09/16/16 – Jason Ditz – The Scott Horton Show

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I'm Scott Horton.
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Alright, so introducing our good friend Jason Ditz.
He is the news editor of antiwar.com.
That's news.antiwar.com.
Really on top of everything for you all week long there.
News.antiwar.com.
It's own separate bookmark on my page.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm doing good, Scott.
How are you?
Very good.
Very happy to have you here.
Okay, so, wow, big news.
Double whammy this morning.
U.S. Special Forces embedded with the Turks in the Wall Street Journal.
And then, not so fast.
What's going on here?
Well, in the very small sort of village of Al-Ray, Syria, which is due north of Al-Bab and a little bit west of Manbij, Turkish forces are massing, planning to attack Al-Bab, which is sort of the last major ISIS hub in that area.
The U.S. sent a handful of troops to sort of consult with the Turks and help them in this planned attack.
We don't exactly know how many.
Some of the reports from rebel factions are that it was five or six U.S. troops.
Anyhow, they arrived.
They weren't in uniform or anything, but still word got around that there were some U.S. troops in Al-Ray.
And the Free Syrian Army went just completely ballistic about it.
They had huge rallies outside the town.
They were condemning the U.S. as infidels and crusaders and vowing to slaughter all the American troops in Syria.
And within pretty short order, the U.S. troops fled the city.
Exactly where they went, no one seems sure, although the Syrian Observatory says that they're still inside Syria somewhere.
They haven't fled outright into Turkey.
Well, yeah, and the whole thing is on Twitter.
The video's right there on Twitter.
Okay, so now, geez, I don't know, Jason.
I'm a little bit confused, because first of all, these guys are moderates, and yet you're describing them as jihadi types.
And secondly, aren't they all armed by the CIA, and why aren't they thankful?
And thirdly, aren't they armed and trained and supported and suckered by the Turks?
And why aren't they happy to have, or are they happy to have the Turks there, just not the Americans?
Because I thought that now, well, I guess the problem is they've got a different enemy.
But these are at least, would be, should be their friends.
And I know that the Special Forces aren't the CIA, but they're still the Americans, right?
So what am I missing?
Right, and that's sort of the real puzzler here.
These are the, anytime you hear the pro-war people talking about, oh, we're going to prop up the moderates to replace the Assad regime in Syria, it's always the Free Syrian Army that they're talking about.
These are the guys that are heavily armed by the CIA for years on end, and have been supported by the U.S. in airstrikes, and they're U.S.-backed, they're Turkish-backed.
By all accounts, if anybody in this part of Syria should be welcoming the Americans as liberators, it would be these guys.
And even here, they're protesting and talking about slaughtering the Americans.
That's how unwelcome U.S. forces are in Syria.
Now, is that just because they're all a bunch of al-Qaeda, or is that because they're pissed off about the ceasefire, and we're trying to separate them out from al-Nusra, and they know that they're nothing without al-Nusra?
I think it's some of each, and there's also the Kurdish connection there as well, because the Free Syrian Army forces in question are heavily backed by Turkey.
When they invaded Jerobolus and the ISIS areas around there, there was sort of an expectation that the next thing would be, well, they start attacking the Kurdish YPG, and the U.S. is heavily backing the Kurdish YPG as well.
So we have this story all the time of U.S.-backed rebels attacking U.S.-backed rebels in Syria, and it seems like it's starting to fuel a little bit of resentment that the U.S. is backing both sides of a lot of these conflicts.
Crazy, man.
All right, now, let's talk about this thing that was in SoftRep, which is the Special Forces News site.
By the way, did you ever get a chance to read the whole thing of that?
No, I still haven't.
Yeah, me either.
I still haven't.
It's behind a paywall.
Well, yeah, we're going to have to take care of that.
Still working on that.
Well, listen, I'm going to go ahead and just mention the first two paragraphs, because anybody can look at the first two paragraphs.
I think it's the beginning of noteworthy here.
It's an article by Jack Murphy at SoftRep.com, which is what?
Special Forces Rep?
I don't know what that stands for anyway.
And this was tweeted out.
He said, boy, you know, there's going to be some paper shredding at the Pentagon tonight when he put this out.
And this is news by former Special Forces guys, four military types.
It's the slant of the site.
And he says, you know, he has a quote of a Green Beret.
Nobody believes in it.
You're like, F this, the Green Beret says.
Everyone on the ground knows they are jihadis.
No one on the ground believes in this mission or this effort.
And they know they're just training the next generation of jihadis.
And so they are sabotaging it by saying, F it, who cares, basically not doing the work to train up the rebels.
And then another quote here.
I don't want to be responsible for Nusra guys, that is al-Qaeda.
I don't want to be responsible for Nusra guys saying they were trained by Americans, the Green Beret added.
So now I don't know exactly whether they're talking about people that they've trained in Jordan or people they've trained in Turkey or, you know, whether they're talking about what's going on this month in Syria because, as you said, it's paywalled.
But, you know, we're already familiar with that kind of sentiment from the military going back to at least 2013 when there were the viral videos of all the guys with signs saying that, you know, I didn't join the army to fight for al-Qaeda and all of that at the time when they almost bombed Syria in August, September three years ago.
So, but anyway, you know, just goes to show what a contradictory type of a thing we have on the ground with that.
Have you ever heard, Jason, of CIA guys complaining about who they're training over there?
Because I guess I would have thought, you know, the Rangers are more embedded with the Kurds and that there's more CIA paramilitaries and contractors training up the Sunni jihadists.
But what the hell do I know?
I don't know.
No, I've never heard the CIA make any complaints.
And I would speculate that, you know, like you, I haven't been able to read the full article, but I would speculate that this is referring to the training that was going on in Turkey when the U.S. was trying to create their own rebel faction before they abandoned that plan as a disastrous failure.
This entire second class of...
You're talking about last year, right?
Right.
The entire second class of recruits out of that effort defected to Nusra pretty much the moment they entered Syria.
So that seems like that's a pretty good indication and defected with, of course, a large amount of U.S. provided weapons and vehicles and the like.
Well, now, what about the Syrian Defense Forces?
Because that's a new name for an umbrella group that combines some Arab militias with the Kurds.
But they're, am I right, geared more toward fighting against the Islamic State rather than the other Sunni jihadists, right?
Right, right.
And this is really...
You know, we've seen this a few times where people are trying to manage international perception of what their forces are doing by rebranding themselves.
The Kurdish YPG rebranded themselves as the SDF for certain operations to try to give the impression that they're not conquering a bunch of Arab land.
But realistically, this is 95-96% YPG forces, and there's a few Christian Arab groups that are sort of allied with them that aren't really much of anything.
So that's not who they're referring to here, then.
Right.
The SDF is overwhelmingly just the Kurds.
It sounds more current.
I wonder if after the failure of last year, they were ordered to just start right back over again, the Rangers.
Or maybe the CIA is using Rangers to do the training of the FSA groups.
Well, they did, depending on...
They did restart this program.
I mean, after that second class all defected to Nusra, they abandoned the program pretty publicly that was supposed to produce 20,000-30,000 strong rebel force and produced a couple hundred rebels, most of whom got either killed or defected immediately.
And they made a very public show of abandoning this as just a disaster.
And they sort of quietly announced earlier this year that they were reviving the program, but that things were going to be different this time.
And that was kind of the last we heard of it.
Well, now, as far as the ceasefire holding and all of that, are there any indications that...
Well, I guess this is a two-parter.
Any indications that the FSA groups of any kind are splitting away from the El Nusra Front?
And then, I guess, secondly, since the answer to that is no, then are the Americans going to do what they did ever since the first ceasefire in February, where they just keep backing them anyway?
Or are they finally ready to betray them and live up to the deal with the Russians that they're going to bomb ISIS, Nusra, and whoever happens to be near Nusra?
If you're marbled, you're dead, dude.
Which do you think?
Or do we already know?
Yeah, I think we already know.
It's interesting, though, because the U.S. has been very public about suggesting that's the way this is going to go.
The State Department issued a statement warning all these so-called moderates to stay away from Nusra and warned that there would be dire consequences for groups that didn't do it.
But the indications are that nobody's doing it, and this is putting the U.S. in a very tough position, because they've sort of set themselves up to do, like you say, to do exactly what Russia's been doing, which is to bomb Nusra, even if they're embedded with other groups.
And the U.S. spent the better part of this year demanding that Russia stop attacking Nusra altogether, because there were so many embedded Nusra-marble-ized groups like this.
And the U.S., I think, dramatically overestimated their ability to separate these groups, when, in reality, pretty much for this entire Civil War, Nusra's done the heavy lifting in most of these joint offensives.
Yeah.
Well, and yeah, they're the ones firing the TOW missiles, too.
They're the ones who figured out how to work the damn things.
Oh, man.
Well, and, you know, as you said, a lot of the people, you know, the DOD and CIA trained, they just defect to Nusra anyway, the ones who are the capable fighters.
They go and join the frontline forces anyway, the ones who are the most capable.
So, and as it has been for years, I mean, this is no pre-recorded thing.
This is, we're having this conversation, September 2016 right now, as unbelievable as it sounds, that after five and a half years of backing these terrorists, it's finally time to stab them in the back.
Jesus.
You know, and just like when you said, you know, it's the exact same cringe as, like, four minutes ago when you said, yeah, the SDF, that's just cover, because they're trying to play down Kurdish territorial expansion against, you know, taking over Arab towns in their U.S.-backed and Russian-backed war against the Islamic State, which, you know, who knows how much of that they're going to lose as soon as we're done stabbing them in the back when we side with the Turks in the final war against them, which I don't know, Jason, which is coming first there, America stabbing the YPG in the back or finish using the YPG to stab the Islamic State in the back.
Yeah, that kind of remains to be seen.
I guess it depends how much they can count on.
American foreign policy, it's kind of a mystery.
It is.
It is.
It's just, there are so many parts of U.S. policy in Syria that just kind of start as a notion that it would be nice to accomplish this goal and then throwing a bunch of money and weapons and backing behind whatever faction they think would be the best to get that goal done.
And there's no big picture sort of planning apparently going on here because they're cheerfully backing opposite sides that are obviously ending up in conflict every time they get close to each other.
I mean, the Kurds have been fighting against Free Syrian Army, against all these so-called moderate Islamist rebel groups, pretty much every time they get anywhere near each other.
But the U.S. has no problem throwing more weapons at each group and backing each group when they're fighting somebody else and then just acting kind of surprised when all that extra equipment is starting to be used against one another.
Someone should write a skit for the new rebooted MADtv, man.
Have these guys all, you know, a little bit of Monty Python here.
They were like, oh, I remember you from, yeah, we were CIA trained together and now we're at war against each other.
Hey, let's move on because there's so much more to cover here.
The money for Israel here, $38 billion is the new hand over there.
Speaking of friends of the Al-Nusra Front in Syria.
And then Lindsey Graham, followed by Donald Trump came out and said $38 billion, that's hardly enough.
So what are the terms of this deal?
What do the taxpayers of America get out of this, Jason?
Well, the taxpayers of America get a $38 billion bill over the next 10 years.
And, of course, most of this money doesn't actually go to Israel.
These aid packages that have, you know, Israel or Egypt or whoever as the recipient are actually huge aid packages for major military companies.
Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and the like are going to get $38 billion to make a bunch of stuff and then give it to Israel.
So these are some juicy contracts that they can pad the hell out of and give Israel a bunch of weapons that, if we're being honest, they don't need.
But yeah, this has been almost ridiculous how much negotiation has gone on for this $38 billion deal.
Trying to convince the Israelis to accept $38 billion worth of free stuff took over a year.
There's another Saturday Night Live skit that you could do too where, we don't want your F-35, it's such a piece of crap.
I mean, we're really relying on our airplanes to fly, even in the dark, you know?
And then the Americans insisting that, hey, you want the money, you're going to have to take the F-35.
Right, right, you have to take what you're offered.
And, you know, it started out, this was always going to be a record large aid package because every new aid package to Israel is a record large aid package.
But it started out about $32-33 billion and it slowly crept up from there and they settled at $38.
Israel was kind of shooting for $40, didn't quite get there.
But then Lindsey Graham is coming up and saying, oh, you know, Congress isn't bound by this, we can give Israel whatever we want to give Israel and if we want to give Israel billions more every year, we're free to do so.
And it's not clear that that's the case because part of the memorandum of understanding that Netanyahu and Obama signed is that Israel not only won't seek extra money from Congress for the next 10 years, but won't accept it if it's offered.
So, that sort of is sparking some tension between Lindsey Graham and the White House, Lindsey Graham and Israel, he's saying, oh, Israel kind of sided with the President against Congress.
And then Donald Trump's aid, who has been coming up with headline-worthy, outrageous statements pretty much non-stop since being appointed Donald Trump's aid to Israel, came up with yesterday the idea that, oh, if Trump gets elected, this $38 billion deal, that's not binding.
We can just keep increasing it however much we want.
None of these limits are going to matter and aid to Israel is going to be limitless under a Trump government.
Amazing.
Hey, did you see that Douglas Feith's law partner, Mark Zell, is leading the Trump campaign in the occupied West Bank?
No, but it doesn't surprise me.
He's picked some bizarre campaign advisors and foreign policy aides.
A lot of these guys have seemingly no experience.
It's just like, oh, here's a real estate lawyer who's a big fan of Israel, I'll make him my Israel advisor.
So someone who's probably known for 30, 40 years, but doesn't necessarily have any real expertise and just kind of heads to Israel and starts making all sorts of wild promises of more money than can even be imagined by anybody is going to be flowing to Israel, which, of course, is just going to mean more money flowing to arms companies, which probably helps Trump with the military lobby in ways that he wasn't necessarily getting benefits before.
Right.
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Yeah, he's had to reassure them a little bit.
There was some of that on TV this morning as general after general got up there to vouch for him and say, and I think he said himself too, oh, we're going to rebuild the military.
As Obama hasn't year by year by year for his entire presidency spent more than George W. Bush on building up the military overall and then maybe less on the Iraq war, but just because it wasn't as big in his time.
But overall military spending Obama has far outpaced George W. Bush or even Ronald Reagan or whatever, adjusting for inflation.
He's neck and neck with Franklin Roosevelt during World War II in terms of military spending.
And yet we get to hear all day long, oh, he's hollowed out the military.
We've got to rebuild the military.
There is nothing left of it apparently.
It's just, yeah, never mind all the money they're diverting into the F-35 and other ridiculous projects like that.
And some of that with those projects is what the military is complaining is hollowing them out.
So much money is going into these pet projects that people in Congress really, really want that they're reducing the number of troops they have.
The Navy is always complaining, oh, we care about number of ships less than quality of those ships.
The Navy has been very public about we'd rather have a bunch of stuff that can barely float but technically counts as ships rather than a couple of really high profile aircraft carriers.
And we saw that a lot with those literal combat ships, which have almost all now been mothballed for the time being because they were brand new but they still broke and cost way more than anybody expected.
But they're these little tiny coastal combat ships that barely would register in any sort of naval conflict.
They wouldn't really be able to do much of anything.
And the Navy put a lot of money into that just, again, to get numbers up.
Yeah.
Well, and they say that the thing would have been really susceptible to any kind of return fire as well.
The whole thing was just, as you say, nothing but a boondoggle in the first place.
You know, I'm not certain if it was Ray Odierno, the general, the Desert Ox, as our friend Jeff Huber used to call him, David Petraeus' sidekick.
I'm pretty sure it was him who said in congressional testimony in plain English that, you know, Senator, look, it may have even been to John McCain.
I'll have to go back and look.
Senator, look, we have all we need to defend America.
No problem.
But if you guys want us to be able to deploy anywhere in the world to fight a war over anything on a moment's notice, get involved in all these civil wars and do all these things, we're going to need more money.
And he just couldn't have put it any clearer.
You know, when it comes to defending the people of America, I mean, that's easy.
Look at the size of our moats.
And look at our two weak and friendly neighbors to the north and south.
And, you know, all we've got to do is make sure to not get in a nuclear war with the Russians and we're fine.
What's to defend from?
But, hey, if you want to dominate the planet, this is going to cost some money.
You know, just so we're on the same page here, Senator.
And I just like it because it's sort of one of those out of the mouths of babes kind of moments where this isn't like what they say to each other, you know, chomping cigars in dark, smoky rooms.
This is open Senate testimony that we've got to make sure, you know, the difference between which mission we're on and which mission we're funding, you know.
Right.
And that's sort of been a pretty dramatic disconnect for a lot of years, that there's the public, what the U.S. military is for.
There are defenders there.
They guarantee our freedom.
And then, you know, they're all deployed overseas, occupying other countries.
All right.
Now, so speaking of which, we're back to Libya.
Give us an update now on what's going on there.
Did they finish destroying the Islamic State?
You know, that's a weird one because they got to the point where the U.S. was saying, oh, there's just a couple hundred ISIS left and they're all trapped in this tiny little part of the coast off of Sirte, and they'll be wiped out any minute now.
And then they just kind of stopped talking about that.
There really hasn't been any new updates from Sirte about what's happened.
And meanwhile, now we have General Hifter, who is the head of the Libyan National Army, which is loyal to the Tobruk parliament and who spent decades as a CIA asset, attacking and conquering oil ports belonging to the Libyan Government of National Accord, which is who the U.S. nominally is attacking ISIS in Libya to support.
So it's kind of already falling apart, this idea that, oh, once ISIS is out of the way, everything will just kind of fall into place.
I think I've read a couple of things, too, about how they really – I don't know.
Do you believe them when they say they've disowned Haftar, they have no confidence in him, and he doesn't do what he said he was going to do and he can't and that kind of thing?
It wouldn't surprise me if there's, much as we've seen in places like Syria, if there's sort of a divide between who the CIA still has faith in and still has money invested in and who the military and the Defense Department and everybody else kind of sees as current U.S. allies.
But we really don't know.
Certainly, Haftar's been nothing but a disaster since he went back to Libya.
He was living in suburban D.C., kind of in Virginia, a few miles from CIA headquarters for 15, 20 years, kind of in a semi-retirement state.
And when the Arab Spring broke out in Libya, he just decided, oh, I'm going to have to go and be the great hero.
Did a little bit of fighting during the regime change, but then started forming his own army and announced in pretty short order that he was engaged in a coup d'etat and was going to become the military dictator of Libya.
He publicly announced this, and everyone was pretty shocked, and nothing ever really came of it.
It was just like a big bluff, right?
He didn't have the troops to even try to invade Tripoli.
Right.
This was before the Tobruk Parliament was created, because the Tripoli Parliament was still sort of the internationally recognized government of Libya, even though it didn't control much of anything.
And Haftar said, oh, these guys are all a bunch of Muslim Brotherhood people, and I'm just going to expel them all and take the country over and liberate it.
And there were even some indications that Egypt might have been on board with this plan, like they were exporting the concept of military juntas against the Muslim Brotherhood into Libya.
But nothing ever really came of it, and there were elections, and a more moderate Tobruk Parliament won it and got kicked out of Tripoli by the old parliament, and so they had two dueling parliaments, and Haftar kind of went with the new parliament, but then kind of lost focus and started fighting over Benghazi instead of fighting to kick mayors out of office in eastern Libya that he thinks are too close with the unity government.
I mean, he's just kind of lurched from one disaster to another ever since he went back to Libya.
He makes bold promises that, oh, I'm going to expel this mayor from office, nothing ever comes of it, or, oh, I'm launching a coup, nothing ever comes of it.
But he's somehow still there and is still in control of this army.
So now, when the Americans came just in the last few months to fight ISIS and CERT and create this new, they called it the National Unity Government, have they actually tried or done anything or made any progress even in bringing the two separate governments in, I guess one in Benghazi and one in Tripoli, and actually unify them into a unity government?
Or everybody's just standing around with their hand in their pockets wondering what's going to happen next now?
Right, that's more than the case.
The original UN plan was, well, we've got a parliament in Tobruk that kind of has some influence in Benghazi, we have a parliament in Tripoli, we need to unify this.
So we're going to create a third thing that's the unity government, and then they're going to kind of bridge this gap.
But what happened was both parliaments rejected them pretty much immediately.
They were unveiled in a ceremony in Tunisia, and then spent the next several months in exile in Tunisia because nobody would recognize them until somebody finally managed to smuggle them into Tripoli.
But to this day, there have been multiple votes in both parliaments not recognizing this unity government, which was supposed to be the whole condition on which it was created was to get this recognition.
And the UN and the US have kind of demanded that it be recognized.
The US has sanctioned members of the other parliaments for not recognizing them, but really they're not doing anything to ensure that there's any sort of recognition.
I think their main hope is if we take over Sirte for them and kind of give them Sirte, which is such a valuable city, people will start to fall into line just because they've got a little momentum.
Yeah.
Well, you know, one thing that's worth mentioning here, Jason, I think would be during one of these debates with Bernie Sanders, Hillary made it clear that she would be re-invading Libya full scale and that if there was any failure here, it was the failure to follow up heavy enough and build them a good democracy.
And after all – and she's completely dismissive about it.
Everybody can look this up.
They have the video and a little write-up of it at Real Clear Politics where she's very dismissive and says, look, we've got a permanent military presence in Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea.
It's a big deal.
We're going to do that in Libya too.
We're just going to have a garrison there and it's going to last forever.
And what's the problem?
Afghanistan and Iraq.
I'm kind of surprised it wasn't Obama.
You and I did a great job, especially you, but I interviewed you, so I get to ride your coattails on this.
And we were great on Libya in 2011.
And I don't know about you, but I was – I don't remember.
You were probably better on it than me.
But I was predicting that we would have a full-scale invasion and occupation and purple-fingered elections and whatever, because otherwise you're going to turn the place over to al Qaeda.
There's going to be suicide bombings and people getting their heads chopped off and crazy stuff, and you can't let that happen.
So once you depose the dictator, then you're going to have to occupy the place in the name of keeping the jihad down.
But that didn't even happen.
They've waited years.
I mean, they're back there now with spies and special forces and airplanes, but nothing like the Iraq-style project that I thought was going to happen.
And yet, with Hillary Clinton, I don't think there's any doubt that that's what we're going to see there.
Right.
It's really incredible.
There was no – And Trump says he'll bomb them, by the way.
I shouldn't leave that out.
I don't want to sound partisan.
Right.
Nobody thought this was going to work when they imposed regime change in Libya and then just kind of left.
And Obama has been very public in some of his higher-profile interviews that that's the big regret of his presidency, is that he didn't go further and sort of occupy Libya.
And he kind of tries to shift the blame to David Cameron, saying, Oh, well, we figured because Britain's so much closer to Libya, we would have thought they'd have been more invested in this.
And they and France would have done more, but they just kind of went along with us and ignored it.
But yeah, this has always kind of been fairly obviously not going to work the way it was going.
And yet here we are, you know, years later, starting to kind of trickle back in to prop up other groups that once again, don't have any real support.
And once again, relying on this idea that if we give them a little bit of momentum, it's going to just all fall into place, just like it didn't fall into place last time.
Right.
Oh, well, like you say, more contracts for those getting the contracts.
So one more is Yemen.
They say war is the health of the state.
And that sure seems to be working for the Houthis, huh?
Not that they started it.
Well, yeah, I guess they did kind of.
Yeah, I mean, you can you can go back 20 years and put this on Saleh, really.
But I mean, the Saleh versus the Houthis and, you know, setting up alliances with the original Houthi who was a politician and then stabbing him in the back and getting him out of parliament and creating this movement.
And but yeah, the Houthis are holding their own against Saudi Arabia, 18 months into a Saudi invasion, much longer than anyone expected.
The Saudis kind of went into this, presenting it as, oh, we're just going to quickly overrun them and reinstall Hadi as the president.
But not only has that not happened, but the Houthis are actually making some gains further north and have actually moved into Saudi Arabia along the coast, taking at least one military post that was up on a on a hilltop kind of overlooking the surrounding area.
You know, Nasser Araby has written a new thing for the Carnegie Endowment.
He's a reporter that I interview every few weeks or so from SANA.
And he was saying that they fired a Scud missile that they had either fabricated or I forgot how he said they got their hands on the thing, but that they had fired it deep into Saudi Arabia, hitting a town near Mecca even and driving the Saudi government completely crazy there.
So, yeah, I mean, Yemen had a lot of not great missiles in their arsenal over the years.
I mean, from dating back to the Yemeni civil war back when it was north and south Yemen, they've spent a substantial portion of their very limited economy on a lot of very mediocre weapons, but they had no shortage of Scuds and even a few missiles that were a little bit better than Scuds.
And a lot of the early Saudi airstrikes when this war started centered on places that they thought those missiles might have been stored because they sort of saw that, you know, sooner or later these could get used against Saudi Arabia.
They blew up a lot of civilian neighborhoods thinking they were blowing up missiles and the like, but obviously they didn't get them all because you still see to this day, 18 months in, missiles getting fired at Saudi Arabia.
And by the way, Araby also says that it's tens of thousands of people who've been killed, 50,000 maybe.
And, you know, whatever the UN says is way behind and is on limited information, but that it's a wholesale slaughter going on there pretty much all the time.
Yeah.
I mean, and if you count starvation and the like, it's probably an enormous number because Yemen's mostly desert.
It doesn't have a lot of farmland.
It has to import 90 plus percent of its food.
And there's a naval blockade since the war began that's severely limited food imports, especially to the Houthi half of the country.
So, yeah, there's, we don't have any clue what the death toll is.
The best the UN seems to do is every time there's a high profile incident where, oh, the Saudis blew up a school and killed 30 people, we'll add that to the number.
And they've kind of admitted, oh, the official figures are probably undercounts.
There's no clue how big this is.
And because it's Yemen and because it's so poor and there's so little international interest in getting figures like this, we might never know how many people get killed in this war.
Yeah, man.
All right.
Listen, thank you, Jason.
Again, dude, you do great work.
Sure.
Thank you for having me.
I sure appreciate it.
Everybody, that is the great Jason Ditz.
He's the news editor at Antiwar.com.
That's news.antiwar.com.
And he's really on top of things for you on all of America's wars, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Iraq, and all the domestic stuff, Guantanamo stuff, whatever you need to know, man.
He is on it at news.antiwar.com daily there.
That's the Scott Horton Show.
Thanks very much for listening, y'all.
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