08/03/12 – Ramzy Baroud – The Scott Horton Show

For KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Alright y'all, welcome to the show.
I am Scott Horton.
The website is ScottHorton.org.
I keep the archives of all my interviews going back to 2003.
More than 2,500 interviews now.
They're at ScottHorton.org.
And tonight's guest on the show is Ramzi Baroud.
He is editor of PalestineChronicle.com and the author of The Second Palestinian Intifada, a chronicle of a people's struggle, and My Father Was a Freedom Fighter, Gaza's Untold Story.
Hi Ramzi, welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me, Scott.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here, and I think this is a very important article.
I sure hope people go and look at it at counterpunch.org, a website of the late, great Alexander Coburn.
The Afghanistan of Africa.
All about the, I guess, horrible situation in Mali.
First of all, where in the world is Mali?
Well, Mali is located in West Africa.
It's a country of about 15.5 million people, and it's sparsely populated, actually, because it has a very large size of about 1.2 million square kilometers.
So it is larger than Egypt in size, but it has about 15 million people.
Most of them live in the southern part of the country.
The north is largely desert.
Some of it is part of the Sahara Desert.
Life there is very, very harsh, and it's becoming much harsher because of the civil war and strife that is happening right now.
Now, as you say in your article, the country was said to be the most democratic in the region.
They had a military dictator who then put on civilian clothes and stood for election a couple of times and was re-elected.
So I don't know how much real rule of law there was, but this was supposedly one of the most democratic states in that part of Africa anyway, right?
Well, you know, I mean, the way that they use such terms, or rather apply such terms, when I say they, I mean in Western media, because it's very rarely that we actually get the news from Zambia or from any other part of Africa or, of course, Niger or Mauritania.
So we are getting our news from Western media mostly, and Western media tell us that President Turi was more or less a democratic president in relative terms, and I would, even then, I would find it so suspicious in the sense that I think that the term democratic here is only applied to as far as our interest as the United States is concerned.
So if he is accommodating to our agenda in West Africa, then certainly he is making few strides toward democracy.
So that is, I think, where the whole democratic definition comes from.
But the interesting thing is that President Turi, who was overthrown by a military junta in March 22nd, last March, was, you know, there are certain things that he would not accommodate, he would not play the game exactly by U.S. rules, because he has his own regional agenda and his own interests as well.
So he was trying to find this kind of balance between U.S.
-French-Western interests and the interests of his country within the region and the interests of his regime.
Obviously, he was moving a bit too slow on fighting terrorism in his country, and as a result, we saw the rise of a gentleman by the name of Amadou, rather, sorry, Amadou Sanougou.
Amadou Sanougou was a captain in the Malian army, and he was trained in the U.S.
He has been in the U.S. on several tours.
We don't know exactly the nature of the training he received in the U.S., but we know even by admission of U.S. officials and media, he did actually receive several military training tours in the U.S.
He goes back to Mali, and he takes over, and he overthrows President Turi, and he declares that his country is now going to a transition, and he says that the reason he actually did this is because he thought that President Turi was not doing enough to fight al-Qaeda militants in North Africa, rather, in Mali, and not doing enough to fight the other militant groups such as Tawarik and other parties in the country.
Now, the interesting thing is that since Sanougou took over the country, actually, his army lost even more battles and since then, northern Mali has succeeded.
I mean, we have...
And when we say northern Mali, it's about two-thirds of that country is now under the control of several groups, including al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, including the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad, which is a Tawarik movement, and it's now declared an Islamic emirate or emirates within emirates, and this is getting very little coverage.
I mean, we are talking about this hugely...
You know, huge country, very strategic from so many points of view, and now it's an emirate, and it's more or less similar to Afghanistan in the makeup, the political makeup, of that new country.
And, of course, these parties are now fighting within each other.
The Tawariks feel that they are losing out to a greater influence coming from other countries, and I think this is rather essential because some of that influence is coming from Libya, and this is something that we've warned from repeatedly.
You can't possibly saturate a poor region like West Africa with weapons coming from Libya and expect that business is going to carry on as usual.
Something is going to happen, and it happened a lot sooner than many of us expected.
All right.
Now, the reason that this particular situation in Mali happens to be the business of those of us living between Canada and Mexico is because, as you said, they had to deal with our government in the first place, and their military is trained up by our military.
Their new military dictatorship is run by guys trained by our guys, and I heard you right.
I think you said he kind of just got back from the U.S. at the time that he did the coup, but also, and I'll let you get to that to clarify that point, but also, as you say, this is the most recent batch of conflict is a direct result of American intervention in Libya, where the Tuareg mercenaries that fought for Muammar Gaddafi went home after losing Tripoli, and they brought their weapons with them, and they decided that autonomy wasn't good enough.
They wanted secession, and then you have, as you said, Al-Qaeda and Islamic Maghreb, whatever exactly that is, kind of unleashed with a brand-new battleground to play and train and recruit in, and here you could literally be from Arkansas, and this matters.
This is kind of your responsibility.
This is your movie playing itself out there in Mali, of all places.
Exactly, and I think that there is something, in order for us to actually trace all of this, to make it a little easier to unravel, is to kind of look at how all this started, and I wouldn't even suggest that this started with the misinterpretation of the UN Security Council of 1973 regarding Libya, which allowed other countries to basically provide some sort of protection for civilians, and it was misread to mean regime change, frankly, and that's exactly what they did.
I think it goes back a little bit earlier, and that is to the establishment of AFRICOM, which is now the American military bases in Africa.
They are based in Germany, their headquarters in Germany, and now they are trying to create what they call strategic alliances.
We don't really know what that means, but they are all over Africa.
They are bribing.
They are twisting arms.
They are trying to do everything in their power in order for them to actually establish military bases.
We know Africa is going to be so important for American foreign policy.
They are leaving Iraq and Afghanistan, and they are trying to look for new bases in order for them to out-balance the Chinese influence in that region.
So that's where the whole thing started.
Now AFRICOM has offices in Mali, they have offices in the capital itself.
Again, we didn't really understand what are they doing there aside from trying to help Mali in its transition towards democracy and all these lovely-sounding words, but we don't really know what is the actual or what was the actual plan until things began falling apart in Bamako with Sunogo taking over.
Notice also how U.S. media, mainstream media of course I'm talking here, has been rather gentle in the way that they have been reprimanding Sunogo for his bad deed.
It's not the kind of response you would think when a military junta takes over a government that has been going through about 20 years of democratization process.
I mean, they would be absolutely outraged.
They are not.
And they are trying to put the focus more on why did he actually do that.
He did that because there is a rise of militant influence in Mali, which means that the U.S. have got to start taking action.
So now the U.S. and France are talking about what are the most proper ways of doing this, and who is the person who is actually making the most fiery declarations regarding the situation in Mali?
It's the head of AFRICOM.
He's saying that, rather, yeah, the head of AFRICOM in Africa is saying, listen, we have got to consider various military options.
No, we are not going to put soldiers on the ground there, but there are other options and other things we can actually do.
So suddenly the issue now has transpired to become a largely American and French concern.
And France is a whole different story.
I'm going to leave it out for now.
So this is why this concerns Americans a great deal, because it's another war that is brewing, and it's another military intervention and another military involvement that is happening as we speak.
Unfortunately, however, it's hardly publicized as other military interventions that happened in Southeast Asia or the Middle East.
Right.
Now, it's interesting to me.
In this one, it's sort of, you know, the old cliché about history repeats itself the first time as tragedy and then as farce, that kind of thing, where always in the Middle East we're kind of trying to clean up the mess, or at least supposedly we're cleaning up the mess from the last time we intervened and led to a bunch of consequences.
And you can trace it back to the overthrow of Mossadegh in 1953 in Iran or, you know, wherever you like.
But in this case, we outright have the American intervention in Somalia of 2006, where we sent in the Ethiopians and the special forces and the CIA to overthrow the Islamic Courts Union, the war of last year in Libya, and now the beginnings of, I guess, special operations forces and drone forces in Nigeria against Boko Haram and, you know, turning this local militia of bark-eating crazies into a real problem for the world, if we can swing it, basically.
And we outright have the head of AFRICOM, General Ham, invoking these three groups, and I guess soon enough they'll throw in whoever's the craziest fighters in Mali, and citing these groups as the reason that we have to begin intervening when the forces in Libya and Somalia are directly related to the American intervention in the first place, or direct consequences of American intervention in the first place, and now they're going to be the excuse to begin intervening in Africa.
Exactly.
And this is the irony.
You know, it's an intentional irony, of course.
I mean, we kind of set up a situation where we either create a security vacuum or we rather infuse a security threat.
Even General Ham himself, which you just cited, has admitted that foreign fighters involved in northern Mali do not amount to more than a few hundred.
But, of course, it's a threat that is growing.
Why should we wait until a few hundred or a few thousand?
Therefore, we must intervene, and we must intervene now in order for us to secure West Africa, restore democracy, and fulfill our destiny in this world.
And very few people would go back to the context in which you went to, whether in the Horn of Africa or elsewhere, and say, wait a minute, are we the ones who actually kind of either created that situation or created the context in which that situation can in fact multiply and take place?
And that's exactly right.
Violence has a way to kind of, it doesn't go away, it just recycles itself.
So in order for you to dump so much weapons and to arm all sorts of groups and tribes in Libya in order for you to supposedly overthrow Muammar Gaddafi, yet you create the kind of weapon cache in one of the poorest parts of the world, which is now being intercepted as far as Gaza, they are being intercepted throughout Egypt, throughout Sudan, and of course in Mali itself.
I wouldn't really give them the benefit of the doubt of saying U.S. military planners had no idea that this was about to happen.
It was really clear to even the most mundane of political analysts to actually realize that that saturation of weapons in that area is going to lead to something.
The Tawariks have had grievances throughout that part of the world, in the Sahara, in the Sahel area, throughout Mali, and they had the weapons and they had the political will at that point in order for them to make it happen.
And they did.
And that created a huge complication that supposedly would not end without seeing unmanned drones blowing up people throughout northern Mali.
And I think that it's going to happen sooner or later because the situation does not seem to be moving towards any sort of political solution.
And the thing is, these concepts are finally getting out there to the point where I think it was almost a race for everyone, all the political commentators, well, those who were paying attention to the Libya war at all a year ago, to say, hey, what's going to happen to all these weapons once they get loose?
Something's going to happen.
And I think quite a few people predicted shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles bringing down jetliners, at least in North Africa.
I guess we'll see the reach of the black market that grew up to disperse and make sure that every possible group in North Africa that wants to be armed can be armed, to see how far their reach ends up going from the massive stocks of weapons that Muammar Gaddafi's government apparently had.
That's right.
And, Scott, as you see, I mean, it is an old strategy.
It's not only the U.S. that is kind of the founder of that strategy.
Others have used it before, which is kind of creating enough tension to justify your military involvement, but not too much that things would go out of control, that you can't even control it yourself.
If it happens in Mali, it's going to happen elsewhere.
Because even countries like Uganda are refusing to allow the U.S. or AFRICOM to start military bases in their countries.
Even a country like Uganda is still resisting pressure, saying, no, I'm not going to give in as of yet.
So what do you do?
You create that security tension.
You create that kind of problem that would allow you to.
And I'm not directly accusing the U.S. of being behind that mess.
I am saying that they certainly created the context that allowed the north to be completely ungoverned.
And now they are saying the only way out of it is actually military intervention, and France called for that directly.
Now, the thing is, they will not go after the North Mali on their own.
They are trying to find a situation, again, similar to Afghanistan, when they supported the northern allies, if you remember, in order for them to take on al-Qaeda, and then they came through the northern allies' umbrella.
And I think that's what they are going to do in West Africa as well.
They are going to prompt few African countries in West Africa that they are recipients of our funds and our financial gifts and contributions to come out and say, we will be the ones, in fact, who are taking on the north.
Now, the number that has been suggested is about 3,000.
The Security Council should be voting on that very soon.
And once a decision has passed that West African countries can militarily intervene in northern Mali, it means that now the U.S. and France and other countries will have to provide them with the help and the assistance they need.
So you will have either a direct or indirect war.
But a war is happening in northern Mali, and you have, again, you have 500,000 people who are roaming throughout the desert, in the Sahara, in Niger, in Mauritania, even as far as Algeria, just seeking food, shelter, and water.
Many people have died as a result.
And, again, that is kind of almost like a footnote that we don't really care that much, although it's a large percentage of the population of Mali that is now packing and seeking shelter somewhere else.
Well, and every report out of Libya basically has the places, Mad Max, Beyond Thunderdome, running around over there, just roaming militias at war and robbing and raping and bombing and doing whatever, you know, basically Lord of the Flies situation.
Nothing like a real even state at all, much less democracy coming together there.
That's right.
Very little is being said about it.
Remember the outcry, the outrage that happened when the media was telling us there is a huge massacre in Benghazi that is about to happen.
David Cameron, Prime Minister of Britain, said, I will not stand for it.
It's absolutely immoral.
We must do something to prevent the genocide of Benghazi.
Well, guess what?
There is a massacre happening every day in certain parts of Libya.
Nobody talks about it at all.
Maybe we should begin to intervene there.
That's right.
Well, for the time being, we have no interest to intervene because the government in Tripoli is on our side.
Therefore, we are going to leave them do the things that they are good at until, you know, they basically get into our wrong side and we find all these human rights violations, which in fact are happening, thus justify intervention once more in Libya.
Yeah.
For now, the oil fields are safe.
Well, now, here's something that we've run up against time and again.
And I'm talking with Ramzi Baroud, editor of Palestine Chronicle, writing at counterpunch.org.
This piece is the Afghanistan of Africa.
Mali, that is, in this case.
But the problem that we run up against time and again, Ramzi, is that when Democrats are in power, the exact policies that Dick Cheney, in fact, praises and would have implemented if he was still the one running things, become perfectly permissible because, well, you don't prefer Mitt Romney, do you?
And these kinds of hollow arguments.
And so here we are where day after day there are leaks in, well, the latest is CNN, before that the Washington Post and the New York Times, where the White House is announcing, really, it's not like this is good journalism or anything, the White House is announcing that they have a covert action program going on against Syria right now.
And this is, of course, part of the upcoming presidential election.
The president is bragging that he has a secret war, the kind of thing where if this was Ronald Reagan, Democrats would be freaking out all over the country.
Liberals and leftists and progressives would be absolutely beside themselves.
And yet he just is waging a war of regime change, openly siding with the king of Saudi Arabia and the king of Qatar.
I don't know if it's an emir or a sultan that rules Qatar over there.
And they're teaming up with Ayman al-Zawahiri's shock troops to set off some suicide bombs and overthrow the Baathist government of Syria.
You know, the last place in the Middle East where a guy can get a drink.
And they're doing this, I guess, only because that's what Benjamin Netanyahu wants.
I don't know.
But the entire choir is just silent.
They're just silent.
They just look the other way.
You know, it is sad, Scott, that in the old days, it used to be easier for us journalists to speak out against war and to expose the charade that was happening in our foreign policy when President Bush was in power because things were very straight.
He wasn't as clever in his vocabulary to actually justify war and assassination throughout Afghanistan and Yemen and to carry out clandestine operations in Syria.
And yet at the same time appear as if he is a person who is there to bring peace and tranquility to the various regions with the U.S. involved.
In the old days, it used to be a lot more obvious.
Now, Obama, I think, is, in a way, kind of won a lot of people to his side just because of whatever reason.
I don't want to go into the details.
But the fact is the Obama administration is, in fact, as involved in so much bloodshed through various parts of the world.
And they do a terrible job, really, at preserving human rights.
They are allowing situations to deteriorate.
They are pursuing a very pragmatic, from their point of view, of course, foreign policy that has no regard whatsoever for stability or democracy in any of the regions that they are involved.
And then, at the same time, they are kind of getting away with it.
And now you have this buildup in the media of people warning that Mitt Romney's foreign policy is not as sound, is not as wise, and so forth, as if Obama has really made a huge deal of difference as far as U.S. foreign policy is concerned in the post-Bush year.
So here we are caught in the same situation.
Nothing has changed at all except of how we word our intervention.
It's a verbal change that actually happened.
As far as the recipient of U.S. missile attacks throughout Afghanistan and Pakistan and Yemen and Somalia as well and elsewhere, nothing has changed.
A bomb is a bomb, a missile is a missile.
Whether it's sanctioned by Bush or Obama, it makes absolutely no difference for the victim.
And, you know, for those who doubt that the U.S. has actually empowered al-Qaeda-like militants and jihadists back in Afghanistan, you know what, the exact same thing is happening right now.
They are being armed with their, I mean, the U.S. declared $15 million of support to the rebels in Syria, but we know that hundreds of millions have been pumped through the Saudi and Qatari and other U.S. allies, and that would have never happened without U.S. approval as well.
Where is the money going?
Okay, so they are going to the rebels, but they are also going to lots of jihadist groups that they are throughout Syria, and they are wreaking havoc in the country.
What kind of a future will Syria have under the jihadists?
It's going to be very much similar to that of Afghanistan.
We're not going to see real democracy there happening.
And here is the U.S. whether directly or indirectly involved in arming and supporting and aiding al-Qaeda or al-Qaeda-like militants throughout Syria.
And, again, there is no outrage whatsoever.
Just the irony is that we don't see lots of people screaming with total anger and outrage saying, wait a minute, you are recreating the exact same scenario that transpired in Afghanistan.
You've got to stop and stop right away before the whole situation goes out of control.
That doesn't even seem to be happening.
And if you open your mouth and say something in mainstream media, somehow you are pro-Bashar, pro-regime, corrupt regime, and anti-democracy.
And that is not at all the case.
It doesn't have to be this way or that way.
Right.
Well, and, you know, especially on that very last point, I'm always reminded of Michael Hastings' reporting in Rolling Stone about the process inside the White House for their decision on the beginning of the Libya war.
And there is one all-important paragraph there about this woman, Samantha Power, who had been relegated to deputy assistant secretary of helping Iraqis paint schools or some meaningless thing, and she saw the war in Libya as her chance to improve her own station within the White House.
If she could only make a successful case for war, then everyone would think that she was important and pay attention to her.
And that's basically it.
Junior high school locker room type emotions are the things that cause this to happen.
You bet they don't have to be this way.
But that's how they become this way, is things like that.
Right.
And one last thing I'm going to say about this, Scott, if you go to the American Enterprise Institute, which is kind of a pro-Israel, neoconservative, supposedly a think tank.
There's nothing to think about.
They are pro-war, part and parcel.
They just want to blow everybody up.
Well, these guys just go and look at it and see their narrative regarding Syria.
See the discourse that they have been building for all of these months to basically push for a war against Syria.
And, of course, they had absolutely no chance whatsoever.
These guys had their hearts and minds set on war, and that's exactly what they are getting right now.
But it's the very people who brought Ahmad Chalabi to Iraq.
It's the very people who overthrew the Saddam regime, the very people who carried out all these atrocities are now the champions of democracy in Syria.
Nothing has changed.
It's devastating because we were told the neocons have been relegated.
The neocons are no longer in the front seat.
Well, guess what?
They are still in the front seat.
They found ways around it.
Well, there are those on the right, especially, who argue that what was so bad about the neocons is that they are still kind of Democrats at heart.
And this is what Democrats have always been about, you know?
Certainly in the last 100 years or so.
But, yeah, I mean, hey, what are we talking about?
We're talking about the Iraqi insurgency has now a new war to fight, and they've now left.
The guys who are our enemies in Iraq are now the guys we're fighting for in Syria.
How do you like that?
Exactly.
Amazing.
All right, well, listen, Ramzi, I really appreciate your time on the show today.
It's been great.
It's my pleasure, Scott.
Thank you.
Everybody, that is Ramzi Baroud.
He's the editor of PalestineChronicle.com and the author of The Second Palestinian Intifada, a chronicle of a people's struggle.
He's got this great piece at Counterpunch.
I hope you'll read it.
The Afghanistan of Africa, all about the war America indirectly caused and is, of course, sure to take advantage of in Mali.
And that's it for the show tonight.
Thanks, everybody, for listening.
This has been Antiwar Radio.
My website is ScottHorton.org.
You can find all the archives there.
We'll be back here next Friday from 630 to 7 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.