to break that record and all that, they would have to escalate.
They would have to, you know, like this Afghan study group said that, you know, we need to send tens of thousands more troops in order to, you know, shore up, essentially provide force protection.
Once we break the deal and go back to war, we're going to need more men.
And I mean, I don't know if anybody's organized to howl about this or not after 20 years.
And I mean, in the Congress or anywhere where anybody has any power.
Is anybody but Rand Paul going to complain about this or what, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, that's a good point.
Staying does.
I mean, it has to mean an escalation.
You know, you can't just fight the Taliban with twenty five hundred troops.
I like how nobody says, but we signed a deal.
Even if it's Donald Trump, the USA signed a deal.
They don't say that.
Nobody says that a deal.
What's a deal?
Yeah.
Biden said it wasn't a very good deal.
He said it wasn't very like negotiated well or something.
Yeah.
That's exactly what Trump said about the JCPOA.
Yes.
Speaking of deals.
I mean, that's what Obama said about Bush's deal with Gaddafi.
And exactly what Bush said about Bill Clinton's deal with North Korea.
We didn't like it anymore.
So we changed it.
Yeah.
I mean, that's another thing with Biden, even with the JCPOA, with the Iran nuclear deal.
I mean, right now he's literally doing the Trump policy, the maximum pressure campaign, demanding talks before giving Iran sanctions relief.
And with all the pressure and all these forces, Israel and Democratic senators and all the Republican Iran hawks, he doesn't have the courage to stand up to all these people and say, no, we're going to lift sanctions because that's the quickest way to revive the deal.
He's just going to sit there and, you know, let this game go on.
But yeah, I mean, that's just another thing where there's a lot.
I mean, from what has been happening lately with Biden's foreign policy, it just mirrors the Trump administration with the stuff with China.
They just sanctioned a bunch of Chinese officials yesterday.
Blinken, Biden's Secretary of State, he's Mike Pompeo.
He's like a polite Mike Pompeo.
He's horrible.
He really scares me, though, because Congress does like him.
He's not as brash as Pompeo was.
He can get a lot more done, I think, and build these alliances in Asia that they want to encircle China with.
So it's just it's scary.
This team is really scary because they're kind of have the same ideas as a lot of the Trump people.
But they, I think, are going to be better at pulling things off.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, listen, I'm just trolling through news.antiwar.com here.
And there's so much of such importance.
And the front page of antiwar.com today is like, oh, God, give me a rest here for Christ's sake.
There's so much.
And I wanted to ask you about all what's going on at the Atlantic Council with the somebody wrote something reasonable about Russia and got shouted down.
We're going to have to skip that.
But everyone, please go to news.antiwar.com and spend like seven hours catching up.
And then you'll be smart like Dave.
But tell me about this.
You've got a minute and a half to tell me all about Houthis clarify not dismissing U.S. proposal.
Peace talks still ongoing.
I'm about to interview Scott Paul about the war there.
But tell me about these peace talks as quick as you can here.
OK, so basically Biden's envoy, Tim Lenderkin, he said that he offered the Houthis a new peace proposal.
When he said that at first, a Houthi official responded and said that the proposal was no good.
It didn't even include a full lifting of the blockade.
And he kind of dismissed it.
And then the next day, another Houthi official or spokesman said, no, no, no, we're still in talks.
We didn't.
That wasn't a dismissal.
But the kind of the harsh response at first was because Lenderkin, he blamed it on the Houthis.
He blamed it on the fighting in Marib and the Houthi attacks inside Saudi Arabia, when the reality is the blockade is still being enforced on Yemen and it's just starving children to death.
There was a CNN investigation that was really, really, really good.
I know it's six years too late, but it showed that the Port of Hodeidah fuel is not coming in.
And there's food trucks on the side of the road and people are dying because of it, are starving to death, children.
And Lenderkin, when asked by CNN, he denied it.
He said, no, he lied.
I mean, they're still starving these people in Yemen.
And for the Houthis, that's a precondition, lift the blockade.
If they're worried about the Houthis attacking Saudi Arabia more, if they lift the blockade, they're already doing that.
The blockade isn't stopping the Houthis' military ability to strike inside Saudi Arabia.
It's just killing.
It's starving children to death and the Biden administration is lying about it.
All right.
Listen, so the U.S. Navy, as far as ceasing all offensive support and all that, they haven't changed the enforcement of the blockade at all.
Is that right?
It doesn't seem like it.
And it's something it's tough to say if anything's changed, because it was always really kind of hard to know exactly how it was being enforced, if it was the U.S. Navy or Saudi ships.
But it doesn't look like that's changed at all.
And the Saudis have been bombing the capital, Sanaa.
And I have a feeling that the U.S. is still helping them because they're framing it as defensive from the Houthi attacks inside Saudi Arabia.
But those attacks wouldn't be happening if there wasn't a war.
And then, of course, there's the huge battle from Arabia and all that.
That's next with Scott Paul from Oxfam here.
I'm sorry I got to cut you off because I would prefer to talk to you for about four hours this afternoon about all the stuff that you've got going on here.
Everybody, it's the great Dave DeCamp.
For some reason on Twitter, he's DeCamp Dave.
He's also at news.antiwar.com on every important thing in the world.
Thank you, Dave.
Thanks, Scott.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A., APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.
