All right y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and the first guest on our show today is Johan Hari.
He is an award-winning journalist who writes twice weekly for The Independent, independent.co.uk and The Huffington Post.
He also writes for Slate and appears on the BBC's Newsnight Review.
He's written for every important newspaper in the world.
Welcome to the show.
How's it going?
Hi Scott, great to be with you.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
I'm furiously clicking through my tabs here, looking for your article.
I read it the other day.
Here we go.
Johan Hari, we're not being told the truth on Libya.
Well, now there's probably 50 or 100,000 different lies you could zero in on here, but what are the big ones you think?
Well, I think, just think back six weeks, right?
These people who are claiming they are completely motivated by humanitarianism, what were they doing?
David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, his first reaction to the Arab revolutions was to jump on a plane and tour the palaces of some of the worst dictators in the region, selling them the most high-tech weapons of repression that he could.
You know, Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, his instinctive response to the Arab revolutions was to offer urgent aid to the Tunisian dictator in crushing his people.
Barack Obama, what was his instinctive response?
It was to refuse to trim the billions of pounds in aid he was giving to Hosni Mubarak and his murderous secret police, and for Joe Biden to declare, I would not refer to him as a dictator.
Now we're being told these people are basically the armed wing of Amnesty International who can't bear to see innocent people being tyrannized by the very tyrants they were arming and funding for years, but that's not a credible claim.
Right, you know, I hadn't realized, but I just saw something, I think, earlier today about, and this may have actually been in your article, that as recently as February, Obama was working on a deal to send armored personnel carriers to Muammar Gaddafi.
Yeah, you've got to think about, when people say, oh, should we intervene, should we intervene?
The most important point to make is, we have already intervened.
You know, before this bombing campaign, we'd intervened for years on the side of Colonel Gaddafi.
You know, the people being shot at, the rebels being shot at, were being shot at by officers who were trained here in Britain.
There's SANTAS, the leading military academy here in Britain.
I think also, if you're trying to understand, well, okay, what is going on here, it really helps to look at, this is part of what my article was about, two other wars that our governments are intimately involved in, because it really shows you that the claims that are being made for this campaign can't be true.
One of the ways I'd frame the first war is, just imagine a distant leader, imagine someone like Gaddafi had killed over 2,000 innocent people, and when evidence was produced that they were innocent, his commanders had laughed and said, well, the victims weren't the local men's glee club.
But imagine those innocent survivors were appearing on television, you know, literally amidst the body parts of, you know, imagine one of the victims was standing there in the rubble with the body parts of his son and his brother, and said into the camera, please, we're human beings, help us, don't let them do this to us.
Imagine that polling from that attacked place showed that 90% of the people there wanted it to stop, that the civilians were the main target.
Imagine there was a huge natural flood and the leader responded by ramping up the attacks.
Well, using the logic of Libya, we would be bombing or invading that country.
The only problem is, we'd have to be bombing or invading ourselves.
This is what our governments, your government and mine, have been doing to Pakistan since 2004, these massive drone attacks that have actually been stepped up by Obama, which are completely disastrous.
You know, they're illegal, and they're disastrous.
Obviously, they claim that, you know, this is about killing al-Qaeda.
But actually, we know there's some pretty major flaws in the argument.
Firstly, the intelligence guiding the bombs, Mahmoud al-Jahadi, is so poor that for six months, these people were holding top-level negotiations with a man who claimed to be the head of the Taliban, only for him to then turn out he was just a random Pakistani grocer who was doing it for the bride.
He didn't even know any Taliban.
You know, even when the intelligence is accurate, and we've got no evidence that it's accurate most of the time, David Kilcullen, who was a senior advisor to General Petraeus, says that for every one jihadi they kill, they're killing as many as 50 innocent people.
You know, almost everyone in Pakistan believes these attacks are increasing the number of jihadis.
You know, if a foreign country was blowing up people in New York, you know, people would be queuing up to fight back in awful ways.
You know, so the claims about Pakistan, you know, really show something.
Fatima Bhutto, who's one of the country's best writers and activists, she said to me, I've got the quote here, in Pakistan, when we hear Obama's rhetoric on Libya, we can only laugh.
If he was worried about the pointless massacre of innocent civilians, that'd be an easy first step for him.
Stop doing it yourself in Pakistan.
And just to tell you briefly about one of the other wars we're involved in, intimately involved in, it's the worst war in the world in terms of death.
I reported on it in 2008.
It's the war in the Congo.
It's very hard to give people a sense of how horrific the war in the Congo is.
It's been the deadliest since the Nazis.
Five million people have died.
You go there and, you know, you go to any hospital in Eastern Congo, you say, show me around.
They'll say, sure, do you want to see the ward for the children who've been stabbed or for the women who've been gang raped and shot in the vagina?
It's the most unimaginably vicious war.
And we know what the war is for.
We know how it's been caused.
The UN had a major investigation into it.
And they said the words they used were, armies of business have invaded Congo to pillage its resources and sell them to the knowing West.
This is the most valuable thing they get from Congo is coltan, which is used to make the metal in the mobile phone I'm talking to you on now.
Games, consoles, laptops, it's a really important metal for the global economy.
We can get it from loads of places, but it's actually very cheap to get it from Congo.
What happened is we went in and the war is a war to control the mines that give us our Congo.
The UN explained very clearly, you know, they listed all the major Western corporations responsible.
They said if you choke off the supply, it will end the war.
We've refused to do it.
You know, so if we were so concerned about humanitarianism that we would be prepared to bomb other people, surely we would start by simply stopping our corporations going and causing the worst war in the world.
But we've refused to do it.
The State Department is refusing to refusing to even draw up the punishment.
It's been required by law to draw up for the people who are doing this.
Well, and now do you know about the involvement of the U.S. government and the U.K. government in the Congo?
Is it just the corporations over there making deals with the dictatorship there or the warring factions there, or are the empires actually involved as well?
Well, they're intimately involved.
What happened is when the UN panel of experts drew up the list of companies, our governments reacted very swiftly.
They reacted by saying, don't you dare crack down on our companies.
They demanded that all these names were taken off the list.
So, yeah, they're intimately involved.
You can see the priorities in the global system by comparing two things.
So you've got that one thing which has killed five million people in Congo, right?
Then about, whenever it was, four months ago now, the Congolese government tried to nationalize a mine that belonged to American and British corporations.
And our governments went crazy.
They started lobbying like anything.
They started threatening to cut off the aid.
So that shows you something, you know, kill five million people, we're not so bothered.
You know, take away the property of a few rich people, we'll get really furious.
So it shows the competing priorities.
And this is obviously also working in Libya, you know, very clearly at work in Libya.
I mean, you've seen some of the, this is starting to be voiced more or less openly now, but William Hague, who's our equivalent to Hillary Clinton, said in an interview this weekend that, you know, oil was a big factor in the war.
Bill Richardson, who was the former U.S. Energy Secretary and then U.S. Ambassador to the UN said, this is a quote he said in an interview with Don Imus, Of course, there's another interest in that energy.
Libya is among the top 10 oil producers in the world.
You can almost say the gas prices in the U.S. going up would probably happen because of the stoppage of Libyan oil production.
So this isn't an insignificant country.
And I think our involvement is justified.
So, you know, it's becoming increasingly clear this is a war, partly to do with oil.
For the first time in 60 years, Western control over the world's biggest pots of oil was being rocked by a series of revolutions that governments just couldn't control.
Well, and you can see they're blackmailing the hell out of us here.
They go in and escalate this war, pick the losing side in a civil war, make sure it continues on.
They don't try to insist on a ceasefire.
They are determined to have a regime change in Tripoli and drag this thing on.
If they wanted to make sure that the oil could get to market, then they could have pushed for a ceasefire weeks ago.
Instead, they're the ones basically causing the chaos that's taking the oil off the market and then telling us that, well, I guess we've got to occupy the place and make sure to secure those resources.
I think that's right.
I think it's about asserting raw Western power in the middle of a situation that was really spiraling out of the control of Western governments for the first time since the Second World War.
Indeed, since before the Second World War, but since we've known there was oil there.
I think that's absolutely right.
The idea that we're motivated by humanitarianism, our closest ally in the region, our government's closest ally in the region, Saudi Arabia, is by far the most vicious and abusive government in that part of the world and arguably in the entire world, along with North Korea and Burma.
This is a regime where rape victims are horsewhipped, where women with the streets are patrolled by police to enforce the most extreme interpretation of Sharia law, who beat women, who show their hair, who ban women from driving.
The idea that this is a kind of human rights concern, when those are your closest friends and allies, is ludicrous.
Right.
It's Islamofascism, if you will, there in Saudi Arabia.
Well, it's the Taliban with oil, the Saudi regime.
It's extremely vicious.
Indeed, as the WikiLeaks showed, the American government knows perfectly well that the Saudi government funds really horrendous forms of extremism.
The Saudi government exports the most extreme Wahhabi form of Islam.
In the city where I live, London, you go to any fundamentalist, you go find any Islamic fundamentalist, and you'll find that they are handing out free literature, which is provided by the Saudi government.
I've interviewed lots of former jihadis who were radicalized by reading and being given free Saudi literature, promoting extreme hatred.
One of the things that's really educative about this is to realize how little a priority opposing Islamic fundamentalism is for our government compared to getting a hold and control of oil.
You saw that as well with the action of Tony Blair in the previous British government towards Qaddafi.
Blair claims that he was motivated in Iraq by opposition to terrorism and opposition to tyranny, but it's worth remembering he negotiated to hand over to Qaddafi, a vicious tyrant, the worst convicted terrorist, murderer of British and American people in modern history.
You know, Abdallah Basset al-Megrahi, who blew up a plane over Lockerbie, was convicted of blowing up a plane over Lockerbie, killed over 200 British and American people.
We've now got people who were inside Blair's government admitting they handed Megrahi over to the Libyan tyranny explicitly so that Qaddafi would let in British petroleum to drill off the coast of Libya.
I mean, it was that simple.
Given a choice between punishing the worst convicted terrorist, the murderer of British and American people, and getting oil, Blair chose the oil.
You know, I think that that reveals a very strong recurring thread that runs through our foreign policies.
Now, it shouldn't be like that.
Well, I really wish I knew more about that.
You know, Robert Perry was on the show the other day, and right at the end of the show, when we were out of time, he started casting major doubt on the story of the Libyans being the ones responsible for that attack.
There's a totally legitimate debate.
You know, he's right.
There's a totally legitimate debate about whether al-Megrahi actually did it.
But if he was innocent, he obviously should have been acquitted at an appeal where the truth came out.
What certainly shouldn't have happened is him being released in part of a very dodgy deal with a dictator, explicitly in return for BP getting access to the oil.
The totally legitimate debate about al-Megrahi, that this was not the way to resolve it.
And it's what everyone blathered that al-Megrahi was guilty.
He just didn't didn't care.
He just wanted to get the oil.
Right.
So now, you know, here's the punchline, though, right?
Is in England and in America, people are buying this by the millions.
We're going to save the Libyans.
Come on.
It's great.
Well, I think people there is a genuine debate that is difficult.
You know, some people I respect are on the other side.
The people who say, look, our government's motives are clearly not humanitarian, but it has prevented a massacre in Benghazi.
And therefore, reluctantly, I support it.
The reason I disagree with that, and I thought about flying through very hard is a bit similar to the argument about Iraq, where people said, well, look, some people who got it very wrong, including me, shamefully wrong, said, well, look, clearly their motives are not good, but it has a good effect.
Therefore, we should support it.
I think what what what we learned there and indeed should have known beforehand, and it's not making any excuses.
Millions of people did know beforehand and warned about it, is that even if there's a very brief overlap between the humanitarian interest and the interest of these imperial powers, they will very quickly diverge.
If they are going in to Libya to get control of the oil supply very rapidly, that interest will diverge from the interest of Libyan people.
Libyan people will want to control their own oil supply as anyone would, as Britain does.
And when that happens, our governments will support their renewed repression in very vicious ways, as happened in Iraq, when the Iraqi population started getting up to tea and saying they didn't want to be occupied.
They wanted to control their own oil and so on.
We now know again from the WikiLeaks and from good journalists out there that our government supported just renewed repression and torture of them.
And I'm afraid that if there is a brief humanitarian overlap, and there may well be, that will very quickly be subsumed by the imperial desire to control the oil which the population there will object to.
Yeah, well, it is amazing what these people can convince themselves.
I think a compelling case has been made that it was really Susan Rice and Samantha Power, who knows what Hillary Clinton's nefarious motives were, but with the other two, that it was one of these golden opportunities for humanitarian war.
It'll be just like the time we didn't stop the genocide in Rwanda, only this time we will.
I don't know if anybody's ever accused Samantha Power of working for Chevron or anything like that.
Those people are just ideologues.
They're the worst kind of liberals with power.
I don't think that's fair about Samantha Power.
I think she's wrong about this, but I don't think she's a bad person.
If you're in a position of power in the American government and you're concerned about human rights, the first thing you should be advocating is to stop the American government supporting massive human rights abuses abroad.
Look, for example, the war in Congo, worst war in the world, as we were saying, 5 million people dead.
There's an easy way to choke off that war, to stop all that killing and that heuristic sexual violence that doesn't involve bombing anyone.
Now, if you're consistent in your humanitarianism, that's where you're going to start.
The worst war in the world, an easy, nonviolent way to stop it.
That's what Samantha Power would be championing, if her humanitarian claims were consistent or as admirable as I would like them to be.
It's very revealing.
The State Department was asked to set up punishment by the Senate for what's going on in the Congo.
They have done nothing.
They have effectively sanctioned the continuing of the mass murder of civilians in Congo, when it could have been very easily stopped at very little cost and they wouldn't have had to bomb anyone.
