All right, welcome back.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and on the line is John Blazer.
He's our assistant editor at Antiwar.com.
I think I'm an assistant editor, too.
Welcome back, John.
How are you doing?
Pretty good, Scott.
Thanks for having me back.
I'm very happy to have you here and at news.antiwar.com and at antiwar.com/blog, where everybody can read the great stuff you wrote.
And I want to get to your headline about the airstrike in Libya.
In fact, let's go ahead and start with that.
What happened there, and what do you know about it for sure?
So this is the second time that the Qaddafi spokesman has blamed NATO strikes for killing a massive amount of civilians.
It was last week, I think on the 17th of September, that he claimed that there were 354, a little over 350 civilians killed directly from NATO airstrikes, which were bombing civilian infrastructure.
And just yesterday, he came out again and told Reuters that 151 civilians had been killed.
Now, the claims are difficult to verify because CERT, which is where he claims these civilians were killed, which is also Qaddafi's hometown, and which also has, you know, a lot of pro-Qaddafi loyalists fighting rebels right now.
It's hard to verify because the city is besieged on all sides by invading, encroaching rebel forces, and communications are down from the weeks of NATO bombing.
Furthermore, these deaths, or these alleged deaths, are occurring in a context of worsening humanitarian circumstances.
There's lack of food, lack of electricity, lack of water.
The medical care for residences, either non-existent or very poor.
The spokesman for Qaddafi said the city hospital stopped functioning altogether, and then patients simply died because nothing could be done to help them.
So that's what's been going on.
The attacks on CERT are happening in a broader context of attacks on mainly two cities that have pro-Qaddafi loyalists still fighting rebels.
That's CERT, and that's Bani Waleed.
And similar stories coming out of Bani Waleed last week were occurring as well.
We know there's lots of civilians displaced, lots of refugees, because at the beginning of the onslaught last week, there were many, many people fleeing and getting in touch with news outlets that aren't actually allowed in the cities.
So that's the situation thus far.
One last thing I should probably say is that just yesterday, the NATO leadership extended their involvement in the Libya war officially for another 90 days.
Well, wait, hold on that.
We can get right to that.
Well, and I guess, you know, part of the question will be answered there.
How many towns are left to fall to the rebels at this point?
How necessary is it, for example, that the French and the British keep bombing from the sky?
Well, it's not necessary at all, in my opinion.
They claim it's necessary.
CERT is fighting.
It's a coastal town.
And so on three sides, from the east, west, and south, the rebels are sort of encroaching, and they're fighting people who are still battling for their own city, who are loyal to Gaddafi.
And NATO planes provide reconnaissance, so they tell them where people are, and they also provide bombing.
It's not necessary at all.
It can certainly be dealt with either by the rebels themselves and by the loyalists, or, you know, some other way.
But that's the situation, and it doesn't seem to be holding up.
It doesn't seem to be stopping anytime soon.
Yeah.
Well, nobody around here thinks that any of this is necessary at all, as far as necessary goes.
But I just meant, you know, for the rebels to take these towns, I'm curious how many towns are left to fall.
Is it just these two?
It's just these two.
There was one more last week, but it hasn't been in the news lately, so I think the fighting there is minimal or negligible, in comparison at least.
That town was called Sabah, and I believe it's either subsided.
That's the central town, it's not in the coast.
And I don't believe that there's that much fighting there, but it's mainly Bani Waleed.
Well, now there's this Patrick Coburn article, whatever happens, a strong government is unlikely in the independent, and that's something that we've been talking about for a while, is how unlikely it is that any of these competing factions that NATO has helped win this war will be able to actually replicate, you know, Qaddafi-style monopoly on power in that land.
Well, of course.
I mean, I think it bears repeating that the United States got behind a disparate group of rebel factions who have their own human rights abuses and their own questionable ideas about how Libya should be governed and their own internal problems and so on and so forth.
They got behind them, and now they're expected.
Obama just this week was at the UN and did more to officially recognize the Transitional National Council as the governing authorities in Libya.
There's not much indication that they know how to run a country or, you know, handle a full-time government.
The small faction, the Benghazi-based faction of the rebels that are most in power, most connected to the NTC, are only a small faction.
And what's sort of too bad is that reports have been coming out about looting of Qaddafi's many stockpiles of weapons that he left over.
And now that just different factions within the rebel groups are looting those stockpiles of weapons, not only are they creating a black market where those weapons are being exported to places like Niger and the Gaza Strip, and Russia claimed that Al-Qaeda might have gotten their hands on some of them.
And so, you know, these are the places that the weapons might be going to.
But where the rebels, in the case that the rebels are keeping them, you know, it's just creating more imbalances in terms of the power structure because we all know, especially you and me, that a government is essentially just an institution that has a relative monopoly on force.
And if all these different rebel factions that have different interests and different preferences for how Libya should be governed have their own arsenal of weapons to defend, and there's not much of a difference between them, what we can expect is a not strong central government and lawless areas where chaotic gangs basically rule over different regions of the country.
That's a dangerous set of situation.
And, you know, I don't see anyone on the world stage, you know, placing enough criticism over that sort of aspect of this war.
Well, and when they finally get around to it, when the infighting gets too bad, they will only know of one solution, which is we must commit troops to establish peace and stability there so that we can have democratic elections and train up their army, and then they'll stand up and we'll stand down in 20 years and whatever.
I can't just, this thing is such a nightmare.
And it's also obvious from the beginning how much of an Iraq they're going to turn this place into.
It's just sad to see.
I wish I'd been complaining about why we ought to leave Libya alone all these years instead of Iran, you know.
It is sad.
And it's also sort of surprising how well each one of these interventions fits into the history of American foreign policy.
They're so similar that there's no surprises here.
Yeah.
All right.
Yeah.
Plenty of shocking news, but none of it's surprising.
All right.
Hold it right there, John.
Everybody, it's John Glazer from antiwar.com, news.antiwar.com and antiwar.com/blog.
And we'll be right back after this.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
Talking with John Glazer, assistant editor at antiwar.com.
You most often find him on the blog there.
A couple of great pieces recently in the Daily Caller as well, which I urge you to look at.
And now call me Mr. Slippery Slope here and hyperbole and all this and that.
But I'm reading USA Today here about how there are now officially at least 16 American military men on the ground in Libya.
And that just sounds to me like the beginning of a long term commitment.
You know, they'll they'll be sending trainers soon enough and then anti-terrorist forces and force protection.
And then we'll need Kellogg Brown and Root to come and set up a kitchen.
It'll be on that.
Yeah, that could be.
They initially sent in four troops to help secure the U.S. embassy.
And later, a few days later, and I think late last week, Defense Secretary Panetta announced some additional ones, adding to a total of 16.
But, you know, they claim it's just to secure the the the U.S. embassy.
Thankfully, so far, they haven't been engaged in any on the ground fighting.
But as you said, when other things, other issues in the Libya war start to sort of face us as disintegrating, like the rebel leadership or the pro-loyal, the pro-Qaddafi loyalists fighting back or whatever the case may be, you know, that that is an invitation for a stabilization force or, you know, constabulary or trainers or whatever sort of Orwellian term they choose.
Peacekeepers.
Right.
Whichever term they choose to help describe their imperial interventionist policies.
Those are invitations towards it.
And so, you know, we should cross our fingers.
All right.
Well, go ahead and scare the hell out of me about the looting of these weapons.
How many weapons?
What are we have?
Tons.
Do you know?
Well, one report I saw said that the weapons stockpiles left by Qaddafi are larger than that of those left over by Saddam Hussein, which were looted in Iraq as well and also contributed to the insurgency there.
So we know how bad that insurgency went.
We know how many people died, we know how long it lasted, so on and so forth.
Now, those roadside bombs in Iraq all those years were mostly old artillery shells.
So this is much, much bigger.
Again, you know, Libya is a different situation.
There's less ethnic, cultural, societal cleavages.
And is there any more security over these weapons at all?
Or it's still just going on?
You know, people have been calling for it.
The U.S. is called for it.
The E.U. is called for it.
NATO is called for it.
Russia has called for it.
Even Middle Eastern countries, Saudi Arabia has called for, you know, securing these weapons facilities so that they don't get into the wrong hands or they don't contribute to ongoing instability.
But nothing has been done yet.
Partly because, you know, no one wants to put boots on the ground, at least just yet, because that's not politically palatable.
And so they have to rely on the rebels.
But as we've been saying, the rebels are not reliable.
They're not organized.
They're barely cohesive.
And it's difficult to get that sort of group to do something like secure weapons stockpiles or, you know, collect taxes or, you know, do whatever else governments are supposed to do.
So nothing has been done reportedly yet.
But although the rebel council, the National Transitional Council, has attempted, they've tried to guard them and so on and so forth, but they're still largely contributing to the black market, which is exporting these weapons.
And people are just taking them as their own within Libya.
Yeah.
Well, I got a conspiracy theory, which is that the generals at the Pentagon have all been reading Crisis and Leviathan by Robert Higgs, only they think it's a blueprint for how they're supposed to behave.
And they're looking at North Africa and saying, perfect, you know, we could fight here forever and ever and ever.
Let's go ahead and sit back and have some weapons looting.
Why not?
As though none of the Pentagon planners could have predicted that this could be a problem or anything.
Yeah, there's plenty of opportunities for ratchet effects in Africa.
And in fact, recently, one of the AFRICOM, which is the sort of US military, the Pentagon's term for the continent of Africa as a military zone, that commander of AFRICOM requested that the Pentagon give him more US Special Operations Command.
Now, he said it was to, number one, help fight terrorists, which, of course, is a blanket term for anything we want to do.
We just call it, you know, fighting terrorism, counterterrorism, and we can get what we want.
The second reason he said was to train African military.
Well, that's interesting.
Now, if we take a look at the Middle East and Central America, much of Europe, a lot of East Asia, the US has peppered military bases throughout those regions almost entirely.
Africa is a different story.
We don't have much in Africa in terms of military bases.
Yeah, they've only just begun.
And I guess really, am I right that AFRICOM has basically been frozen out of Somalia because that's just JSOC outside of their chain of command?
So this is, this heavy a thing is their big chance to get in on that war too.
Right.
And they're using it to their advantage in order to get, it's sort of the way bureaucracies work.
If they, you know, get more funding, they get to have bigger teams and employ more people and get paid a bunch more.
And so they always vie for more regardless of the merits of actually doing it.
I mean, Nick, Nick Turse, as you know, recently uncovered US special operations forces are deployed in about 120 countries, mostly secretly acting as kill teams and performing exercises.
And that's what the, the, the commander of US AFRICOM command, General Carter Ham is his name.
He said, quote, I'd like more special operations forces now, end quote.
And he's waiting for the troops to be taken out of Afghanistan so that he can take them in Africa, mainly North Africa.
Hey, tell us a little bit about Boko Haram.
You know about that in Nigeria?
I know a little bit about it.
Here's how I'll set this up.
A week ago, the New York times ran a piece that said there are three major terrorist groups in Africa that we're going to have to fight beginning now, I guess.
And that's Al-Shabaab in Somalia, the guys that we just helped win the war, although that didn't make the mention in the New York times piece in Libya and Boko Haram, the Islamist terrorist group in Nigeria, just like in the Navy commercial from two years ago.
That's right.
What I, what I know is that um, traditionally they have had pretty much domestic concern.
Um, they're an Islamic group with a fundamentalist concerns, like not educating females and, uh, other, other such things.
That, that's actually what the name means or no, no Western education.
I think it's what the name Um, and they've been, they, they have attacked, you know, Nigerian, uh, uh, forces or, uh, military outposts and Nigerian institutions, but have never, uh, expanded beyond to target American embassies or, uh, military outposts or something like that.
Um, and what's happening now is that they might be at the beginning of expanding that influence, uh, and expanding their scope to target America.
And, uh, so then now they're in the, um, sort of field of vision of Africom and the Pentagon as a, an excuse, despite the fact that they're probably, they're probably so minuscule a threat that, um, you know, it's, it's definitely not worth any troops, not worth any sort of much worrying about at all.
Um, but it'll be, it'll certainly be used as an excuse as it is with Shabab, as it is with the Islamic Maghreb, uh, and, uh, it will be with Boko Haram, um, to, uh, they frame it as that's national security and they try to justify military bases, uh, higher levels of, uh, special operations command, uh, so on and so forth.
Yeah.
Well, you know, there used to be a generation of military men who wanted no more Vietnams.
They wanted the power doctrine in and out quick and don't get bogged down.
And now it's like, they're just in search of a Vietnam war to fight, you know, the Niger Delta.
There's a great place to get bogged down.
Amazing.
It's suicide, but on it goes.
All right.
Thanks very much, John, as always appreciate it.
John Glazer, everybody.
News.antiwar.com, antiwar.com/blog.
