All right, welcome back to Antiwar Radio.
I'm your guest host, Zoe Greif, and I am very happy to inform you that I've got Jason Ditz on the line.
Jason is editor at Antiwar Radio.
I'm not sure if it's a senior editor or whatever, but he's top-ranking, and he's one of the many people, or not so many people actually, who's directly responsible for the quality of Antiwar.com, and I am so glad that you are.
Welcome to the show, Jason.
Hi, how are you doing?
I'm doing pretty good today, doing my best to bring the world all the bad news.
Speaking of which, I'm looking at Antiwar.com news, top of the page, and there is so much bad news, I don't know if we can even cover it in two segments, Jason.
Where do you want to start, with Netanyahu considers ground invasion of Gaza?
Sure.
What kind of madness is that?
That reminds me of Operation Cast Lead back in 2009.
Was it Cast Lead or Cast Lead?
Does anyone know?
I think it was Cast Lead.
As in bullets being cast into the bodies of Palestinians?
Yeah.
Wow.
Well, so is he just talking, or, I mean, rockets have been firing back and forth, have they not?
Oh, absolutely.
The last four days, we've seen dozens of rockets coming out of the Gaza Strip.
They've wounded a few people in Israel.
Israel's responded with airstrikes that have killed some 25 or 26 Palestinians.
Mostly militants, but of course, inevitably several civilians, too.
And this talk of a ground invasion actually has been going on for a while, although this is the first Netanyahu's spoken of it.
The IDF chief, Benny Gantz, has been advocating an Operation Cast Lead-style invasion for the last six months or so, saying that that one worked so well and that that one worked so well and was such a great deterrent that they ought to just have another one.
Well, refresh my memory, Jason, because 2009 seems like a long time ago to me.
But I remember that it was, what, like well over a thousand people were killed.
And what was accomplished?
What was the point of Operation Cast Lead?
Did it even have one?
It was much like this situation.
It was just some exchanges of rocket fire and airstrikes that eventually spiraled into a full-scale ground invasion.
And there was never really a stated goal.
There was some talk of regime change for a while, but of course, that was abandoned pretty quickly.
When the war started, they bombed all the police stations.
So I guess destroying all the police stations must have been a goal.
And the end of the war didn't really seem to accomplish much of anything except leaving much of the Gaza Strip blown up and then several years of fighting diplomatically to try to keep cement out so they couldn't rebuild anything.
Yeah, and that reminds me of the Turkish flotilla and all the efforts.
Wow, I don't want to get distracted talking about that, but not right now.
But does anyone know what incited this most recent round of rocket exchanges that you say started three or four days ago?
Well, the first thing was a targeted assassination by Israel.
They assassinated a member of the PRC, which was the group that was responsible for kidnapping Jilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier that they did the huge prisoner exchange over late last year.
Yes.
They assassinated the leader of that group, or one of the leaders of that group.
The group responded with a couple of rockets fired into Israel.
They blew up a whole bunch more targets in Gaza, and it's just sort of snowballed from there.
And now you've got a few other groups from Gaza firing back.
So far, it doesn't seem like Hamas is among them.
It's mostly smaller groups.
Well, in media coverage, I've noticed that in the West, they like to pretend like the rockets coming out of Gaza are just as bad and just as destructive and just as accurate as the Israeli ones.
But of course, that's not even close to true, is it, Jason Ditz?
No, it's remarkable how ineffective these rockets are.
We've seen dozens and dozens of rockets fired out of the Gaza Strip, and we've got a couple of actual injuries in Israel that resulted directly from the rockets and a handful of other people that are in shock from having seen a rocket explode nearby.
But it's incredible when you look at, say, a satellite map of southern Israel, how many times these rockets just happen to hit empty fields and do no damage at all.
Every once in a while, one of them will hit someone's roof and leave a burn mark or something.
But these are really very primitive rockets for the most part.
Compared to what the Israelis have, which are highly targeted, ballistic.
You tell me, what kind of firepower are the Israelis packing?
They're packing mostly US-provided surface-to-air and, well, in this case, air-to-surface missiles.
This is perhaps not the cream of the crop of the Israeli Air Force, because, of course, it doesn't need to be when you're just blowing up people that happen to be wandering around in a burnt-out husk of a city like Gaza City.
But these are relatively high-tech weapons, probably the equivalent of what the United States was making in the 1980s.
Wow.
But it sure is superior to whatever the Palestinians have.
That was kind of the point I was trying to emphasize.
Oh, dramatically so.
Yeah, because Palestinians die, and like you're saying, Israelis...
I'm sure it's no fun to have rockets thrown around, but it sounds a little bit more like bottle rockets compared to what the Israelis are packing.
Right.
And there have been occasions where people have gotten killed by these rockets.
And if you happen to be outside and happen to get hit with one, certainly it'd be a pretty dangerous thing.
But they do seem to be just a stepped-up version of fireworks, and they don't seem, for the most part, very well-targeted.
They just sort of randomly lob them in and hope they hit something.
And like I say, a lot of it is just, you know, they'll hit a farmer's field, and every once in a while they'll clip a cow with one, but it's not really a targeted campaign of terror against the entire south of Israel, like it's being portrayed in Israeli media.
It seems almost like a defiant, yet largely empty, gesture.
But how else are they going to resist over there?
I mean, they're stuck with their backs to the Mediterranean Sea, right, pretty much?
And these militant factions, they're so ineffective, but this is one of the few things that gets them any sort of domestic support at all inside the Gaza Strip, is that they're retaliating, even if the retaliation is, for the most part, counterproductive and largely meaningless in a practical way.
It's apparently fairly popular among their supporters, the people that would theoretically fund their groups.
Well, before the break interrupts us, I want to run by a quote that you quote in your news article on antiwar.com about this.
Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said, because of the rockets, the Palestinians, quote, have condemned themselves to a separation that looks like it will continue for generations, he said.
Now, that strikes me as incredibly arrogant and just really unpleasant.
What do you think about that quote and all that it implies, Jason?
It's vintage Avigdor Lieberman.
He's nothing if not unpleasant.
And he's always been opposed to the idea of Palestinian statehood in any real way.
So it's not surprising to see him sort of using this as the latest excuse of why it's not going to happen.
Yeah, it seems like any excuse is a good enough excuse, certainly as far as the Western media is concerned, as we were discussing with Mr. Hart earlier on the show.
Man, so they're actually talking about possibly invading Gaza.
Do you think they're serious?
Or do you think it's just bluster?
Does anyone have any way to know?
It's not clear.
I tend to think with the apparent attack on Iran, at least put off for a few months, they might say, well, we've got a few months to kill.
Let's invade Gaza just to pass the time.
It seems like Israel does like to have a late spring, early summer war.
So that might be what this turns out being.
More with Jason on the other side, Antiwar Radio.
All right, welcome back to Antiwar Radio.
I'm your guest host, Zoe Greif, talking with Jason Ditz, editor at Antiwar.com.
And we were just discussing Netanyahu barking about launching another ground invasion of Gaza.
What sounds to me like a repeat of that sanguinary spectacle from 2009, otherwise known as Operation Cast Lead.
And we just agreed that we both hope cooler heads prevail and that that doesn't happen.
So what else is important in the news right now, Jason?
What else do you want to talk about?
There's Syria to talk about.
There's Yemen.
There's Iraq.
People are still dying.
What do you think is most important?
Well, I think Yemen's an interesting topic.
I see a headline here, U.S. drone strikes killed at least 64.
I got a question for you, Jason.
Can you clear up my confusion about does Yemen actually have any drones to pretend like they were killing their own people with or was that just a ridiculous farce?
No, they don't have any drones of their own.
There was some initial reports that it was airstrikes carried out by Yemeni warplanes, which I guess is theoretically possible because we've seen in the past that they've launched airstrikes, particularly in their disastrous war in the north along the Saudi border.
They launched several airstrikes and accidentally hit one of their own field hospitals.
So they have the capability, but no drones as such.
Your article is subheadlined.
Yemen says no advanced notice of attacks.
I thought that the CIA or the JSOC or whoever it is who runs the drone program was working with the Yemeni government to kill Yemeni people.
Is that not so?
That's certainly been the case traditionally, but it seems like these last ones, at least according to the Yemeni officials quoted who aren't named, there was no advanced notice given and it doesn't seem like they even...
It's not really clear if they were given any notice after the fact that it was U.S. strikes, except that they went and found out they didn't do it and just figured it was U.S. drones.
But since the quote-unquote election of the new Yemeni president, I would have expected to see even closer cooperation since he was sort of the Obama administration's hand-picked successor for President Saleh.
It doesn't seem like that's the case.
Well, it's my impression, Jason, that the central government in Sana'a is weak to say the least.
They don't have full control over their territory.
Are there multiple rebellions going on in Yemen right now?
Can you educate me about that?
There are at least three major rebellions going on and arguably four in different parts of the country.
This particular one that the U.S. drones are involved in is in the southern part of the country, the Beda and Abyan provinces, where a group calling itself Ansar al-Sharia has taken over virtually the whole Abyan province and several parts of the Beda province.
And supposedly they're linked with al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, but the exact way they're linked isn't clear at all.
They're certainly sympathetic groups and they tend to support each other, but whether they have any direct links or not I think still is unclear.
Well, I just don't know very much about Yemen or Yemeni culture or the different tribes or how they interact or their histories with each other.
And I'll bet you that whoever's running the drone strike program doesn't know much more than me either.
What do they think they're doing?
Don't they know this is just a hornet's nest, so to speak?
It's not a central government.
It's just a desert, you know, with imaginary lines for national boundaries.
What do they think they're doing, Jason Ditz?
I just don't understand the motive of these strikes.
I guess they say they're targeting militants, but what does that mean?
Well, that's a tough question.
What counts as a militant in Yemen?
Certainly...
Anyone with a rifle?
Who has brown skin?
I don't know.
In Yemen, they've got a rifle outside of the major cities.
Other than a few major cities, almost everyone is just living in some tribal group in the desert somewhere.
And there are a lot of nomads and people like that.
And certainly, some of them have ties to al-Qaeda, but more often than not, I think you'd be hard-pressed to have these people even know what al-Qaeda is.
Yeah, and even if there was a big, fat, hairy hub of al-Qaeda in Yemen, which it doesn't sound like there is, whatever al-Qaeda is purported to be, what are they going to do with the United States?
They're stuck over there in Yemen.
Well, right.
And these tribes certainly get quite angry when there's a drone strike that kills some members of their tribe.
But other than that, they could probably care less about the United States.
Sure, they've got their animals to herd and their life to live.
They don't care what's going on in the United States.
And I don't blame them.
Why should they?
Well, it's largely the same as Pakistan's tribal areas, which are also a popular place for drone strikes.
It seems like the drone campaigns work almost exclusively in areas where there's no real centralized authority, and the people are living very sort of nomadic, agrarian sort of life.
Which suggests, again, not a threat to infiltrate the United States and hurt anyone somehow, right?
That just seems ludicrous.
Right.
And if anything, having suddenly constant drones overhead and missile fire is going to convince the more militant among them to try to find some way to strike back.
I sure would want to if I was Yemeni and my loved ones got blown up by invisible drones in the sky.
That just strikes me as so cowardly.
And again, I don't know too much about Arab, you know, culture or, you know, values.
But I seem to think that cowardice is really considered pretty shameful and odious to that culture.
And how cowardly are the Americans acting by killing them with robots from the sky?
It just seems really cowardly to me is what I'm saying.
I guess that's not a question.
It's a disastrous thing to keep launching these drone strikes.
And it seems like that's basically what the CIA has become, is an overwhelming portion of the CIA's employees now are actually employees that just work as targeters or in some support role for drone strike.
Wow.
That's one job I would never take.
And I mean, I like to play video games, but this is not a video game.
These are real people.
It's just disgust-a-pating to me.
That's what I think.
And there was an article a few months back about that.
Pilots for these drones, I guess you'd call them pilots, the people that handle the joystick and the couple of buttons, how many of them are starting to come down with the same sort of psychological problems that people that are in direct combat are coming down with.
Isn't that fascinating that you can get PTSD from thousands of miles away?
Killing people is the same thing.
It is the same thing.
Isn't that fascinating that you can get PTSD from thousands of miles away?
Killing people is the same thing.
Even trying to sanitize war by putting it on the other side of a planet and having you control it like a video game, it still has a toll.
Yeah, wow.
I wonder if the Pentagon predicted that one in their studies or whatever they do.
I'm guessing not.
No, no, they seemed quite surprised by it and tried to downplay it by saying, well, a lot of these people had other past service overseas or something, and maybe the PTSD is a result of something that happened 15, 16 years ago as opposed to what just happened.
And it's just mysteriously surfacing now.
Or maybe, you know, they're just having a breakdown like the alleged killer in Afghanistan who went and did some extra judicial killing or, I mean, apparently it's okay to kill Afghans, but only under orders and in an organized fashion, not on your own, all drunk.
What does that say?
I don't know.
I guess I'm just kind of muttering right now.
Anything else you want to talk about, Jason, before the music starts?
Well, I'm not sure what we've got time for.
Like probably just a minute or so.
We can talk about Libya.
Yeah, yeah.
What's going on in Libya?
What's the latest?
Well, we've got a group in Benghazi of several militias that are nominally affiliated with the NATO-backed government but are kind of on the outs with them, trying to form an autonomous region centered around Benghazi, which would include most of Libya's oil wealth.
And the NTC's leadership has said that they'll never allow that.
They're going to unite the country by force and that they're going to crush any attempt to set up autonomous regions.
So it seems like the second Libyan civil war of the last 12 months is getting closer and closer.
Well, I'm looking at the anti-war blog and I see Libya's US-backed militias terrorize the country.
Wow, there's the music.
I guess we don't have time to talk about it.
But go to antiwar.com, read everything that Jason Ditz writes.
You will learn about all the bad news all the time, like I do.
Thank you so much for doing the show, Jason.
I really appreciate it on short notice like that.
Sure, thanks for having me.
