Alright, y'all, welcome back to the show.
To our first guest, John Glazer, he's an assistant editor at AntiWar.com.
Welcome to the show, John.
Thanks for having me.
I'm very happy to have you here.
Let's talk about Uganda.
Is it really true that America invaded Uganda over the weekend?
Seems like a bad joke, doesn't it?
Since we're almost at break, I'll just give a teaser for people to stick around.
Obama, over the weekend, sent up to 100 troops, U.S. Combat Forces, like Joint Special Operations Command, to Uganda to help fight against the Lord's Resistance Army, which is a Christian, fundamentalist, psychotic rebel group with a history of very, very deadly and brutal activity in the region.
But, of course, what comes with that is all sorts of dangerous mission creep and lies from the Obama administration as to why they did it.
And it gets messy and will get messy.
Yeah, it's just amazing to read.
Oh, yeah, by the way, he sent troops to Uganda and the President wrote a letter to the Speaker of the House.
Right.
Like Wilson going and asking for a declaration of war.
That's precisely right.
People got all riled up when Obama intervened in Libya without Congressional approval.
And he didn't even send troops into Libya.
We were doing things through the air.
We were doing no-fly zones and airstrikes.
Now Obama sends 100 combat troops to one of the most war-stricken areas in the world and doesn't even bother, doesn't even have a nod to the Constitutional requirements that obligate him to request permission from Congress and the people to actually engage in this sort of a thing.
And, not only that, but here's the original leak to ABC News.
They will ultimately go, these troops, will ultimately go to Uganda, South Sudan, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with the permission of those countries.
That's right.
Now the argument there is that the LRA, the Lurkut Army, doesn't just reside in Uganda.
They're spread out.
But that sort of brings us to another important aspect of this.
One of Obama's primary justifications, amazingly, was that it was in the U.S. national security interest to go and fight the LRA.
Now, that's implausible.
It's far-fetched.
There's no direct threat to the United States opposed by the LRA.
Indeed, they're at their weakest point in 15 years.
Right now they only have 200 to 400 fighters.
Compared to 3,000 armed troops and 2,000 people in support roles in 2003.
They're a weak, messed-up organization that doesn't need the greatest army force in the world fighting against them.
Well, I guess we'll find out what the real interest is, if it's not America's national interest, when we get back from this break with John Glazer, assistant editor at Antiwar.com.
Hang tight, y'all.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Wharton.
Got John Glazer on the line.
He's an assistant editor at Antiwar.com.
Let's see, now we got Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and now we're adding four more wars, John, to fight the Lord's Resistance Army in Central Africa.
I mean, I guess, you know, we all know that there are marauding bands of killers in Central Africa.who go around doing terrible things, but what in the world does this have to do with us North Americans?
I can't figure.
Well, it's a good question, and there are answers.
First, I should address the humanitarian justification that you just alluded to.
Obama, as well as saying that it was in our national interest, which is not plausible and which I'll get into, he said that, you know, he rattled off a bunch of crimes that these LRA forces have committed and said basically use the ubiquitous humanitarian rationale for intervening militarily in yet another corner of the earth.
But, you know, that's as fraudulent this time around as it is every other time around.
We know that is a lie, because the U.S. has administered, has been complicit in, and has total disregard for comparable atrocities around the world.
So, it's not reasonable, it's not logical, it's not consistent at all for us to buy the rationale that this is somehow we're going in to save people and stop the murders.
Well, and that really makes the best propaganda, right?
Is that this isn't about our selfish interest at all.
This is about Superman coming to save the poor, downtrodden, helpless people.
That's exactly right.
You get people, you get the American people behind you because they want to go and crusade and help save.
Although we know how many times that's turned into such horrors.
Black Hawk Down, not the least of the famous stories.
Yeah, the very same people are willing to nuke every Persian off the face of the earth.
Right.
It's as dangerous as it can possibly get.
That brings us to the national security interest justification, though.
And as I explained before the break, that's not possible.
The forces are at their weakest in years.
They pose no direct threat, obviously, to the United States.
They're just a couple guys with a bunch of guns and bloodthirsty people.
But if we use the official state definition, if we use the sort of Orwellian Obama imperial definition of national security interest, it actually starts to make perfect sense.
And it falls into line with the familiar U.S. policy, U.S. foreign policy doctrine that's been going on for years.
National security interest in this context often means, often refers to the interest of corrupt dictatorships, especially ones that are obedient to U.S. demands.
So what's going on in Somalia with the al-Shabaab militant group?
The U.S. has expanded its drone war in Somalia, which is neighboring Uganda.
It's doubled down on a proxy war in which one group of horrible militants gets U.S. support, while the other horrible militants, indistinguishable from the first, is targeted by the U.S. proxies.
And then there's the CIA and Joint Special Operations Command that are running a kill-capture program in horrible prisons that we know from Jeremy Scahill.
But that's what's going on in neighboring Somalia.
The U.S., in this context, has lent economic and military support to the Ugandan government, which is now headed by a so-called president for life, Moussa Ben-Ni.
And he's been re-elected this year in an election that was widely disputed by international observers.
And so since the Somalia war has intensified, in June the Pentagon sent part of a $45 million package of military equipment to Uganda.
They sent four small drones, body armor, communications gear, and other military equipment.
And in part that's being used to fund the Ugandan military's fight against al-Shabaab, which is basically helping the U.S. mission there.
The request for aid to Uganda for fiscal year 2012 next year is set at over $520 million.
So where does this leave us?
The national security interest, according to Obama, is keeping the Ugandan president in power so that we can bribe him to fight our war in Somalia, which shouldn't be being fought anyways.
The leader of the LRA, Joseph Kony, he's a horrible guy, and it's actually President Moussa Ben-Ni's, one of his highest priorities, to catch him.
So as the Washington Post reported recently, I'm quoting military advisers in Uganda, advisers, that means the 100 combat troops that we've sent, could be payback for U.S.
-funded Ugandan troops in Somalia.
So that's an interesting twist to this.
So basically we're fighting another proxy war on behalf of a dictatorial government that we want to keep in power so that Somalia and al-Shabaab can be kept in place and we don't have to send in troops to Somalia.
That's how twisted this sort of national interest rationale goes.
Well, and how much of that did Obama allude to?
When he said that this was in our national interest, did he cite anything specific?
What he said was, I believe that, I'm quoting, I believe that deploying these U.S. armed forces furthers U.S. national security interests and foreign policy and will be a significant contribution towards counter-LRA efforts in Central Africa.
So that's all he said.
That's slightly alluding to the fact that, you know, counter-LRA efforts.
So the Ugandan government wants to counter the LRA.
That's counter-guerrilla, counter-terrorism, whatever you want to call it.
That's the extent to his allusion to the actual national security interests that are real, not the fake ones.
He did not mention Somalia.
He did not mention al-Shabaab.
That's all he managed to say because truth doesn't actually matter when you're telling the American people that you're going to war yet again.
Right, yeah, never has.
Well, so what about oil?
It's got to have something to do with it, no?
Well, we have circumstantial evidence that oil does have a role to play.
It was only a few months ago I came across this article in the, what's it called, the oilprice.com.
The title of the article was, Uganda's oil potential arouses international interest.
And it talked about estimated reserves at at least 2.5 billion barrels.
They talked about, they estimated that Uganda could be able to support production of over 100,000 barrels of oil a day.
So this is circumstantial evidence.
This is circumstantial evidence.
We can't exactly say that oil is the reason, but the Somalia situation is probably more prevalent in the Obama administration's mind.
Yet again, oil is primary.
I mean, it was primary in Libya, it was primary in Iraq.
This is nothing new.
There's a strong strain of oil being in the land that we intend to invade, so yeah.
Well, you know, I saw South Sudan on this list and that really pricked my ears up, or my eyeballs, because I think they've been trying to find an excuse to put troops in South Sudan for a long, long time now.
They finally succeeded in breaking it off from the rest of Sudan after a very long civil war there.
But I guess the last I heard, it was the Chinese who were developing South Sudan's oil resources.
And the Americans were determined to put a stop to that one way or the other.
I figured that years ago Bush would probably invade Darfur in the name of humanitarianism, and then we'd end up in South Sudan somehow, you know, from the west down to the south.
But here we go, we'll just start in Uganda.
Somehow we're going to get troops occupying the fields in South Sudan and turn them over to the Americans, or at least to the Europeans, take them from the Chinese.
You know, it's quite possible.
I know that the new borders in Sudan that have been drawn between north and south were contentious primarily because they needed to figure out who the oil profits would go to.
And for the U.S. to use Africa Command, which is the newest sort of realm of imperial empire that the United States has deemed reasonable to have under the Pentagon's auspices, is certainly interested in the oil interest in Africa.
And it's a growing sort of branch of the Pentagon, and we should definitely be weary of sort of Africa Command becoming the new Central Command.
Because more and more international powers like, for example, China, are getting interested in the natural resources of that continent.
Well, lucky for them, they don't have as many as it might look like just from a map.
But anyway, hold it right there, John.
Is it all right if I keep you one more segment here?
Absolutely.
Okay, great.
I want to ask you more about our Africa wars and a little bit about Iraq, too.
It's John Glazer, assistant editor at Antiwar.com.
We'll be back at six after.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
This is Antiwar Radio, brand new at Antiwar.com.
U.S. officials peddle false intel to support terror plot claims by Gareth Porter.
A follow up to his last one, FBI account of terror plot suggests sting operation.
I will be interviewing him about both of these articles at the bottom of this hour.
So stay tuned for that.
Right now, we're talking with John Glazer, assistant editor at Antiwar.com.
About Obama's invasion of sub-Saharan Africa in the name of, I guess, cleaning up or protecting civilians from this Lord's Resistance Army.
And I guess I try to not sell the military too short when it comes to the things that they're actually designed to do, like put fire on targets.
I don't think that they're very good at, you know, dealing with the politics of Central Asia, for example, and fighting the war in Afghanistan.
But, you know, like the old saying from Vietnam, never lost a battle.
Is it not possible or even likely, John, that these 100 JSOC guys leading the Ugandan army could be possibly able to annihilate this Lord's Resistance Army and protect the state of Uganda and, you know, civilians in the surrounding countries, in the surrounding countryside, I guess, who are the victims of this army?
It's possible.
I mean, it has been said that LRA is such a weak organization that if the heads of the organization, if the leader, Joseph Kony, if you can sort of cut the head off the snake, the organization will completely dissolve.
On the other hand, we should look to our past to see whether or not something like this is as easy as it is done, as it is said.
Previous operations, we've targeted this group before, and they've ended pretty badly.
In 2006, a squad of Guatemalan commandos that was trained by the U.S. infiltrated an LRA encampment in Uganda.
What happened, it actually ended up in the eight-man commando force from Guatemala being killed entirely.
Every single one of them and their leader was beheaded by the LRA.
So that wasn't so clean an operation.
Three years later, in 2009, U.S. Africa Command helped the Ugandan army plan a series of raids on LRA camps.
It was a horrible operation gone awry.
The Ugandan air and ground forces couldn't coordinate their attacks.
Rebels sort of fanned out and left.
They went various escape routes throughout neighboring countries and ended up killing 600 to 900 more civilians.
It was sort of compared to poking and prodding a hornet's nest.
It angered the LRA so much that they went on a killing spree and raped a bunch of more people and razed a bunch of villages and so on and so forth.
So our previous two operations against the LRA have ended absolutely horrible, made no progress, and ended up in more lives lost than actually needed to be lost.
Since then, we've just been paying, like I say, dictatorial governments in that region, training their army and sending military equipment so that they can do it.
It's also ended in further violence.
If we want to measure the extent to which this operation can actually go well, we should think about those operations, but we should also think about what kind of mission creep there could end up being.
Now it's a very targeted goal of stopping LRA, but in a month or two, maybe it'll be a totally different goal.
Maybe it'll be stabilizing the region, or maybe it'll be training the Ugandan security forces to go on their own, as we're doing in Afghanistan right now.
The arrests and murder of two or three top al-Qaeda people right after 9-11 in Afghanistan and Pakistan turned into one of the longest-running wars in American history.
So we shouldn't undercut the potential for really drastic things to come down the line from this Uganda intervention.
Yeah, well, Sub-Saharan Africa is a big place, and the fact that they announced that they're going to four countries right at the start here, sounds to me like full-scale invasion by AFRICOM of that continent is on.
This isn't going to be undone until the dollar breaks.
Yeah, that's what we're afraid of.
Well, and look at Vietnam.
I mean, I guess they have their own problems in Afghanistan, trying to fight uphill with the resistance firing down from the mountaintops on them, and that's pretty bad.
But fighting in the jungle in Vietnam really didn't go so well for approximately 60,000 Americans over there.
And Sub-Saharan Africa, to me, seems like a pretty dirty, stinky place to try to fight a war, you know, carrying around 100 pounds worth of equipment and wearing heavy American combat fatigues and stuff.
It sounds like it could be, well, the perfect quagmire for the African command.
Absolutely.
Wars in the jungle against guerrilla forces, who you can't always distinguish from civilian populations, is a recipe for quagmires and deadly, deadly wars that drag on forever.
And this is America's first such adventure, and I think, you know, we'd be kidding ourselves if, as Jason Ditz wrote in today's piece, it seems unlikely that America would deploy its most battle-hardened combat forces into a zone and tell them not to fight.
So, yeah, it's clear that these aren't just advisors, as the Ugandan president and President Obama have said, and there's going to be heavy fighting.
We should expect that.
What's more, what's, you know, taking the broad view, it's just amazing.
First of all, no congressional authority.
Second of all, this is Obama's, like, sixth, seventh war.
He came in as the anti-war president.
He came in as the anti-Bush.
I'm going to change things.
I'm going to have, you know, a different kind of foreign policy that's not so aggressive.
He is the most bloodthirsty president we've had in a long time.
I know.
It's really crazy.
I mean, you look at, especially with the expansion of AFRICOM's mission here, you know, maybe it's just a point of view or, you know, it's hyperbole if you don't like it or something, but it seems to me like modern day slavery.
You know, we can't kidnap them and bring them here and force them to work at gunpoint.
We'll just go and enslave them on their own continent and, you know, put them to work in our mines and pumping our oil out of the ground and whatever.
It's just old school European colonialism, only we're the Belgians.
Yeah.
I didn't think we were supposed to be.
Right.
Well, and especially to have, you know, Barack Obama doing this.
I actually got in an argument with a guy here in Austin just a couple of weeks ago about Barack Obama.
This black guy, he's probably in his 50s or something, and he was saying, no, every single thing that Obama has done wrong is all George Bush's fault.
And he's only had three years.
It's not like he can turn things around this quickly.
Oh, yeah.
Well, he's invading and enslaving Africa.
How are you going to defend that and blame that on George Bush?
I mean, is there no line that this guy can cross?
I guess not.
I mean, right, you look at how many lies George Bush told and how many people still supported him, you know, throughout his eight years.
I guess we're in store for the very same thing.
Obama will be on year seven and a half.
There will be a million dead Africans, and they'll still be blaming George W. Bush for everything he's done wrong.
Yeah.
I mean, this is one of the most central problems in American politics, period.
People root like tribes for one side or the other, blue team or red team.
And whosoever is the head of that tribe, they literally go through so much confirmation bias to exclude evidence that there's no difference between the two teams.
And just lie like this guy has, just lie to themselves that, you know, my guy's the man, my guy's...
It's a celebrity sort of obsession with Obama, and previously it was with Bush.
People just cannot get beyond the fact that these are two factions of the same party.
Yeah.
Well, and they're after your kids, so it's time to start getting it straight.
All right.
Thanks very much, John.
I'm sorry we're all out of time.
Thanks very much.
Appreciate it.
John Glazer, everybody, assistant editor at Antiwar.com.
You can find him especially at the blog there, Antiwar.com/blog, and at News.
Antiwar.com as well.
We'll be right back.
