05/13/15 – Jason Ditz – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, I'm Scott Horton here.
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All right, kids, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
On the line, I've got Jason Ditz.
He's the news editor at antiwar.com, news.antiwar.com, and all those most important headlines up at the top of the page every day.
Hey, welcome back to the show.
Here's the one problem that I have, keeping up with the Yemen war.
I don't know.
I guess there's some news coming out of there, but I don't know what it all means.
So why don't we start off with all the headlines.
And if people just go to news.antiwar.com, you've got about five or six stories just on the front page of entries here of all the latest bad news out of there.
And a little bit of good news, too, right?
Some kind of humanitarian pause.
You want to start with that?
Yeah.
The humanitarian pause began at 11 o'clock last night.
It hasn't really held completely.
There have been a handful of Saudi airstrikes since then, but it's mostly holding.
The real test is going to be whether the Saudi naval blockade starts allowing humanitarian aid into the Yemeni ports, though.
And that we might not know for another day or two.
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
So let's talk about that, the humanitarian aid.
There's been virtually none this whole time, do I understand that right?
There have been a handful of U.N. ships and planes that have been allowed in after multiple searches by Saudi and coalition ships.
They're allowed in very briefly.
They're not allowed to stay long enough to take any patients out that are wounded and need medical treatment in a country that has a functioning medical system.
And it's been a disaster, because Yemen, besides being the poorest country in the Middle East by a fair bit, also imports some 90% of its food just as a regular routine matter of course.
So those ships are not having much luck getting in either.
So we've seen the price of things like flour double and then triple, and then in a lot of cities now they said after it tripled, it sold out pretty quickly after that, and no place has any anymore.
Oh, man.
Yeah, I mean, that's the kind of thing that can turn into the world's worst crisis very quickly.
And yeah, when Patrick Coburn first said that about they import 90% of their food, I couldn't believe it.
I mean, wow.
So I wonder how much their population has grown in, I don't know, since the end of World War II or something like that.
It must be just exporting.
They don't have that much oil resources there, I guess, right?
But they got enough to export enough to pay for that food most of the time and build up that population on imported food.
I'm not really sure what their main exports are.
Their oil is virtually insignificant.
Yeah, that was what I thought.
I wonder how they afford 90% of their food as imports in the first place.
But anyway, point is, now they're really screwed.
Because as you're saying, it's not just that very little humanitarian aid is getting in.
All of that international trade is virtually shut off at this point.
Right.
I mean, there was an Iranian cargo plane trying to make a landing late last week in Sanaa, the capital city.
And Saudi planes warned it away, and when it tried to land anyway, they bombed the airport and destroyed all the runways to make sure it couldn't land.
Crazy.
Now, how many people have been killed, obviously, ballpark estimate, in the actual airstrikes?
Do you have deaths and other casualty numbers?
At this point, it's well over 1,000.
I would say the majority are civilians.
And do you have any estimate of wounded?
No, I really don't.
It's more, certainly, thousands.
There were 300 wounded in a single strike on Monday.
And now, I'm sorry, I meant to ask this on the humanitarian thing.
Is the Red Crescent there at all, or they're just basically stuck out waiting for permission to enter or something?
Yeah, they're having the same problems as everybody else.
The Red Cross and the Red Crescent have managed to get a few aid ships in there.
One cargo plane in before the airport was destroyed.
They seem to be having every bit as much problem as the regular private companies that usually ship the food in.
Yeah.
Man.
All right, so now, I guess here's where we get to more of what I don't understand.
It seems to me like the, well, first of all, what is the declared end of this?
What have the Saudis said is supposed to be a victory?
Regime change against the Houthis, they have to leave Sana'a and Hadi comes back to power and they'll settle for nothing less than that.
Is that their stated objective?
Right.
Okay.
And then, they think that they're just going to bomb the place until that happens?
That seems to be the plan.
They've said in some of their statements that nothing except for their military intervention can accomplish their goal and that they're not going to stop with anything less than that.
But now, they do not have a real army, a field army to put in there to make this happen, right?
So, I guess what I'm trying to get to, I think you understand, is the mismatch between the stated goals and the tactics and the strategy for actually carrying that out, unless, and I haven't seen any indication of this, of the Saudis with the Americans coordinating, obviously, right?
According to Wall Street Journal and others.
Not direct air support for Al-Qaeda battalions on the ground, right?
In effect, they're fighting as Al-Qaeda's air force, but they're not actually flying cover for these guys in a way that they could actually help them sack Sana'a and really take the government over in that way, are they?
Well, one would certainly hope not, but I'm not sure that what they're actually doing looks that much different from that.
No, it really doesn't, does it?
In fact, one of the airstrikes that was reported after the ceasefire was supposed to have begun was against Abyan, which is a traditional Al-Qaeda stronghold in Yemen, and which the Houthis had just taken over in the hours leading up to the ceasefire.
And so, the last little bit was basically just betraying their intention to get back to that, to drive the Houthis out of that town and give it back to the Mujahideen, you're saying?
Well, again, it doesn't seem reasonable at all that Hadi is ever going to return to power, even with a full-scale military intervention, and stay there for any meaningful amount of time.
I mean, he was president for two and a half years, almost three, and he never had a remotely good grip on the country during that time.
I mean, he had little to no support in the army, he sacked half the leadership trying to put people that he thought were more loyal in power, and it never really took.
He never really had any luck getting the tribes under control, which was the real power base in Yemen.
His control never really extended that far out of the major cities.
Alright, well, hold it right there.
It's a good place to pick up this conversation with Jason Dittz, News Editor at Antiwar.com, news.antiwar.com.
We're talking about America and Saudi's war in Yemen.
And more on the other side of this break.
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Alright, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm on the line with Jason Dittz, news.antiwar.com.
And I got an email from my friend Bill here, Jason.
He says, major exports from Yemen, crude oil, coffee, dried and salted fish, and liquefied natural gas.
And then he goes on to say, some of the finest coffee in the world comes from Yemen.
Ask your coffee guy.
Mocha Sananay is a famous blend, he says.
Well, there you go.
Here I'm learning things all the time on this show.
I guess coffee is a historical export of Yemen.
I didn't even think of that.
I didn't realize they still produced it.
Yeah, there you go.
And I guess, legalized cat, right?
And then, have an extra little boon there, a little windfall.
Alright, so yeah, we were talking about how it doesn't seem to make sense, even if the Saudis with, obviously, American coordination and support and helping them pick targets and flying the AWACS and floating the ships offshore that are coordinating the whole war here.
Even if they're flying as Al-Qaeda's air force, hell, Al-Qaeda ain't gonna put Hadi back in power either.
Nobody's gonna put Hadi back in power.
And I keep mentioning this just because I thought it was hilarious where this guy, he sure looks like a Mujahideen warrior you'd think of or whatever, right?
And he tells the documentarians, hell, everybody always calls me Al-Qaeda or they call me a Houthi or whatever it was.
Why don't you ask me?
I'm for Hugo Chavez!
Viva Venezuela!
And he's shooting his gun in the air.
Oh, maybe he doesn't shoot his gun in the air.
But anyway, so there's a big Marxist presence there in Yemen as well.
That was back when they were North and South Yemen.
That was part of the split back then.
All these different splits that nobody wants.
And correct me if I'm wrong, is there any faction that would like to have him back?
And then the next question from there is, well, what about Saleh?
Because he's the one, supposedly, who has brought some military forces, some battalions still loyal to himself, even, as you said, two and a half years after he was deposed, and brought them into alliance with his old enemies, the Houthis, even though I guess he is a Zaydi, right?
He is, but he also fought several really bloody wars with the Houthis and killed their first two leaders.
The Houthis have always been kind of a family operation.
The original founder was a top politician.
And he was killed by Saleh.
His father took over.
He was killed by Saleh.
And now the younger brother is running things.
I see.
And Saleh was the dictator for, what, 30 years, right?
Right.
About 35 years.
1978, he took power in North Yemen, and he's been in power through early 2012.
And now, so you think at this point that, well, I don't know, he's still waiting in the background.
He's declaring himself dictator again.
But I guess they'd have to get a lucky strike to just get him out of the picture at this point.
Right.
And they tried that.
Over the last few days, Saudi warplanes destroyed his house in Sanaa.
And he was, not only was he not wounded, he appeared on Yemeni state media in the hours after the strike, standing in front of his now-destroyed house, calling for the factions in the military, which are still loyal to him, which are a significant chunk of Yemen's military, to resist the Saudi invasion.
Well, I didn't realize he was doing TV and this kind of thing now.
Well, he hadn't been until they destroyed his house.
And I think that sort of changed things.
Yeah.
I guess, yeah, he wasn't hiding out that undercover, I guess, if everybody knew where his house was there in Sanaa.
Anyway.
All right.
So now, I don't know if you can hear it or not, Jason, but I got a Texas thunderstorm raging outside my window, so I'm going to try to turn it over to you more and leave my mic off.
Can you just give us the latest lowdown from the war with the Islamic State?
Well, that war is going as it ever has.
There's no real progress anywhere.
Everybody's claiming progress that doesn't exist.
The US and Jordan have just started training what's supposed to be a new rebel faction, because they weren't happy with any of the existing Syrian rebel factions, and they decided to create their own.
They're training the first few hundred, which are expected to be ready in about six months.
The goal is to eventually train about 5,000, which even US military officials say probably won't accomplish much, but Congress authorized it, and they don't have any other ideas for how to win Syria, so they seem like they're just going to go with it.
Yeah.
Amazing.
Now, this was a headline that you had yesterday.
We were talking about it on the show.
I don't think I have it here anymore, but where you quote, I guess, Kerry, saying, geez, if Assad goes, then ISIS might take over.
Yeah, welcome to our conversation from four years ago, jerk, but then the sub-headline was yeah, but Dempsey says that we're not going to change our policy from the completely split policy that we have now, pushing for regime change and bombing ISIS at the same time.
Right, and Dempsey admitted the same problem, that the probable beneficiaries of Assad going would be ISIS and al-Qaida's Nusra Front, but we're still going for regime change because that's been our policy all along, and apparently it's got enough momentum that common sense isn't going to do anything about it.
It's really amazing, even after a year of, almost a year of the existence of the so-called caliphate and all of this, they still can't turn the damn ship of empire around from its stance of fighting a war for these guys at the same time they're fighting against them.
It's really something else, and I'm reminded of the thing I saw on CNN where, I wish I remember who this was, it was a Republican congressman, and the anchor said, huh, well you know, who do you think will come to power after we finally, you know, get rid of Assad?
And he goes, hmm, well, I guess we just have to hope that someone will come to the fore.
This is like, what, yeah, al-Nusra, if you're lucky, pal, what are you talking about?
Someone will come to the fore.
Yeah, well, I don't know, an Alawite, maybe?
Or was he?
They hadn't even bothered thinking about that yet.
These are the guys making the policy.
Well, right, and a big problem with it is, there's a lot of foreign lobbying on the Syria war, and it's overwhelmingly against Assad, so, for the sake of Obama wanting to keep this coalition of the willing together for the air campaign, he doesn't want to back off of the call for regime change, even if it's the worst idea out of all the ideas for how to carry the war on, because the Saudis and the entire GCC are all against Assad, Jordan's against Assad, Turkey's against Assad, Israel, who isn't involved in the war, at least not directly, is not only against Assad, but has actually been taking in some of the wounded Al-Qaeda fighters in the Golan Heights, healing them up and sending them back in.
Yeah, amazingly enough, they're not even really trying to hide it, either.
Right, there have actually been news pieces in the Israeli press bragging about how nice it is of Israel to be helping these rebels all the time, with the unspoken fact that the rebels that control that part of the Golan Heights are overwhelmingly Al-Qaeda fighters.
But somehow, Israel has put itself in a false sense of security here, that Al-Qaeda's real enemy is the Shiites, and that they're not going to be an enemy of Israel as soon as this war is over.
Yeah, well, as usual, they're really thinking things through very carefully over there.
Yeah, I love the headline, Hezbollah strikes!
And, oh!
Yeah, they strike Al-Qaeda targets in Syria!
Oh, those dastardly Hezbollah guys, taking on our enemies for us.
Oh, how we're supposed to hate them, for some reason.
Right, and I think there's a lot of recognition, particularly in the security and intelligence communities in Israel, of what a bad strategy this is.
Similarly, what a bad strategy the antagonizing Hamas is, because there are ISIS factions trying to grow in the Gaza Strip that Hamas has been keeping in check.
But, somehow, the politicians have just for so long been anti-Assad, have been anti-Hamas, that they don't really think too hard about what the alternative is going to be.
Yeah.
You know, I asked Eric Margulies about this, where I said, you know, Assad seems like he might as well be an Israeli agent, for Christ's sake, he hadn't done a thing to them.
And, you know, when Al-Qaeda killed the former Lebanese Prime Minister Hariri, and they blamed it on Assad, and demanded that he get his soldiers out of southern Lebanon in 2005, he did.
And then, he had made a peep about the Golan Heights, he ain't fired a single rocket over the wall, he ain't done a damn thing.
And so, I remember, I was asking Eric Margulies, why would they want to get rid of this guy, and replace him with the Bin Laden Knights?
I mean, if they take over the whole country, for crying out loud, you know, that could be a real problem.
And he goes, nah, you know, from the Israeli point of view, psh, the Al-Qaeda guys, they're a bunch of head-chopping, you know, kooks, basically waving an AK-47 over their head, yelling and whatever.
They're no threat to us, they're nothing compared to the State Army of Israel, one that they would never be able to really replicate.
Even, you know, ISIS's army is still basically just a very left-alone rebel militia force, rather than a real army.
And so, from the Israeli point of view, just as a matter of strength, what are they going to do?
Even though Assad never did anything, he had the potential to ever fight them, in a real army kind of a way.
And so, that's why to him, that's why the calculation is simple from the Israeli point of view, that they don't care if, at that time, I don't even think ISIS existed yet, but at that time, even if al-Nusra ended up ruling the whole country, you know, to them it was preferable just as a matter of raw power, and never mind anything else about Assad, like his three-piece suit and his clean-shaven chin, or anything else, you know, that might, anything about his past behavior that might predict his future behavior, any of this kind of thing, you know?
Well, that's true, and not to sound too much of a conspiracy theorist here, but I think another factor is that the previous Israeli government, going back a little ways, and the Olmert government was actually negotiating with Assad on a peace deal, which would have seen the return of some of the Golan Heights.
Now, a lot of officials have denied the terms of the deal that were supposedly in place, but there certainly were talks going on, and there certainly was an idea of, we're going to give back some of the occupied Golan Heights to Syria, in return for sort of a Jordan-style peace deal.
And I think the farther-right governments that have been in since then are so opposed to that idea, both because they don't really want a peace deal with a Shiite government, and because they have a lot of personal interest in seeing the oil-drilling projects in the Golan go forward, that they would simply prefer that Assad be out of the way, so that that plan is never revitalized.
Because Israel is certainly never going to have any sort of land-for-peace exchange with Al-Qaeda or ISIS.
Right.
Yeah, it's great to have a bunch of terrorists, because you can't negotiate with terrorists, and so that makes a good little PR stunt there.
Hey, by the way, as long as I'm keeping you over time, could you tell me real quickly, is it right that a big part of the reason that the Turks and the Saudis are so pissed off at Assad is because he wouldn't let them build a pipeline across Syria?
That I don't know.
I read one good thing about it, but then I never did follow up learning more, so I was wondering if you had.
Yeah, I'm not familiar with that.
It's entirely possible.
Although, there is a pipeline into Turkey through Iraq, so it seems like they could have just extended that into Saudi Arabia.
I don't know.
I'm going to write that down so I look again.
Turkey has sort of become the de facto export site for a lot of Middle Eastern oil.
Yeah.
Well, and Caspian oil, too, right?
Right.
And soon to be natural gas, too, because with the European Union blocking a lot of the pipeline plans for natural gas that go around the Ukraine, they've sort of gone with this very southerly route through Turkey and supposedly into Greece, because the Greek government is saying that they don't care that the EU objects to it.
It's going to bring them in some money, and they're broke.
All right.
Well, listen, man, I've got to go.
I've got to get Ray on the line here, but I'm sorry, because I could keep interviewing you all day about this stuff, man.
I had all kinds of questions about the Baiji refinery and Tikrit and all this stuff, but we'll just have to catch up another time soon.
Okay.
Thanks very much.
Great to talk to you, Jason.
Sure.
Thanks for having me.
Okay.
That is the great Jason Ditz.
News.
AntiWar.com.
News.
AntiWar.com for all of his great articles.
I don't know, half a dozen or a dozen a day.
News.
AntiWar.com.
We'll be right back with Ray in just a second.
Hey, y'all.
Scott here.
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