09/25/15 – Jason Ditz – The Scott Horton Show

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I'm Scott Horton.
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All right, next up is our friend Jason Ditz from Antiwar.com.
He is the news editor at Antiwar.com.
News.
Antiwar.com, covering all the bad news for you every single day.
And I really don't know how you do it, man.
You do it better than anybody does.
Jason, welcome back to the show, dude.
How are you?
I'm doing good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing real good.
Appreciate you joining us again on the show.
Been too long since I had you on.
Happy to have you back.
There's so much going on.
But let's start with Yemen, because that's the thing that no one else is talking about at all.
Because, hey, we're leading from behind.
And so all them Yemenis dying aren't quite newsworthy, at least in America.
I guess there's some coverage in Europe.
But anyway, tell us everything important that you think we need to know about the war going on in Yemen right now, please, sir.
If that's not too broad of a question.
Wow, that's a broad question.
It goes back quite a bit.
So the Houthis are a largely political movement, but they're predominated by Shiite leadership.
They're based around the northern part of the country along the Saudi border.
And their longtime complaint was that governments have just kind of taxed them and that's it.
I mean, they get even the limited services that most of Yemen gets, they really didn't get much at all.
Virtually the whole area is unpaved except for private roads.
And I mean, it's really the poorest part of Yemen and also the one that got the least amount of attention.
Well, the original founder of the Houthis was a member of parliament who agreed to an alliance with the Saleh government on the idea that it would get some of these political disputes resolved.
Saleh needed an alliance to have a real majority government in a past election.
And basically he took the alliance and then didn't give anyone what they wanted.
It started a protest movement.
There were some violent crackdowns that turned into an outright rebellion in that region.
And they've been fighting a war against them off and on for about a decade.
And the war against the Houthis continued even after Saleh resigned in 2012.
Now when he resigned, President Hadi was quote-unquote elected to replace him.
Basically he was the U.S. choice for a new military dictator in Yemen and the U.N. was on board with the idea.
They elected him in a single candidate election in which no one else was allowed to run and he wasn't allowed to vote no.
So he was elected to a two-year term which was supposed to be up in early 2014.
When early 2014 came around, he'd been fighting the Houthis all along.
He said, no, because we're fighting the Houthis we need to extend my term in office at least another year.
So he extends his term, launches a bigger war against the Houthis, promptly loses that war and the capital city falls in November of last year.
So interestingly, the Houthis don't really take over once they capture the capital city.
They start saying, okay, we're going to have talks on a democratic transition and actual real elections this time.
President Hadi wasn't keen on that idea so he took off in January, resigned, moved to Aden, announced that he's going to have to take the country back militarily.
In pretty short order he lost Aden too and fled to Saudi Arabia.
So that brings us to March.
In March, Saudi Arabia declares war saying they have to reinstall the rightful president of Yemen and they've killed thousands of people.
They retook Aden which has been, from the Hadi government's perspective, redefined as the new capital city and they've been fighting a war there ever since.
It's been a really bloody war.
There are now thousands of Saudi and Emirati and Bahraini troops on the ground and to make matters worse, there's this naval blockade which Yemen is mostly desert country, doesn't have much agriculture, also not a great place to fish even though it's a coastal area.
So about 90% of their food is imported on a yearly basis.
But this blockade has made it almost impossible to import food.
So you've got kind of a looming famine, particularly in the parts of the country still held by the Houthis because every time someone tries to deliver food to those parts of the country, Saudi Arabia destroys airports, they destroy naval ports.
They just want to make sure that the food doesn't arrive, which they say is because they think weapons are being smuggled in.
And they're really setting the stage for what, I mean, of the 4,500 people that are still killed already, a lot of them are civilians, but they're really setting the stage for what could be a huge civilian death toll from just the famine alone.
Yeah, and now, so let's really examine that part of it.
This number, 90%, 80%, 90%, that's what I've heard too, this whole nine months long, that's what Patrick Coburn says and the UN says, and I know that you're getting that from real incredible and multiple sources.
But they've been saying that for so long and the blockade has been going on for so long, I've got to wonder whether we're talking about an impending famine or an actual famine.
People can't go very long without food.
If they're not importing their food and they really are that dependent on it, obviously the war has made the price of gasoline prohibitively expensive, so all the distribution channels are shut down and everything.
I guess, not like I'm begging for it or something, but it just seems like we must be missing the part where the numbers must already be coming in of people laying down and dying for lack of something to eat there or else, what are we missing?
Is somebody smuggling stuff in from Oman somehow or what?
Yeah, there's definitely been some smuggling.
I'm not really sure where it's all coming from.
Music's playing there, Jason, so let's go ahead and stop here.
I'm sorry, I never look at the clock when I'm doing this show.
I should, though.
I'm going to let you answer that on the other side of this break, just how desperate is the humanitarian situation there, and then we're going to get back to the actual war, the goals and the means and the ends and what the hell's going on in America's role, of course.
It's the great Jason Ditz, news.antiwar.com.
Eye on the Empire.
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All right, you guys, welcome back.
Wrapping up the show already for today, man.
Got Jason Ditz on the line.
He's the news editor at antiwar.com, news.antiwar.com.
We're going to talk about the war in Yemen.
Sorry, I know it's a big, complicated question, and I know that you're in Michigan not reporting out of Yemen and stuff like this, so it's okay if you don't know.
But I just wonder, maybe it has been reported and I just really have not been paying close enough attention, just how bad the famine is already hitting the people of Yemen, this famine that was announced beforehand to be the inevitable, inevitable result of this war as warned by so many back months ago, Jason.
Yeah, it's really odd that we have predictions of the famine that are roughly the same as the predictions of the famine that we saw five months ago when the war began, but we really don't get a lot of detail about just how bad it is, especially in the Houthi territory, because most of the reporting is coming out of Aden, which the pro-Saudi forces control, and they're allowing food into the territory they control, of course.
But that's a pretty small portion of the country.
I mean, Aden is a pretty heavily populated city, but other than that there's not a lot that is controlled by the pro-Saudi forces.
So we really don't know how bad it's gotten.
A few months ago the reporting on the ground was you would see the price of staple foods like flour double and then double again and then double again, and then finally they were getting to the point where in a lot of neighborhoods you couldn't get flour at any price.
I'm sure there's hoarding going on.
That too hasn't been as widely reported as you would think, but I think a lot of it is we really don't know what's going on in those parts of Yemen.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's the other thing.
I mean, when we talked with Matthew Aikens on the show, the only reason he had something to say was because he and a colleague had snuck across from Djibouti and snuck into the country past the blockade.
There's no way for a New York Times reporter to even get there.
I mean, not that we really want to hear their version anyway.
Yeah, so a real lack of information coming out of Yemen.
And also, like I was implying there in the introduction, because America is leading from behind, as they call it, there just seems to be total ignorance on this topic, or it just ranks so low in importance in terms of national media and national newspapers and TV, they just don't cover it at all.
There's a great article in Counterpunch where she has to insist, hey, this is America's war, guys.
The Saudis can't do any of this without us.
And I wonder what all you know about that.
Obviously, the Wall Street Journal has covered this a little bit, and there have been some other reports, but it mostly seems to just go without saying that America's running this war for the Saudis, Jason.
But what do we really know about it?
Well, it's really incredible.
It gets such limited coverage, America's involvement, but whenever we get information, it's exactly as you say.
It really is, in a lot of ways, America's war.
U.S. Air Force planes are doing most of the in-air refueling for Saudi bombers.
U.S. surveillance planes are helping them pick targets.
U.S. military advisors are basically consulting with the Saudis on everything.
And U.S. warships have, on occasion, even participated in the naval blockade.
The U.S. has done everything except literally drop the bombs.
And even in that, they're picking where the bombs are being dropped and just letting the Saudis do it, with planes that we've been giving them over the course of the last couple of decades.
So the idea that this isn't an American fight at all is just ridiculous, for some reason.
There's just really not much interest in it.
All right.
So now when it started, the question was, I'm sure I asked you in this very same way, how the hell are they supposed to reinstall Hadi with air power?
I mean, that's stupid.
But now they've invaded.
But who's invaded and how much?
And do they have a real force?
You said that they're declaring aid in the new capital now, which kind of sounds like a funny sore loser kind of thing.
But on the other hand, it means that, hey, he's not an exile in Saudi anymore.
And they are, again, backed by the American imperial superpower.
So is it just a matter of time before this ground force, how big is the ground force, and you think they will be capable of reinstalling Hadi in power in Sana?
Because, after all, like you said, the Houthis are from the north.
They're not the natural power regime to reside in Sana.
If anybody is, it's not them.
Well, I mean, it's difficult to say.
I think we're heading towards just a split of Yemen in the long run.
There are thousands, but it's single-digit thousands, of foreign troops involved, mostly Saudi and UAE troops.
We don't really know the size of the pro-Hadi Yemeni force, but it's mostly just auxiliaries.
It's not the real Yemeni military.
It's mostly people that were tribal allies and people who went to Saudi Arabia to get a couple of weeks of training and a weapon.
So they don't really have a proper military.
And the thing I think is most interesting, and has only been covered on very rare occasion, is there's been a huge active separatist movement running out of Aden for years.
And ever since the pro-Saudi forces, the Hadi government, took over Aden and declared it their new capital, they're not flying the flag of Yemen, they're flying the flag of old South Yemen in Aden.
These are the socialists that we talked about, right?
Where that one guy's in the documentary saying, don't call me al-Qaeda, I say, viva Hugo Chavez revolution!
Right.
Which is just hilarious to see Yemenis talking like that to me.
But anyway, legacy of the Cold War days.
It seems like that's probably the most likely outcome of this, is that Hadi himself is from the South.
A lot of his allies are from the South.
I think the creation of a new South Yemen that is a Saudi ally, and sort of a transition to a Houthi-dominated democracy in the North, that isn't necessarily very friendly with either Saudi Arabia or the United States, is probably what's going to end up happening here.
I mean, of course, the Saudis are still insisting that they're a matter of days or a few weeks from liberating the entire country, but they've been saying that for months now, and they really don't seem to be gaining much ground.
Yeah.
Well, now, so what about Saleh?
Because the last I heard, he was back and had allied himself with his old enemies in the Houthis, because he, in fact, is a Zaydi, right?
He wasn't part of the Houthi movement, but he's part of that same Shia sect that the Houthi movement is from.
And so now he's allied with them, and I guess was working on getting his old throne back.
But what's the latest about his role in this?
Well, it's not clear.
As you say, he is a Zaydi.
The Houthi movement was never really a religious movement, so much as that the political leadership of it, the Houthi family, were also Zaydis, and their district, when they had a parliamentary seat, was in the Zaydi north.
They really are kind of natural allies in that regard, but Saleh has claimed that early in the war, the Zaydis were offering him money to support the war and offering him whatever.
He kind of said he wanted to stay out of it, so they blew up his house with one of their airstrikes.
And ever since his house got destroyed, he's called on the military to back the Houthis in resisting the Zaydi invasion.
And how's that going?
He was dictator for so long, and despite Hadi being a military man himself, and despite Hadi trying to purge the leadership of Saleh's supporters, a huge amount of the military is still pro-Saleh.
Basically, the Houthis have the bulk of the Yemeni military on their side.
Man, this is just going to keep going.
There's no end in sight.
Wait, that was the last question.
Real quickly, any positive sign of talks here?
Well, the Houthis are in favor of talks, and they've said that they would support talks, and they've gone to a couple of planned negotiations that the U.N. set up, but the Hadi forces keep rejecting these talks and saying that the U.S. pushed a resolution to the U.N. Security Council saying Hadi's the rightful ruler, and the Security Council demands they could get all the cities.
So they keep insisting, well, if the Houthis want to talk, they need to unilaterally disarm and surrender the entire country first, but that's obviously not going to happen.
So for talks, I think it's probably going to be quite a while before the Hadi government is resigned to having to negotiate.
All right.
Well, thanks, as always, for the bad news, Jason.
You do a real great job, man.
I appreciate it.
All right, y'all.
That is the great Jason Ditt, news.antiwar.com.
I'm serious.
There is no better source of information, no better single source of information about American foreign policy on this planet than, well, antiwar.com in general, but especially Jason's work at news.antiwar.com.
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