Welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and I'm joined on the phone by John Glazer, he's assistant editor at AntiWar.com.
Welcome back to the show John, how are you doing?
Pretty good Scott, thanks for having me back.
Well I'm happy to have you here, did you have a good Thanksgiving?
I did, I had a week break which was longer than I thought and I missed a lot, but I've been catching up all day.
Good times, well sometimes we need a break even if it wasn't planned on, it can be nice to get your head out of the world war going on right now for a little while.
But now that we're back in it, tell me what's going on in Yemen, could it really be true that Saleh has finally stepped aside?
Well it's not exactly sure, I mean he did sign an agreement and formally transfer his powers to his vice president, General Hadi, and issued some general amnesty for the political prisoners that he arrested during the pro-democracy rally.
But his stepping aside is technically sort of only a formality because he still holds the title of the presidency, just not the powers.
His vice president, General Hadi, who is no different from him in terms of prospects for reform and democracy and less killing of innocent civilians, he's the one that's actually formally in charge, so this seems more like a letter that you might sign off and say yes this is true, but formally and actually in a technical sense, I'm not sure there's much of a difference here.
Well, you know, the skepticism built into my question there is because this guy's been promising to step down in 60 days or 90 days for the past thousand days.
Well, past 300 anyway.
That's right, there's been three previous times where he has literally sat down with people, with members of the GCC, the Gulf states, and been about to sign the document which would transfer power from him to his general and begin an interim process where elections could come down the line.
And all of those three times he has, at the very last second, even while sitting with these people, said nope, based on some technicality, I'm backing out now.
And then you see three, four, five more months of turmoil in Syria at mostly his hands.
In Syria?
Sorry, Yemen, that was a slip, sorry.
Wrong American-backed revolution.
Well now, in this case, they've been trying to really hold on to the entire state, but the Americans have been encouraging Saleh to go ahead and go, right?
I mean, they don't want a real revolution, but they wouldn't mind seeing him step aside.
Right, but Saleh offers a bit too much baggage for the US.
This is despite the fact that they continue to support the government.
Well, they even praise him on occasion, you know, like when he helps them murder Anwar al-Awlaki's 16-year-old American citizen son.
That's right, if there's a success for, a so-called success, in quotes, for US counterterrorism efforts in Yemen, we of course pat Saleh on the back.
However, my sense is that the political elite and the foreign policy elite in the Obama administration would like to see Saleh step down so that they can appear to be supporting some sort of transfer of power, some interim government.
Major General Hadi, the Vice President now formally in power, would be similar to Saleh.
He would be subservient to US interests.
He would continue to allow the covert operations that are going on in Yemen right now, the drone strikes he would probably take responsibility for, as Saleh has.
Basically do what the US wants, but he would have less of the baggage of President Saleh because he's been demonized after all the horrible violence, which was supported by the United States.
A key sort of indication here is the fact that for next year, there's $120 million being given from the US to Yemen.
It's scheduled for fiscal year 2012, so that might be a harbinger of things to come.
Well, you know what, I'd be surprised if any of this works on the people of Yemen.
I mean, you look at what's going on in Egypt right now, and I guess it was true that for a little while there anyway, it seemed like, well, maybe getting rid of Mubarak was enough for a lot of the revolutionaries, and they were going to basically sit down and take it for the rest of the time.
No, apparently not.
They are determined over there to overthrow their military form of government and replace it with a civilian one.
And, you know, the people of Yemen, after almost a year now, are still out in the streets, still protesting, and I think mostly peacefully about this, right?
I mean, we're not talking about the civil war of the Houthis in the north or whatever.
We're talking about just peaceful protesters in the street demanding the abolition of their current system.
That's right.
I mean, there is civil fighting, and it has potential to sort of start to seem like an actual all-out civil war, but that is separate.
That's separate between Sunni tribesmen and the Houthi rebels and so on and so forth, and it's been going on for decades, since the early 1990s at least.
And the protests are separate.
The protests are largely peaceful and pro-democracy, reform-minded.
I posted something on a blog not so long ago that, you know, activists in Yemen put together a video of themselves asking for democracy and human rights and, you know, a stable economy and so on and so forth.
These are the people, these are the voices that have been the underpinning of the protest movement there since the Arab Spring.
But it's interesting you mentioned Egypt.
I'm afraid, I'm scared that Egypt, what's going on in Egypt will too closely resemble what's been going on in Yemen, because, you know, I think, my sense is that getting rid of Mubarak could have been enough.
Could have been enough to put things in place, actually go towards reform, and give the Egyptian people a government they would actually prefer as opposed to a military dictatorship.
The problem is that the U.S. continued influencing things in Egypt.
In fact, post-Mubarak, we sent an additional amount of aid to the ruling military junta, headed by Tantawi, you know, an ineffective interim prime minister.
And we continued sending weapons and we continued military-to-military cooperation, doing military drills with their military.
And so the status quo remained just that, the status quo.
I think that that could happen precisely the same way in Yemen too, with the oncoming of General Hadi being the primary leader there as opposed to Saleh, if it actually does happen that way.
And the Yemeni people won't get what they actually want, which is reform and a government that reflects the will of the people.
Well, there's just no doubt that the American taxpayer can and will spend a bunch of money, and that that money can be very effective at propping up these dictatorships.
But you look at what's going on in Egypt right now, I think those people are just not backing down.
They're going to stay in Tahrir Square no matter what happens with the election, until the military subordinates itself to the civilian power.
And Hillary Clinton be damned.
It's amazing to watch too, because they're so brave.
I mean, here, people in Occupy protest.
Yeah, there's been some ugly stuff with pepper spray, and some particularly ugly stuff with some serious, serious injuries in Oakland and things like this.
But it's different in Egypt.
We here don't have it on our minds that, okay, we're either going to die or go be tortured in prison.
And Egyptians have it the other way around.
They have to go out and do these protests with the utmost of bravery, because they know that being killed or taken prisoner as a political activist is a likelihood.
And it's amazing to watch.
Well, yeah, and it's amazing too that Hillary Clinton and her State Department flunkies continue to make these statements like, you know, the military really ought to do like the people say and defer to the civilian government.
We all know that that is, I mean, come on.
It's even in the very same papers reporting that, or reporting that the American policy is to back the military regime there to the hilt, to the bitter end.
All right, more like this with John Glaser when we get back.
Antiwar.com.
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So now, John, let's talk about Bahrain a little bit here.
I saw a funny headline the other day.
King of Bahrain welcomes report accusing him of torture.
What?
Yeah, so after the months and months and months of a harsh government crackdown on, again, largely peaceful pro-democracy protests that was supported unequivocally by the United States, the international pressure and some elements within Bahrain ceded to actually have a report on human rights abuses issued.
And now they're talking about, now the leadership in Bahrain is talking about, okay, we're going to take this body's recommendations and implement some reforms.
We haven't mentioned any prosecutions for the crimes that were committed, but they have a lot of talk about reforms.
Well, let's look forward and not backwards, all right?
Yeah, it sounds too familiar, doesn't it?
The opposition in Bahrain, called Al-Wafeq, is a leading Shia group.
They represent more of the majority, because that's mostly what Bahrain is, and has rejected the government's attempts to approach leading opposition figures to try to implement the recommendations of the report.
Now, this is interesting, because the opposition, of course, is against the leadership and their direction of dictatorial policies and criminal assaults on civilians.
But the reason that they're rejecting it, the reason that they're shunning the reform body and the government now, is because they recognize that it's not going to lead to anything.
They recognize that the government has been procrastinating for months, and it hinders possibilities for reform, as opposed to makes them more likely.
It's interesting, because you can still see, and this is borne out, these skepticisms are borne out, because just recently, that case of the medics, the up to 20 medics that were convicted of trying to overthrow the government by treating patients that were injured by the government, they have had an interesting thing happen to them.
A government spokesman in Bahrain produced boxes on Monday of weapons that they said were found in the medics' hospital.
So it included swords, hammers, chains, machine guns, and this is meant to say, see, they really were trying to overthrow the government, not just be doctors.
But it's so obviously a fabrication that the opposition and the defendants in the case of the medics are laughing it off.
One of them said he finds it hilarious.
I started laughing, he said, when the whole show went on, with all these weapons and fruit knives and screwdrivers and hammers and Kalashnikovs.
What are they after, he said.
So this kind of stuff is still going on.
The repression is still going on.
And under that context, it's no surprise that the opposition is saying, no, screw you, we're not going to allow you to implement these reforms.
We want to implement them, because you're the corrupt bad guys.
Wow.
What a catastrophe.
And what a blatant example for the American people.
Here's this protest movement as it started out in Pearl Square, what, last February or March, I guess.
They said, you know what, we don't want to overthrow your monarchy at all.
All we want to do is kind of add a little bit of a semblance of a rule of law to it.
Please, can we have a constitutional monarchy?
We still have absolute power, but it says so on a piece of paper somewhere.
And the monarchy responded by driving them out of Pearl Square, which is actually a roundabout, with bullets.
And wage war against them, and has, you know, definition of blowback here.
Now their demands are much more severe than they started out.
Am I right?
That's right.
People have been digging in their heels, and it's no surprise.
I mean, if we think about it, those weapons, those bullets, that tear gas, those elements of violence that the Bahraini government has unleashed on the people were paid for by the U.S.
I mean, the United—Bahrain is on the list of the top five recipients of weapons from the United States government.
Which is, of course, why they felt perfectly free to go ahead and crush the rebellion instead of having the slightest negotiation, because they've got gigantic Uncle Sam has their back.
Right, they've got the backing of the hegemonic superpower who calls all the shots.
And that's what's unfortunate about it.
But as of now, things don't seem to be changing too much.
Bahrain is—the news from Bahrain is being sort of overshadowed by places like Syria and even Yemen and other places.
And a lot less people have died in Bahrain, but that's no excuse for American tax dollars going to, you know, support this repression.
And as you said at the opening in this segment, you know, people are a lot better off making their tax-deductible donation to antiwar.com as opposed to paying for people to kill and be suffering and so on and so forth in Bahrain.
Right.
Well, and of course we know why Syria gets all the headlines and not Bahrain, because that fits with the narrative of America on the side of the underdog.
This little guy trying to create a democracy against their evil bought this dictatorship.
Right, that's the line.
And that's a dictatorship we don't control yet.
Right.
So it's a lot easier for the United States to actually intervene.
Luckily, we haven't seen too many moves towards that.
And one mistake I think some people make when they are skeptical of the government lies and regarding foreign policy is that they too often discount the very serious crimes that are going on in Syria.
I mean, al-Assad has committed crimes against humanity, according to a U.N. report recently.
It just came out today or yesterday.
And, you know, 3,500 people by most estimates have been killed.
It's horrible what's going on there.
But what people have to understand, of course, is that a U.S.
-NATO intervention does not mean that that is going to result in an end to the violence.
It's not going to mean that the people of Syria are going to get a government that they want.
What it means is that the United States is extending its sphere of control, and things are more likely to go on in Syria as they are going on in Bahrain and in Yemen and in Egypt and so on and so forth.
It's not going to be an intervention for the people.
It's not going to be a humanitarian intervention.
It's going to mean more bloodshed.
It's going to mean predictions about, you know, regime change and flowers being laid at the feet of intervening soldiers and so forth that are way off and a total lie, and it's going to mean more lies, actually, for the American people to have to sift through.
We know that from history, and we're seeing it now.
Now, the Syrian opposition is growing, and the people are backing the defectors, the army defectors.
And the army defectors say they want intervention, but they do not want on-the-ground intervention.
They want logistical support.
So we'll see what happens there.
We've got to get more than that already, I think.
All right, we'll have to leave it there.
Thanks very much, John.
I appreciate it.
Thank you.
John Glazer, everybody, antiwar.com/blog.
