Alright y'all welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio All right, Jason Ditz is on the line.
He's our news director dude something or other managing news guy at antiwar.com news dot Antiwar.com welcome back Jason.
How's it going?
Man this top headline is making me mad Gates Libya war not a vital u.s.
Interest So does that mean that he's only got us into this thing out of the goodness of his heart Well His answer was a little longer than that and it was was it Israel's interest.
He's trying to protect here or what well indirectly his argument was well if If Libya gets too bad all the refugees will flock to Egypt and that might be stabilized Egypt, which I guess Implied within that is that would be bad for Israel.
So so yeah Israel's in there Well, there you go.
So the question then I think is bagged is Israel a vital u.s.
Interest But I guess nobody asked him to follow up right now.
No, there was definitely no follow-up the fact that he was even willing to admit that He just got done starting a war that's not a vital u.s.
Interest was sort of a staggering admission in and of itself though Yeah, well thing they keep to themselves until they write their memoirs Yeah, well, I that's something that I've really noticed about maybe the Bush crew really started it but the Obama team really has to Have such a shamelessness to outright admit some of the things that they outright admit You know that you would think that they would know they're supposed to keep under their breath or say Backstage to each other and laugh or whatever, but they just come right out and say it's us Yeah, there seems to be a disconnect there where they don't realize the stuff.
They ought to be ashamed of it's like Oh, yeah, we started a war no congressional debate We waited until Congress was in recess watch this war.
That's not a vital American interest.
Yep, and Here's the punchline everybody, especially you Obama voters out there who?
Perhaps I don't know took it to heart when he announced it.
Hey this our intervention here will be a matter of days not weeks We were running a headline here from the New York Times at anti-war calm gates and Clinton unite To say Libya intervention may last a while Yeah, yeah, and and there are a while that they said on the Sunday news shows was a matter of months Which is even that is kind of underselling it because Secretary Gates just a few days ago was saying Well that UN resolution doesn't have any sort of end date.
So neither does the war As far as he's concerned.
This is just an open-ended Open-ended conflict again and officials have been pretty unanimous and saying well We don't have any sort of endgame strategy here.
This is just a war that's going to be going on Amazing now Tell me this, you know, I guess we're trying to figure out, you know Predicting and trying not to predict the worst here, but maybe that's all we have It seems like our choices for the end here are either You know figure out a way to get Qaddafi to actually, you know, give up autonomy to the east something like that or failing that Is it do you think it's possible that with American air cover the rebels will be able to just take Tripoli and and hunt this guy down and get rid of them themselves therefore, hopefully avoiding the Quote unquote necessity of sending in the Marines like Thomas Jefferson.
Well, it seems to be what they're hoping but It's really hard to say and Of course this resolution was never meant to be International backing for just propping up a rebel offensive across the entire nation anyway But that's that's what it's being used for now, but whether or not they can actually pull it off Really remains to be seen Yeah, it's funny.
You know, I hate say but or I don't hate say it But it really at this point is pretty clear.
The UN resolution doesn't mean anything You know Even if they had gone to Congress, whatever The UN's not legit and besides that, you know, the Security Council declaring war that's not legitimate.
It shouldn't be to anyone I don't think but besides that No war lasts past the first mandate the You know, that's like a cliche right that the first casualty is truth And then the second one is the battle plan, you know, everything changes immediately when you go to war Right, and I'm sure the the reason for this war is going to shift several times.
There's already a lot of Preliminary reports leaking out about al-qaeda being key parts in the rebels al-qaeda infiltration of the rebel movement, so it's entirely possible even if they do al-qaddafi that it'll just be a prelude to another war against the Al-qaeda back rebels, you know, it's funny because it was just what a couple weeks ago We talked on this show about that's why not to do this That's why not to do this, you know, there are a lot of Libyans that went to fight in Iraq on the side of the Iraqis you know and whether the Al-qaeda Infiltration of the rebels is true or not.
I mean, I guess we can't really say that for sure right now it's an excuse and it's out there and In the era when wars are just an end unto themselves.
It's an excuse to keep one going In Afghanistan pretty much forever, right?
That's how how we switch sides back to Qaddafi in the first place we're if you look the the The mi6 and SAS they were trying to use the jihadist types to kill Qaddafi as late as 1998 then with the terror war they decide they prefer a secular fascist with mirrored sunglasses to some guy in a turban with an ideology and So they started backing him up and you know from what I read I should throw in here from what I've read about these accusations about Al-qaeda there these guys are veterans of the Afghan and Iraq war apparently some of them but that doesn't necessarily mean that you know They're all about suicide attacks or that they're all about attacking Americans or or share any of the you know real ideology of Al-qaeda in Pakistan if such a thing even still exists anymore Or of Abu Musab al-zarkawi.
I mean, we don't know exactly who these guys are But you know, this is one of the reasons why we said not to invade Iraq, too It's one of the reasons that our puppet dictator Hosni Mubarak in Egypt said not to invade Iraq You're going to create 10,000 bin ladens You're going to how many people are going to go to fight in the Iraq?insurgency just like they went to fight in the Afghan insurgency in the 80s and then go home again and then be people that You know either we or somebody else has to deal with later and as you say serve as a ready excuse For further intervention in the war well we help the rebels but we can't let these of the rebels win now we have to intervene further and make sure that the right Guys come out on top and have a good progressive 21st century democracy for the people of Libya there That should only take a couple of decades right, there really is no endgame strategy and I Guess their ideal victory condition is just for democracy to magically appear somehow Which is which is just silly because Even in Iraq where you know It was a fairly cosmopolitan society and and democracy could well have emerged in the wake of Saddam Hussein in the first place It really just didn't happen in under a massive military occupation it's tough to to establish a new democracy and it's going to be just as tough with Constant airstrikes and a no-fly zone well, and you know Libya is a big place and a lot of it's the Sahara Desert and it seems to me that I Don't know man I don't see Qaddafi coming to a table and signing a piece of paper like Milosevic here And you know the way he finally granted autonomy to Kosovo something like that I mean, this is going to be another Iraq style long-term thing here I can just I can't see a way out of it from here Not the way these Democrats have got us in now, and I was wondering if you could update us a little bit Jason on from what you can tell by the news reports here What's going on in Libya how much better the rebels are doing now that the Americans have taken over the air war for them?
Well, they've retaken a couple of very key port cities But it seems like the Qaddafi forces are still stalling their offensive when they get into the western part of the country when they get into the Sort of home territory of the regime it it becomes a lot more difficult going And now what about the factions?
I guess I heard that a couple of You know Qaddafi loyal army types had moved over to the rebels side late last week.
Has there been anything more like that?
I haven't heard anything new on that exactly how many of the Qaddafi military are even still on his side.
I guess we don't really know I know he brought quite a few mercenaries in to fight on his side early on When when the first defections started happening Yeah, I mean it seems like if you got just an army of mercenaries I guess it depends on how much you're paying them, but you know with typical soldiers You inculcate them into God and country and duty and loyalty and all those other ideals too to keep them doing your bidding You know what?
I mean?
Whereas the mercenaries just a mercenary man.
He can get a plane ticket Right and Reports I saw I mean they were never confirmed, but it sounded like he was paying the mercenaries pretty excessively like To the tune of ten thousand dollars to sign up and a thousand dollars a day to fight Well, he certainly got them stolen money to pay him with no doubt about that Yeah, he definitely does how much of it he can access.
I guess we don't know but Apparently he's not too worried about being able to come up with all this money to pay all these mercenaries Yeah, well, you know He's run a pretty tight tortured dictatorship there for a long time a very brutal one And I think yeah, I don't know I wonder what was going on in that conversation before Obama came out and said Qaddafi must go Like he just talked us over with Hillary Clinton and that was it or what?
I don't understand.
It seems like You know, you gotta be able to back up what you say and then now look at us, you know And I'm kind of with Justin Armando who he predicted that Obama's not stupid enough to do it that was bad, but I think he You know along those same lines he's got to kind of think bad of it I mean at the very least this makes him look pretty bad to the American people.
It's not going over very well so far and you know Republicans and Democrats attacking him for doing it without permission from Congress and that kind of thing for his own political fortunes if Only that it seems like he would be a little bit hesitant to get himself involved in something like this.
But I Don't know man, I guess he's got higher obligations than his own re-election Right, and I guess he's spent enough of his first term Spending the Afghanistan war to increasingly fed up American public that what's one more war?
You know, you just have to give a few more speeches Right.
Yeah, you know the New York Times actually has a piece about The American people are so busy that they don't they're not really keeping up with the Libya news It's just you know one too many news stories and they've decided that they don't really want to pay attention Then they have a couple of quotes from some regular Americans saying things like well I don't know too much about it, but that we're on the side of the good guys So I'm proud of that come for that, you know, that's where you get your 47 to 43 percent there But yeah, well, it's just another TV show, right?
Yeah Popular one I mean compared to the heartwarming stories of You know Afghanistan and Iraq Libya Libya is definitely sort of the The lesser story yeah, well it's too ambiguous going in, you know bad guys attacked us You know from Afghanistan sort of kinda and you know Saddam Hussein They called him a Hitler for you know, 15 years leading up to that thing almost, you know what I mean?so, I mean he was a bad guy too, but not a threat obviously, but I Think yeah with this one even with Qaddafi I mean people have paid a Qaddafi for a long time But it's been a long time since he blew up the Pan Am flight and all that, you know, so I don't know All right, but the Qaddafi thing kind of comes out of left field because In the in the 1980s, of course, we remember All sorts of scare stories about him and and what a what a great danger he was But it really sort of stopped around the end of the Reagan administration.
We haven't heard Tremendous amounts out of that area Yeah, except you know selling him weapons.
That's what we call normalizing relations with the country We don't just allow trade.
We our government brokers arms deals with them directly, of course because Directly we still don't sell weapons to Libya, but the British do so Yeah, well, yeah, the Americans helped arrange all that General Dynamics is an American company with a UK branch It's it's as translucent as wax paper.
We can see right through it sort of All right.
So well, let's change gears then a little bit and can you give us a bit of an update on?
The crisis in Bahrain, I know the Saudis and I guess they're saying they're allies to some UAE troops and who knows what have invaded Bahrain cleared Pearl Square last week What's the news since then?
Really the news has gotten amazingly quiet out of Bahrain there's been some Accusations being laid by the Bahraini government saying all these protesters were all secretly in league with Hezbollah Or they were all secretly in league with Iran and things like that, but Really the the news isn't coming out anymore other than the official stories.
We're not seeing Really since since the destruction of the Pearl roundabout monument There hasn't there hasn't been a tremendous amount of news coming out about What protests are still going on what happened to all the people that they detained or anything like that Yeah, well, you know There's that is a Times article.
No, it's a it's a McClatchy piece by Warren strobel Arab Spring drives wedge between US and Saudi Arabia Saying that I guess basically while the the most notable part is that Gates and Clinton both were refused an audience with his highness King Abdullah in the last few weeks and Apparently, they're very upset that the Obama administration has issued the most tepid sort of absolutely mandatory for American politics only sort of criticisms of their action in Bahrain but that they're so determined to thwart the Iranian Conspiracy there or whatever that this is really driving a wedge between the Americans and the Saudis.
I wonder Well, it's hard to say and and even the the stories about a wedge could well be stories designed for American consumption So that we say well, we're not involved in and what's the Saudis are doing in Bahrain, right?
Yeah, they're mad at us for criticizing them Yeah, I mean hell how do we know that he rebuffed their?
Their visits other than some anonymous source told some establishment journalists lackey, you know, I mean secretary gates visited Bahrain right before the invasion started and his post secret talk press conference was about how he thought there should be a dialogue and certainly there's been no dialogue, but Beyond that we don't know what went on behind closed doors or whether the u.s.
Had any inkling that this Officially they say they didn't hear anything about the Saudi invasion and tell the Saudis called them up and said troops are on the way So there they say there was no American consultation, but whether that's true or not, I guess we don't really know Yeah, and you know what actually I was still confused and thinking it was a times or a post piece It was Warren strobel and McClatchy and that guy's a real journalist, but I guess we'll see, you know, I Doesn't see I mean your spins much more likely than his honestly, but it's worthy of note, you know And after all like who's zooming who and in the Saudi American relationship anyway, you know what I mean?
We need them to keep buying our debt and selling their oil and all this maybe Maybe it's kind of a Israel situation where the satellite gets to dictate to the boss, man alright, so I guess Let's talk about Yemen a little bit huge protests there last week over the weekend Some people kill a lot.
Oh, no, go ahead Some people kill a lot on oh go ahead well, the situation in Yemen looks like it's starting to finally come to a head that was one of the first places to Really get the protest going in earnest.
They started about the same time.
They did in Egypt and It's been growing Progressively and they've been some violent crackdowns particularly after the Libya crackdown started we saw President Salih going with more Violent crackdowns particularly in the south but as we've seen in a lot of places of violent crackdowns are just making people angrier and He got to the point where last week he was asking the Saudi government to Do another Bahrain with him and send troops and protect him And was there a response to that?
Yes, there was the Saudi foreign ministry Responded we never liked President Salih in the first place and we don't really care what happens to him.
Oh All right, then well and and now although he's Becoming his rhetoric is becoming all the more aggressive and insisting that he's absolutely going to stay in power through 2013 He's losing control of a lot of the provinces on Well on both ends of the country the separatists in the north the Houthis have taken over the Sada province and the al-jaff provinces apparently fallen in the north as well the Houthis have appointed a new governor in Sada they've taken it over so completely They well, that's the capital city, right?
Is Isn't Sana the capital city?
Oh, I thought that's what you said.
You said Sada.
I'm sorry Yeah, one of them thought and one of them Sana.
I think Sana is the capital and Sada is the northern, right?
Right.
I see.
I'm sorry.
I just misunderstood you but that's Part of the traditional Country of Yemen, I mean Southern Yemen, he's lost control of some of the southern provinces to the separatists down there as well That used to be the old soviet-backed South Yemen But he's also losing Control in the central provinces.
There's been reports of al-qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula even chasing him out of some of the towns In the central provinces, he's losing parts of the north.
He's losing parts of the south.
He's He's had so many defections in the military that he really can't claim control of the capital city anymore So his his insistence that he's going to stay in power is starting to seem very much beside the point What he plans to do it doesn't seem like it's going to have a lot of impact on what actually happens anymore I mean he already had major secessionist movements in the north and the south anyway And then I guess he's had to call his troops Fighting those battles back to the capital to try to protect him and now they can't even do that doesn't sound like well And There have been some really ugly crackdowns on tribal protesters in both the north and the south and in both cases The tribes have jumped ship He's lost the support of a lot of these tribal leaders, and they're now on the side of the protesters although There's also still the separatist movement, so I think We really don't know where Yemen's going to end up is it going to end up with a Sort of Egypt style overthrow is it going to end up with?
Breaking off into several different countries We really don't know but the one thing that I think is probably safe to say is that president's belay the days are very much numbered Yeah, it sure sounds like it and doesn't sound like the country's gonna stay one country after this either All right, well tell me this now Jason See if we can break it up first of all tell me what's going on in Syria This is the this is another country where the Americans would very much like the American government would very much like to see a revolution as opposed to Yemen or Pahrain So first of all tell me what's been going on in Syria a little bit and then get to the the politics of DC Because I know they've been talking about it this week Syria's had some Pretty major protests in the south along the the Jordanian border and There were some violent crackdowns On those protests they started out there were a few hundred people up up to a thousand There was a violent crackdown that killed a few that turned it from about a thousand people to about five thousand people and they killed more people which turned it into about thirty thousand people and Then it's spreading increasingly over the country and now the Assad government is talking about making reforms and ending the emergency law that's been in place for 48 years but they're not really giving a timeline on when they're going to make those reforms or anything and We really don't have any information about What he's planning on doing it seems like that promise of reforms and ending emergency rule is a lot like President Mubarak's offering Egypt shortly before he got ousted Yeah, well and I guess you know his father of course and masquered what tens of thousands of People in a Muslim Brotherhood stronghold when they were rising up, but I guess we don't know whether I mean It doesn't sound like the movement here against him is nearly that marginal And I guess it remains to be seen whether the military is that loyal to him especially in these Circumstances with what's been going on this you know past couple of months right early on it seems like the movement may have been Somewhat marginal we didn't really see the big protests.
We've seen in Libya or Yemen or Bahrain but particularly as the Police and security force reaction turned violent to see a lot more people jumping on the bandwagon and Seeing that there's something very much wrong with how things are going right now and demanding change Well, we saw the last week Robert Gates in Israel came out on the side of the Syrian revolutionaries and I note this piece here at anti-war comm About Joe Lieberman the link is to a Washington Times piece.
He says that Well now that Obama's intervened in Libya the president said let's go to Syria.
He did say that and He wasn't actually the first He wasn't even the first Lieberman to say that because Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said essentially the same thing a few days ago on Friday he said That the u.s.
Should be looking to for a Libya style solution to the Syria protest so There there is there's always been momentum for starting a war with Syria.
And this is one more excuse for it But right now Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says the u.s.
Isn't planning to start that war just yet you know that That what she said, you know, not right now was her answer was not now and her Explanation of why with such a tortured explanation that it's like well you know the Crackdowns were police actions and they they really haven't spawned the same sort of international Condemnation that Libya did and there hasn't been a UN resolution yet.
So so we're not Preparing military action just yet.
It's a very Very interesting to see where they're going from here.
And of course the French president Sarkozy Has been talking up the idea of using the Libya solution basically all over the entire planet Let's start with him man.
That's what I say starting to agree with those right-wing bumper stickers first Iraq then France Alright, well, thanks Jason.
I appreciate it man.
Everybody.
Look at news anti-war calm for the best of Jason Ditz there
