Hi y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
And I think I remembered to mention this one time, but I should mention it all the time.
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99 point something percent of these articles are written by my man, Jason Ditz on the phone live right now.
Welcome back, Jason.
How are you doing?
I'm doing good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
And, uh, boy, I sure do appreciate the work that you do and the articles you write.
And of course, a lot of times I read them out loud to the audience and I can always count on them being funny, assuming I can read through them without tripping all over myself, but that's something else entirely.
Uh, anyway, here's where I want to start is with your piece experts urge us not to reject Iran nuclear deal.
Um, I think, uh, the audience may remember I was mentioning on the show yesterday that Robert Dreyfuss had a piece about this and the diplomat, and I was hoping you could give us a little bit more information about what nuclear deal we're talking about and which experts are attempting to lead credence to this thing.
Well, it goes back to the, uh, basically the same deal that's been on the table for a couple of years now, the, uh, fuel swap deal where Iran would send their 3.5% enriched uranium, some of it anyway, to some third party country, probably Russia or France, and they would make fuel rods that would, uh, power the Tehran research reactor and creating, uh, medical isotopes.
And this is basically so that, uh, the Iranians in effect would be attempting to allay the West's concerns that they're enriching up to 20% themselves by having someone else do it for them and, and limit their uranium enrichment to 3.6%, uh, U-235 for their electricity program.
Is that right?
Right.
They, they would have no reason to enrich to 20% anymore if they could find a decent supply of these fuel rods.
And they've said all along that they would be willing to stop if they can get some sort of deal in place to get the fuel rods.
But the problem of course was when this deal was proposed in 2009, uh, I believe it was in October of 2009, the U.S. endorsed it and everyone else in the P5 plus one endorsed it.
It took the Iranian government a few months of debate to actually get to where they endorsed it.
And by the time they did, the U.S. was angrily condemning the deal.
So it never actually happened.
Yeah.
And it's really too bad too, because it seemed like the, uh, the breakdown was over, you know, they're obviously internal politics on both sides, but really the question, at least on the surface was whether the, uh, Iranians have to export their uranium and wait around for the Russians and the French to finish, uh, you know, increasing the, the purity and forming it into fuel rods to see if they get it back or not, or whether they would go ahead and swap raw uranium for finished fuel rods at the same time, which is obviously the kind of thing that they ought to be able to work out sitting across the table from each other.
You know, that's a, a very reasonable point of disagreement that could be ironed out if, if both sides wanted to.
And I hate to say it, cause I mean, I am from here, but at least according to WikiLeaks, uh, Ahmadinejad was more for this thing than Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
Oh, definitely.
And, and of course the, the Iranian government had a fair concern there of whether or not France would just somewhere along the line decide that, oh, we're keeping all your uranium and not giving you any fuel rods because they've, they've done that before to Iran with a previous nuclear deal.
They've just decided to, uh, keep the material, keep the payment and never, never deliver the goods.
Right.
All right.
Well, so, uh, so far, as you say in your, uh, sub headline here, whatever you call those things, U.S. officials shrug off proposal.
This is not being taken seriously by Washington at all, is what you're saying.
No, on, on Friday, uh, U.S. officials were already with the state department were already saying, oh, this, this is nothing new.
This is just Iran trying to buy for time.
Uh, time for what is never actually stated because Iran's nuclear program doesn't seem to be changing in any serious way, except for them trying to make it more difficult to bomb.
Yeah.
Well, and that was the subject with, uh, Ray McGovern just now in the last interview was whether the Israelis are going to drag us into that, but, uh, well, I don't know.
What do you think you've been reading the Israeli press a lot lately?
I know Mayor Dagan's been saying some things about how concerned he is.
You know, it's so hard to say because this isn't something that's all that new.
It's, uh, Israel's been threatening to attack Iran's nuclear program for the better part of a decade now.
And you can even find references to Israeli threats to that effect in the nineties before Iran really had a serious enrichment program going on.
So it's hard to tell us these are serious threats that Israel's like, well, someday we're going to follow through with this, or if it's just sort of the punctuation that Israeli diplomats put in all their comments about Iran.
Yeah.
Well, you know, unfortunately I imagine that Netanyahu figures that if he won't do it, nobody else will.
He's the toughest guy out of all of them over there and his way of looking at things and that, you know, he's like the Dick Cheney of Israel over there.
He knows what he's got to do and he's willing to withstand whatever consequences to do the right thing.
He thinks so.
I don't know.
I guess we need darts and a board here.
Which American war do you want to talk about next Jason?
We can, we can talk about virtually any of them really.
And there are always more on the horizon.
Well, hit me with the latest from our humanitarian adventure in Libya.
It's humanitarian because Barack Obama's a Democrat.
Right.
And it's an adventure because after Tripoli fell, then tens of thousands of missiles went missing.
Now, now the big concern is there was, of course, human rights watch said, well, all these missiles would be enough to turn all of Northern Africa into a no fly zone if the people that got ahold of them decided they want to.
But the reality is these missiles aren't just going to stay in Northern Africa.
There's already talk that they're going to start trickling into Afghanistan.
These surface to air missiles that the Taliban, that Al Qaeda, that all these groups are trying to acquire these missiles.
And of course, always left unsaid here is that some of these missiles are bound to wander into Europe as well.
And realistically, civilian air travel is going to be enormously more dangerous in the wake of the Libyan war because you never know when someone's going to have one of these shoulder mounted missiles capable of knocking out an airplane.
So do I really have it right that when they say 10,000 missiles may be missing, that's pretty much all referring to shoulder fired surface to air missiles?
Well, the shoulder fired surface to air missiles is about 6,000 of them, according to the Libyan rebels, but exactly how many isn't entirely clear.
They say that of the 20,000 or so shoulder mounted missiles, they can account for about 14,000 of them having been fired.
Well, my secret Pentagon sources say they're thrilled because this means decades of more war.
Okay, no, I don't really have sources for that.
But I know that they're thrilled.
This is just great, right?
However many civilian planes get shot down, that's like a war per plane that gets shot down.
Right.
And so long as each plane gets blamed on a different country, it's basically a different group of rebels inside an Allied dictatorship's country.
Oh, man.
Well, and now, sorry, but I'm just reminded of your piece from your book, which is called The War of the World.
I'm reminded of your piece from yesterday about the all the threats from the military that if their budgets cut at all, they're going to have to conscript us.
Yeah, it's bound to happen later.
Well, again, as long as it's the Democrats doing it, it'll be humanitarian conscription.
Actually, I think the 1960s, though, because it seems like there's very little that's as as unpopular as a draft.
Yeah, I hope that's still true.
Hold it right there, Jason.
We'll be right back.
Jason Ditz, News.
Antiwar.com, y'all.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and I'm talking with Jason Ditz, our news editor at Antiwar.com.
That's News.
Antiwar.com.
And now, Jason, let's stick with the Libya topic here for a little while.
How goes the war?
There's still one or two cities full of, what, Qaddafi forces that are yet to surrender to the rebels?
Right.
One or two cities in the north and then a large number of heaven only knows how many villages and towns in the southern half of the country as well.
Well, and by I guess I kind of wonder about the tactics of the rebels.
Are they just saying, well, you know, whoever's locally in charge there, you just don't work for Qaddafi anymore.
Regime change at the top or they mean to uproot every last person who used to be in the government when Qaddafi was in power, even, you know, down on the local sheriff type level or what?
You know, it's not clear because on the one hand, they seem to be recruiting a lot of supposed defectors.
And on the other hand, they're arresting people that were suspected of even attending pro-Qaddafi rallies during the Civil War.
So exactly what their ultimate goal is and where they stand isn't all that clear.
Yeah.
I mean, well, the whole scene is chaotic, but so what about the different factions aside from the last dead enders for Qaddafi, wherever he is still, you know, at the beginning of October, they haven't caught him yet.
Aside from his dead enders, among the rebels who are attempting to create this new government here, how's that going?
Is there enough tolerance for the different points of view that you think they might actually be able to create some sort of parliamentary-ish sort of system or something?
They might be able to create it, but I don't think it's going to last very long because it seems like we've got the two major factions, which are a group of high ranking defectors from Qaddafi and a group of Islamists who've been fighting the regime since the 80s, and they're both convinced that they should be in charge of this revolution.
And they're pretty much split down the middle.
So it seems both sides are already arming up and it seems like this is just going to eventually become a civil war.
And even within those factions, of course, since all politics in Libya is extremely local, you have various municipalities lining up against one another saying, oh, Qaddafi favored your town all these years and now it's our town's turn to get favorable treatment.
So it's likely that there are going to be a lot of smaller clashes, and we've already seen some in the far northwest of the country where a pair of tribes in a pair of neighboring villages that were both on the side of the rebels just started fighting out of the blue, saying that they were sick of each other.
Well, it's already clear in it that it doesn't matter at all whether the people of Libya, so-called en masse, want any of these factions to have power.
It's just a question of who's organized and who gets their hands on the loot and the firepower first.
Right.
And there's a mention of free elections, of course, happening eventually, but how long eventually is never really said.
They're saying that once they conquer Sirte, they're going to form some sort of interim government that's going to pave the way for elections.
But it seems like that interim government is likely to remain in power, at least nominally, for a long time, since they're never really going to have the country under control.
There's always going to be enough internal faction fighting that new civil wars are going to be breaking out all the time.
Yeah, but one thing is for sure is that this nightmare is only just beginning.
And who are they going to send in?
The French Foreign Legion are going to pacify the place.
Someone is going to have to pacify Libya.
They're not just going to let it remain chaotic the whole time.
From now on, or at least they're going to try, they'll probably make it more chaotic by trying to tamp it down.
But that's a different thing.
Right.
They need they need to at least pacify the few cities that are involved in the oil industry.
Everything else they could probably care less about.
Well, they're going to have to at some point.
I mean, I'm not trying to encourage them or anything, but just guessing they're going to have to say, OK, well, these people who are avowed veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars fighting on the sides against the Americans, we can't have them in power here.
So we're going to have to intervene to make sure they lose.
If we if that means, you know, retaining as much of the old Qaddafi regime as they possibly can, except for him and his sons, then that's what they'll have to do.
Am I right?
No, right.
And it's it seems like they're already heading that way because the Obama administration last week revealed that they're starting to look into the backstories of some of these Islamists.
Yeah, they're starting to.
Right.
You'd think they would have started to do that back in May or even before that.
But back before the bombs started falling.
But apparently they waited until the Qaddafi part of the civil war was over.
And now they're saying, OK, let's see who we were backing.
Well, you know, I'm not really known for thinking what everybody else thinks in America very well.
And I kind of don't really have a good frame of reference necessarily for what they think.
I mean, I know we're all told to think by TV, but is it your impression that people in general are just pretending this war isn't going on?
They're just trying to wish this thing away.
Oh, definitely.
And unless you're really looking for it, you're not going to see coverage of the Libyan war.
It's much like the Iraq war.
It's something that it might hit the third or fourth page of a newspaper if something happened that day.
But largely it's going to go uncovered.
All right.
Now, I guess without getting too bogged down in the details of the war, can you tell us real quick about the contrast between the polls and the general's proclamations about our war in AFPAC, as they call it now?
Sure.
The CBS News issued a poll yesterday showing that roughly two thirds of Americans are opposed to the war in Afghanistan and roughly three quarters of Americans are ruling out the idea of the war continuing more than two years.
At the same time, and interestingly enough, on the same channel, the new U.S. commander in Afghanistan, General Allen, appeared on 60 Minutes and said, oh, this this 2014 date that the that NATO was floating around and at the Lisbon conference, that was just, I don't know what it was, just some sort of marketing tool or something.
It doesn't mean anything.
We're going to be in Afghanistan a lot longer than that.
Yeah.
Remember in 2009, when Barack Obama gave that speech and said that the beginning of the end of the war was going to be this July.
I wonder if anybody thought that that was right.
It seems like they did, because if you look at the polls around that time when he announced it, there was a very short spike in support of the president's handling of the war.
So it seems like people were pacified of the idea that, OK, the war is about to end here.
And as soon as they figured out it wasn't going to, then they got mad about it again.
Yeah.
Well, thank goodness for that.
All right.
Well, we're all out of time.
And thank you very much again for your time, Jason, on the show.
Appreciate it.
Sure.
Thanks for having me.
News.antiwar.com, y'all.
