All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our first guest on the show today is Jason Ditz.
He is the news editor of AntiWar.com.
That's news dot AntiWar.com.
Welcome back, Jason.
How are you doing, man?
I'm doing good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing all right.
Appreciate you joining us today.
So I've kind of been busy and haven't been able to do too much reading.
I've at least been trying to scan the headlines as much as I can, but I was wondering if you could help catch me up on what's going on in America's various wars and if it's okay, can we start with Somalia because this is the one that nobody cares about except I think you and me and Chris Floyd and Jeremy Scahill and Jesse Walker did a good thing at Reason one time.
Hardly anyone else in the world cares about America's war in Somalia except when, you know, maybe a pirate makes the headlines once in a while or something like that.
So since it's so neglected, I thought maybe we could start with that.
Sure.
So what's the deal?
Good guys winning?
Well, to hear them talk, they always are.
It's a war that's still expanding, of course.
The African Union's added a lot of troops in the last few months with designs on expanding outside the capital city.
They seem to think that this influx of a few extra troops from countries like Djibouti is going to allow them to push into the key central towns, which seems like it ignores the fact that they've never been able to successfully hold any of this territory and that the only reason they've really been able to take Mogadishu is because the Al-Shabaab faction basically abandoned it during the famine.
Well now, so I guess to catch us up a little bit here or to back up just a little bit here, the Ugandans, and I'm not sure who else, have been part of this so-called African Union force in the country since right around the time the Ethiopians left back in, what, 2006, right?
Right, and Burundi is another one, and they're actually an interesting case as far as a country that's involved in this war, because they're basically in it for the money.
And that sounds ridiculous to say, but Burundi's a dirt-poor country in Africa.
The per capita GDP is like $15 a month.
And the African Union pays these soldiers that are sent to Somalia, and the soldiers are taxed by the government at a fairly substantial rate, to the point where taxes on the soldiers who are helping occupy Mogadishu is a significant portion of the Burundi's national budget.
Well, and who's paying the African Union?
Is that American tax money there?
Largely, yes, but there's also money from some of the richer nations in the African Union, South Africa and the like.
It sounds ridiculous, and it sounds like it couldn't possibly be true, but literally, over 10% of Burundi's government's revenue in a given year is taxes on the troops that are occupying Mogadishu.
Amazing.
Alright, and then, so last fall, you might have to get the date straight for me, the Ethiopian, well, first the Kenyans invaded, and then the Ethiopians re-invaded, anybody else I'm missing now?
Well, Djibouti sent some troops to the African Union's force, but they were sort of later.
I think that's everybody that was significant, although the U.S. has, of course, meddled quite a bit with a lot of additional airstrikes.
Oh, meddled, I'm sorry, I missed you.
The French Navy has also, they've always got French warships parked off the coast.
Well, and now, so what's all this about Navy SEALs and special forces and kidnappings and shootings, and I missed it, I don't even know.
Well, this seems like a, it was presented as a sort of feel-good story, and what's right with the U.S. military story, but it really seems like it was, a completely unnecessary overreach.
The Navy SEALs, who were from the same SEAL team that assassinated bin Laden, invaded Central Somalia, and it was over these two people that were kidnapped, two aid workers, one of them was an American citizen, the other, I think, was an Ethiopian, and they killed nine of the kidnappers and rescued these people, but if you think about it, since then, of course, President Obama condemned the kidnappers and said they were, you know, terrorists and pirates, but since then, we've found out, there's been a lot of, you know, terrorists and pirates, but since then, we've found out, there really wasn't any indication that these kidnappers were anything to do with any militant group in the country or any pirate group in the country, so it seems like there were just kidnappers in it for the money, and it sounds like the expense of sending, you know, parachuting in a Navy SEAL team to kill a bunch of them was quite expensive, and fortunately, it didn't get the hostages killed, but it certainly may well have, and it seems like it would have been much cheaper to just pay the ransom.
That's funny, I wonder if it was Obama's campaign staff that came up with this mission, or what?
He used this as a talking point in the State of the Union speech?
Come on, guys.
Did you ever see that HBO movie, the Second American Civil War, where they have Martin Short, who is like the chief of staff, political advisor guy, and he causes a civil war just with his, like, Karl Rovian, how's this going to look on TV, if you say this or that sort of angle, and the whole country ends up coming apart?
That's a funny one.
Alright, well, we're spending way too much time on this war, if we're going to cover all the wars, well, even half of them.
Take me to Libya, tell us about the great success of the Democrat way of war in Libya.
Well, Libya is much as Libya has been for the last several months, since the ouster of Gaddafi, which is basically a country with no central authority anymore.
The US-backed NTC doesn't seem to have a good grasp on anything, they don't even seem to have control of Benghazi anymore, because we've seen massive protests against them in Benghazi, for most of the same reasons they were protesting against the Gaddafi regime, that there's no transparency, there's a lot of corruption going on, the economy is continuing to get worse, and fighting is just constantly breaking out between rival militias, rival tribes, and neighboring cities.
It's really shaping up to be much the disaster we thought it would be.
Oh man, well, is there any evidence that anyone on the National Transitional Council, or whatever kind of thing, or even the leadership of any of these militias, really have any kind of wise view about, like, hey, okay guys, we're going to have to try to figure out a way to get along, or else we're just going to descend into horrible fighting forever, and nobody really wants a bunch of killing around them all the time.
I mean, if they think they can really achieve an objective in the short term, maybe, but...
Is there any evidence that high-minded anything could possibly prevail in Libya, short of complete catastrophe, Jason?
Not really.
It seems like, if anything, most of the leadership is just throwing out threats to the smaller militias, saying you better get in line, or we're going to crush you.
All right, hold it right there.
We'll be right back with Jason Ditz, everybody, right after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm talking with Jason Ditz.
He's our news editor at antiwar.com.
That's news.antiwar.com, where he writes on everything.
And where we left off was Libya.
Let's stay in Libya.
What's the news I'm reading about?
How many different armed factions?
Is there any kind of ballpark, major and minor?
I wouldn't even hazard a guess of how many.
It's an enormous number.
Hundreds or thousands?
I would say probably yes.
Man, and so, how many people have been proved to have been tortured to death over there?
Do you know?
Well, we don't know, because a lot of these people just, they're disappeared off the streets by a militia, particularly in cities like Misrata.
The people that are suspected Gaddafi sympathizers will just disappear off the streets.
And then they'll turn up six months later, just their bodies laying in a cemetery somewhere.
Quite often we've seen what they're calling pro-Gaddafi cemeteries will just, in the morning, find a whole bunch of bodies left there.
And it's presumably by these various militia factions that have been mass detaining people.
And a lot of the bodies show signs of either being summarily executed, shot in the face, or tortured.
Amazing.
Now, what's the news about, what's it, Hakeem al-Belhaj?
How's he doing, the former military commander?
Well, we haven't heard much out of him lately.
The last thing we really heard about him was that he's planning to sue the British government for its role in the CIA's torture of him.
Right, that was the last thing I heard, too.
There really hasn't been anything about him personally since then.
Yeah.
Now, when all these reports, I mean, because some of these are coming out in pretty major papers or whatever, where they're saying, you know, BBC reports or Guardian reports, whatever.
I guess BBC's more of a channel and a website than a paper.
But anyway, when these stories come out, do the NATO politicians have a thing to say about this?
The British, the French, the Americans?
Not our fault.
At least that or anything else.
Do they have anything to say?
So far, it doesn't seem like they're saying anything at all.
The only time they say anything is when we get a report about NATO specifically having killed large numbers of people during the bombing campaign.
And then it's that they're outraged and that this is all a plot to distract attention from Syria or Iran or somebody.
Hmm.
Tell us a bit more about that, the estimates of the dead from the air war.
Well, we've seen several different estimates, and NATO's official estimate is zero, that nobody was killed in all of the bombings.
Nobody's civilian anyway.
Whatever happened to the modified limited hangout?
Zero?
Come on.
Yeah, literally zero.
No one was killed.
Every target they hit was a military target.
And we've seen some...
First we saw the New York Times looking into it, and just in a very cursory examination of a couple of cities that were heavy bombing targets, they were able to confirm dozens of people that were obviously just civilians killed by NATO airstrikes.
Then we saw some human rights groups from the Muslim world doing a somewhat more official study, and they said that the low number was in the 60 to 80 range of civilians killed.
They also faulted NATO for calling things like schools and hospitals military targets.
All right, well, so, did the oil companies get their oil?
Is everything secure where it counts for them?
Oh, yeah.
That's the happy news out of Libya.
Everything's up and running.
It is.
ANI, which is the massive Italian oil company/media conglomerate/everything else in Italy, has said that their oil production in Libya is almost pre-war levels now.
They're within about 5% of where they were before the whole uprising started.
Well, I wonder, I guess it doesn't matter in the end, really, or maybe it does matter more.
I don't know who gets to choose.
But I wonder whether there will be such a thing as Libya anymore after this, or if they're just going to split it off in the middle of the desert.
Well, that's a good question.
And it seems like the real interest in keeping it Libya as such is from the oil companies, because a lot of the oil that they're actually extracting is coming out of just the middle of nowhere and being piped into these cities.
It's being piped from places that are nowhere near where anybody lives in the middle of the desert.
And it seems like if these cities were all just independent little city-states and that territory was all a no-man's land, that there would be a lot more competition for these resources.
Well, what about all that water, too?
Didn't Gaddafi build some giant water pipeline thing across the Sahara Desert and all that?
That I'm not sure about.
Yeah, I need to learn more about it.
I've read about it worked, and then I've also read what a giant boondoggle it was, too.
I don't know.
I'd have to go check.
I'm not sure who owns the rights to any of that stuff.
I know the oil is overwhelmingly European oil companies, and Annie is by far the largest of them.
So, I guess, so far, my worst-case scenario, we talked about Libya for the last year straight, of course, during all this, and both of us predicted it would be at least as chaotic as it is.
But then, I guess, the question is whether there's going to be further American intervention, like, you know, go in there, like I was predicting, going in there and building them up an army, Iraq-war style, occupying the place, and creating a new nation-state there, and all that Hillary Clinton-esque type nation-building sort of thing.
But I guess the alternative to that is just ignore all the violence.
We're in the middle of nowhere.
Anyway, it's not too hard to defend for the oil companies and just whatever small forces are required there, and then they're going to let the rest of the country go to hell, and who cares, at least, you know, in American media.
I don't know about European media, but that seems to be the strategy so far, and I guess I prefer that to a full-blown occupation, if those are our only choices.
Well, it does seem to be the strategy so far, and it probably will be the strategy until something happens to threaten the status quo.
And, of course, the status quo isn't anywhere near sustainable in Libya, so sooner or later, something's going to happen above and beyond the fighting we're already seeing, and I think, yeah, probably we'll still see NATO intervening, and it'll probably be much the same excuse as why U.S. troops stayed in Iraq for so long.
It'll be a we-broke-it-we-bought-it situation.
Yep.
That's what I'm thinking.
That's what I've been saying for a year, and I think I'm sticking with that.
Sooner or later, something's going to happen.
A couple of big truck bombings, or whatever it is, just the wrong target hit, and we're going to have the Marines and the Army in there.
Well, if you blow up the wrong pipeline or something that belongs to the wrong company, I'm sure you'll start seeing a lot of news pouring into Europe about how, particularly with this new Iran oil embargo, because a lot of the Mediterranean countries in Europe were getting their oil from Iran and are now going to be getting their oil even more so from Libya going forward.
So it's going to be all the more vital for them to keep that flow going.
Mm-hmm.
All right, now, can you stay one more segment with us and then we'll wrap up.
Okay, good, because I do want to ask you all about the latest news about Iran and the embargo, this way and that, going on there, but I wanted to point to this story at news.antiwar.com.
UN says Libya arms could reach al-Qaeda and Boko Haram, large quantities of weapons smuggled out of Libya.
So this Boko Haram thing, they've got it in their head that this is the next place or one of the next places that America has to send forces.
Am I right?
Definitely, and again, it's not too hard to see why.
Nigeria is one of the top five or six suppliers of crude oil to the United States, and Boko Haram is an increasingly violent outlet there.
Yeah.
It seems like, it still seems like an excuse because it's not like their central government there couldn't defeat them if they were trying to.
Anyway, hold it right there.
We'll be right back with Jason Ditz more about imperialism after this.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to The Thing here on Sansat War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and I'm talking with Jason Ditz, news editor at Antiwar.com.
That's news.antiwar.com and at least the last time I hit refresh, the top headlines at Antiwar.com were Israeli foreign minister seeks naval aerial blockade of Iran.
Iran set to turn off oil supply to Europe and the Iranian oil embargo.
Does this mean war?
Catch us up.
Actually, why don't you answer that last question first, please?
Well, hopefully it doesn't mean war, but it's the Israeli finance minister, too, not the foreign minister.
I know it just says FM up there.
Oh, I see.
Well, still, no?
Well, maybe not still.
Who's this guy?
Does anybody care if he says that?
This guy's a Likud member, so he might actually be a worse one to have say it than Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister, because Lieberman sort of, particularly when he talks foreign policy, is sort of treated as an afterthought by the Netanyahu government.
They've been basically running a separate foreign ministry out of the prime minister's office because he's been such a joke as a foreign minister and has caused so many problems.
But this fellow is the actual Likud member and seems to be a little more in line with the mainstream of the current coalition government.
And now, so, the European Union has decided, this week they decided, to go ahead and adopt the American-style crippling sanctions on Iranian oil?
Right.
And it's going to be sort of a slow process because, as I mentioned earlier, so much of Southern Europe's oil comes from Iran.
But within another six months, they expect to have it completely, completely zeroed out the imports from Iran.
Well, I mean, I wonder if that matters in the sense that China still exists and oil is a liquid.
They can sell it this direction or that one, especially with around planet Earth or whatever, they can even sell it one direction and have it end up the other direction, you know?
Oh, absolutely.
So, so who cares?
You know what I mean?
Or is it that there's some kind of political leverage on China where they won't take up the slack of everyone else's boycott?
Well, that seems to be what they're betting on, but I'm not sure that it's the case.
I mean, look at Iraq in the 1990s.
They had nobody to trade with.
You know, they had the embargo on Cuba where they could still trade with the Soviet Union the whole time or whatever.
They basically completely isolated Iraq from the whole world.
China and Russia had gone along on the Security Council in the first place, you know?
But not here.
Right.
I don't see that sort of thing happening here because, like you say, you've got China, you've also got India, which is continuing to buy quite a bit of oil from Iran.
In fact, there's been a report that's sort of been a little bit off the radar for a lot of people, but there's a recent report that India and the Iranian government came to an agreement so that they wouldn't have to deal with the current U.S. bank embargo on Iran.
They would stop trading the oil and U.S. dollars would start trading it in gold directly.
And, you know, Pepe Escobar was on the show a week ago or so, and he said that Japan and South Korea were saying, hey, can we be exempt from these sanctions, please?
Because we need Iranian oil, we buy it from them, and it's going to be too big of a pain to transition away and whatever, like that.
So they're really not very isolated at all, are they?
Right, and historically the Obama administration and the Bush administration have been more than willing to grant these exemptions to the sort of Eastern Asian major trading partners.
And that's been a big complaint by a lot of hawks, but it's also something that always seems to find its way to the bill that the president can give these exemptions.
Well, now, have the American sanctions on Iran's central bank, it has dealt them quite a blow to their currency, am I right?
Oh, absolutely.
We've seen a couple of times now, some of the sanctions a couple of times now, so far, just in the past month, the Iranian rial has lost in the ballpark of 10% of its value in a single day.
So, they're going through some pretty serious inflation right now, and, of course, that hurts the average Iranian a lot more than it hurts the central government.
Well, you know, it's all the same.
Iran is ready for some more nuclear talks.
Does that mean they're crying uncle, or is he just saying, that's what I've been saying all along, or what's that?
Well, this is sort of an odd story, because the European Union, I guess she's not really a foreign minister, but she's basically the foreign minister, Catherine Ashton, has been saying, we're just waiting for the Iranians to say that they'll be willing.
And the Iranians continue to put out there these speeches and these stories saying, we've been ready all along.
In fact, about a week before Ashton's last speech, Iran said, we're just waiting for the European Union to give us the date and the location, and we'll be there.
I mean, there's been some talk that Istanbul would be the location, but there's been nothing set in stone.
Well, you know, I guess it's been too long since I asked anybody this question, and I don't know if you know an answer to it, but is there any clue as to why the Europeans are going along with this nonsense?
Well, I mean, I think the first word was probably years ago and said that, well, they're trying to stave off war by trying to get in between America and Iran, but that ends up meaning conceding and doing the American thing on a lot of issues, but still trying to stave off war by imposing more and more sanctions until Iran just eventually gives up.
But, of course, Iran isn't going to give up, and there's nothing really for them to give up here.
The demands that they stopped their entire civilian nuclear program simply aren't going to happen.
They never were, and I don't think even the U.S. State Department thinks that these sanctions are going to have some sort of happy ending.
So, exactly what the purpose of them is, I think, is unclear entirely, except to show that they're doing something on Iran.
Well, that's the key right there.
That's John Glazer's blog entry at antiwar.com where he says something about something, like, yes, Prime Minister, when really, like you say, there's no rational goal here, but people will still have to suffer for civilians.
Right.
There's no possibility of, and French officials have said that not that long ago, that there's no possibility of a deal here.
In the French opinion, which I hope he's right about that, and he also says they're not willing to give any concessions at all to Iran over the program.
So, they're just sort of stuck in this middle ground where they're constantly making threats and constantly imposing new sanctions, but it seems like that's only adding to the hostility.
It's so funny.
It's not that I ever bought into the rhetoric that things were going to be different under this president.
You know, he came in putting out that YouTube, all due respect to the Islamic Republic of Iran and all the people, let's negotiate and whatever, and then, as the Quaker lobbies pointing out, they give it 45 minutes of actual talks between the Americans and the Iranians this whole time.
That's it.
Brown rice All right.
Thanks, Jason.
Sure.
Thanks for having me.
The great Jason Ditz, everybody.
News.
Dot.
Anti-war.
Dot.
Com.
