Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 1/25/24 Jason Ditz on All the Ways the War in Israel Could Escalate

Episode Date: January 28, 2024

Jason Ditz returns to the show to discuss the potential for escalation in the Middle East. Ditz has been following developments on Israel’s northern border closes and talks with Scott about the potential that Israel faces a direct war with Hezbollah. They then zoom out to the broader region and talk about the American troops in Iraq and the risk of a U.S. war with Iran. Discussed on the show: News.Antiwar.com Ditz’s recent articles “As U.S. and Militias Engage, White House Worries About a Tipping Point” (New York Times) Jason Ditz is senior editor of Antiwar.com. Read all of his work at news.antiwar.com and follow him on Twitter @jasonditz. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Moon Does Artisan Coffee; Roberts and Robers Brokerage Incorporated; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; Libertas Bella; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and The Brand New, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2004. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton.4 you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show all right you guys it's the triumphant return of jason ditt senior editor at antiwar dot com back on the show how you doing jason i'm doing good scott how are you i'm doing good man very happy to have you on the show and I was looking through news.antywar.com where we keep all the bad news.

And there's this great series of articles that you've been writing for the past quite a few weeks here about the northern front, as the Israelis call it, I guess. The south to Hezbollah, tit for tat, as they call it, strikes back and forth, things destroyed, people killed, and I'm way behind on it. I was hoping we could kind of walk through this a little bit. I guess this has really been going on since October, right? Right. Late October, early November, we started seeing more and more cross-border attacks

between both sides, but really it picked up a lot in the last month with the assassination of Saleh Aruri, the Hamas leader who was killed in Beirut. And they Israeli press didn't really like to publicize that fact But Aruri was a big part of the hostage exchanges And he was working on another hostage exchange When he was killed So this was sort of the Netanyahu government's way of saying

No we don't want to make another deal That is just incredible That they would Talk about making a point listen to you we don't want any negotiations and to prove that point we're going to drop a bomb on the negotiator's head in a foreign nation all right well so as i read in your reporting here estimates are that has bala has tens of thousands of missiles and everybody's really i think including supposedly the Biden administration are really afraid that this thing is going to turn

into a war possibly even worse than the 2006 war. Is that right? Right. Hezbollah's been preparing for this war for quite a while because Israel's been very openly preparing for this war. Israeli officials treated another war in Lebanon like it was just a matter of time. And they've acted like, oh, this will be very easy. We're much better prepared than we were before. But realistically, Hezbollah has got a lot of weapons. And worst problem for Israel is that the rockets they've been firing across the border are not the sort of rockets that Iron Dome can really intercept. I mean, they've been able to intercept some missiles that have been fired out of Lebanon, but most of them just hit their targets

whenever they're shot across the border yeah so i don't know if this is true but it's important that it's the narrative anyway for its own reasons is that the biden regime put a story in the wall street journal in fact this was repeated in something else that you linked to that i read or this is i think you know widely believed inside the major media now i guess that the israelis were going to attack Hezbollah, and Biden talked them out of it. And based on, do I have the story right, American intelligence said that Israel had bad intelligence that said Hezbollah was about to launch a major attack against them. And so the Americans talked them out of, and this goes along with the narrative that the Americans are very worried that Israel's not going to be

able to control the thing if it really breaks out, which is another maybe polite way of saying, America's going to get dragged in and have to come in to try to bail the Israelis out. Oh, absolutely. I mean, the problem is military intelligence has said, Hezbollah, despite all the Israeli insistence to the contrary, doesn't want a ground war in Lebanon. They just don't want the war if they can help it. And they've warned time and again that Israel isn't ready for a ground war either because they're stuck in the middle of an open-ended ground war in Gaza.

And if they're fighting on two fronts, that's going to divide their forces pretty severely. And even though all the military brass in Israel insists they can handle it and they're more than ready because of all the lessons they learned in Gaza, the u.s doesn't seem convinced at all that they would be able to handle two wars going on at once well and especially when blinkin has said officially and this means this is an intelligence estimate and official you know understanding i guess of the government that there's no military solution to hamas and gaza which means in other words fess up after all this time and after killing all these people, Israel has hardly been able to erode Hamas or their power at all. You know, I heard on Kyle Anzalone's great show Conflicts of Interest.

He was talking about, I believe it was an American intelligence assessment that said that there are still miles and miles of tunnels beneath Gaza far more than the Israelis had estimated. And that truly provides safety for Hamas fighters down there. there that they're not running out of food and fresh air and whatever as the israelis thought that they would and so they've killed 25,000 people and we all know it's really more than that and they still really have uh made you know only some progress against tamas of course driving more people into their arms at the same time anyway so in the face of that it would seem like invading southern

Lebanon might be biting off more than they can chew, which I guess Jason brings up the question of, I know you haven't been covering this personally as closely, but I know you're, you're keeping up with it overall. Dave and Kyle have been writing a lot about it, anti-war.com, which is the American strikes on the Houthis, the American strikes on Shiite militias. They say in Syria, as well as, more believably in Iraq. I don't know who they're fighting in Syria, who they're bombing in Syria. I don't know if you do, but, and then they say that if any of our guys, many of whom have already been wounded, the Americans, I believe told the Washington Times that, yes, it was the Times, it was Peter Baker and the New York Times, that they think that if Americans are killed in Iraq, that they'll be politically compelled then to hit the Ayatollah in Iran, which really threatens to spread the thing and turn it into.

an absolute just regional war America and Israel versus the Shiites and then who knows what right and there are a fair number of Shiites in Lebanon in Syria in Iraq and Iran northern Yemen

I mean they're all over the place and this would be miles bigger problem than just a second war with Hezbollah if they had to contend with three or four fronts all at once. Israel definitely can't handle that. And the U.S. will certainly be

dragged into the middle of it. And I'm not sure the U.S. is ready to handle it. But it seems like the only reason they've even kept troops in Iraq is for the sake of getting them attacked so they have a pretext to retaliate. Yeah. I like this. The prime minister of Iraq now. His first name is Shia, Shia al-Sudani, and he's from the Supreme Islamic Council, right? Right. Which goes back to 2007. I remember Seymour Herschin, some preparing the battlefield, or one of those from the great series of 07, where forgot his source.

I think an American general told him, man, if we hit Iran, south of Iraq is going to go up like a candle. All of our guys will be at risk. in other words it would be for people who saw Star Wars 3 or the clones shoot all the Jedi in the back all our guys were embedded with the Shiites fighting a war for them they're all going to get killed by their allies if we hit their friends next door

and same thing here fewer Americans to be killed but the same deal that if it came with a real you know they can hit I don't know they say they're associated militias in Iraq and then the government protests But that can get much worse, and especially if they really hit Iran, then it could be a situation where the government in Baghdad says that's it. And they turn the army that Petraeus built and start marching on American bases, kick our asses out of there.

Right. And it seems like it's only a matter of time before they put their foot down about kicking the Americans out. They've tried to do it before. They tried to do it with the assassination of the Iranian june. General Soleimani, and the U.S. simply said at the time, no, we're not leaving. But I'm not sure that that's going to work forever. Sooner or later, Iraq is going to say, okay, no, you are leaving one way or another. It's funny, you know, just trying to imagine the worst case scenario here where never even mind, you know, Douglas McGregor says, points out that Russia and China would have a big interest in backing Iran, even if quietly, in the event that all this breaks out.

But even putting that aside, trying to imagine what a war with the Shiite Crescent alliance would look like and over time, I mean, obviously they're going to try to do the Rumsfeld Doctrine, which would not be the way they invaded it. Iraq, but the way Rumsfeld wished they had invaded Iraq, which would be special operations forces and air power mostly. But they're going to fight Hezbollah and the Syrian Arab Army, which, by the way, is majority, Sunni, but under Alawite leadership and part of the alliance with Iran and the Iraqi army and militias and the Houthis. And they're just going to have to withdraw from some of these places and just send him B-52s, I guess. I don't know what's going to happen.

They had to withdraw from Yemen a few years back when that Saudi war first started because there's just no safe place for American troops to remain there anymore. No, that's the other thing, right? And this is the big issue in 07. When Cheney and Petraeus were pushing so hard for strikes in Iran, the chief said no because our Al-Ulid Air Base in Qatar sent com headquarters and a massive air base would be destroyed

and same for the fifth fleet at Bahrain and economic target and whatever bases in UAE and Saudi and economic targets up and down the Gulf all our troops in Kuwait

and then 100,000 plus in Iraq at that time but still same difference if Hezbollah has tens of thousands of missiles then how many does Iran have that can reach across the Gulf and completely destroy

you know People put those funny maps out of how come Iran put their country so close to all these American military bases, you know, that aggression. But really, you know, our guys are in a way, there's shields preventing war. It's like having Israeli settlers in Gaza before the withdrawal of disengagement of 05. They're kind of preventing the worst persecution of those people there. And it's like if our guys start withdrawing from around the region, that might open up the problem. possibility of worse intervention in a way, you know? Yeah, it very well might. And like you say, Russia and China surely will be backing the

Iranians if this blows up into a full-scale regional war. And it's hard to blame them, because after all, from Russia's perspective, look at what's happening in Ukraine. The U.S. and other Western countries can't wait to throw money at Ukraine to fight the Russians. So it would only make sense that the Russians would do the exact same thing in Iran. Yeah, that wouldn't take much to help them. People just look at a map, think about how much harder it would be to tackle that country. And that's the thing of it is the chiefs know that the worst they could do is an air war against them and a missile war against them. They can't march an army into Iran.

No, Iran is huge. Yeah, but can you even really launch anything? but missile strikes in there because there's the obvious question of air power getting blast out of the sky because you need a pretty substantial invasion of

special operations forces with laser designators to take out all that anti-aircraft you know to lace those targets for the initial salvos to open up the airspace for more and worse and I think there's a real question

whether they could even get that done how many men is so calm willing to lose to try to take persia i mean you're talking about some d-day level i mean there's no way they want to do that um i don't know or then again who knows what they think that they can get away with you know with all their fancy lockheed products and so forth that they have such confidence in right and uh you can just imagine what a mess It's going to be the Iranian response alone if they get attacked all of a sudden. Suddenly, that religious ban on creating nuclear weapons might not seem so pressing if they know that having nuclear weapons is the reason the U.S. doesn't attack North Korea and the reason they haven't attacked other nuclear powers. Yep.

Hey, y'all, Scott here. Let me tell you about Roberts and Roberts, Brokerage, Inc. Who knew? Artificial bank credit expansion leads to price inflation and terribly distorted markets. If you've got any savings left at all, you need to protect them. You need to put some at least into precious metals. Well, Roberts and Roberts can set you up with the best deals on silver, gold, platinum, and palladium. And they've been doing this since 1977. Hey, if you just need some sound advice about sound money, they're there for you too. Call Tim Fry and the guys at 800-874-97760. That's 800-874-9760, or check them out at r-rbi.co.

That's r-r-rbi.com. You'll be glad you did. Hey, y'all, you should sign up for my substack. It's Scott Horton's show.substack.com, and if you do that, you'll get the interviews a day before everybody else. But not only that, they'll be free of commercials. How do you like that? Pretty good, huh? Scott Horton's show.substack.com.

Hey, y'all, Libertasbella.com is where you get Scott Horton Show and Libertarian Institute, shirts, sweatshirts, mugs, and stickers and things, including the great top lobstas designs as well. See, that way it says on your shirt, why you're so smart. Libertas Bella, from the same great folks who bring you ammo.com for all your ammunition needs, too. That's libretasbella.com. What did your ancestors really do all day? Beyond names, what were their lives like? With Ancestry's global historical records,

you can discover incredible stories about how your ancestors lived and worked. And for a limited time, you can explore select occupation records for free. Imagine finding your great-grandfather's RCP records or discovering your ancestors' name in the UK and Ireland Nursing Register. Don't miss out. Free access ends August 24th. Visit Ancestry.ca for more details. Terms apply.

And right now they've settled for a latent nuclear deterrent and have hoped that that would be good enough, as you have demonstrated so many millions of times in print at ANIWOR.com over the years. They still have not made a move toward a nuke, although, you know, I got a new thing from the arms control administration my email this morning that had the IAEA complaining that they left out this part in brackets due to America's sabotage of the nuclear. deal that America had pursued and gotten passed there under Barack Obama, now the Iranian nuclear program is advancing at full speed and they're producing a lot of 60%. I don't know how much really. I bet you know the details, how much really they're producing, but it's enough to make everybody very worried and it's probably enough to be interpreted as them taunting us that, look, man, don't make us enrich up to weapons grade because you know that we can. And if they bury their facility deep enough under a mountain, they can do it in a way that we just can't stop them from doing it.

So the status quo is bad enough, Jason, but I got real reason. I think we all got real reason to worry here. And even though this is a real important point, too, is it is clear, kind of, sort of, that Biden mostly, right, doesn't want to spread this thing into regional war. he probably is counseling israeli restraint at the same time though he is hitting the houthis and is hitting uh shiites in iraq and syria and i think nasrallah and the ayatola have both shown that they mostly don't want to fight but nasrallah certainly demonstrated that he will as you have documented here hasbala has hit some pretty important targets in israel and pretty hard in the last few months here

and so I don't know you know Las Vegas odds and that kind of thing but seems like we're really in danger of this thing spiraling out of control possibly despite everybody's

intentions you know they want to keep the thing more narrowly focused to Gaza but it's already spilling over it's been spilling over so I don't know what's to stop it from getting that much worse, you know? I don't know. Right. That's the, that's the worst part is that this is a war that doesn't need to happen. We absolutely have the Ayatollah and even Hezbollah

saying, no, we don't need a war. We could be talked out of it. We just have to be a little reasonable. And the idea that the United States is going to be reasonable with these nations after decades of hawkish comments just it's a little scary to think that that's not even on the table to be reasonable with them well if you think that netting yahoo has any kind of long-term plan which may be a stretch but he certainly browbeat trump into withdrawing from the jCPOA deal in 2018 which leads only really one conclusion right his narrative was that that deal will never hold them. They must be confronted and destroyed.

Either their regime or at least their nuclear program must be completely destroyed with violent force because deals and inspection regimes can never get the job done. And so he's got a plan to make sure that one way or another, this really does turn into an American war with Iran, now may be his opportunity to see.

see it through. Right. And Israel has been kind of egging the U.S. on to go to war with Iran for many, many years. We had Naftali Bennett, the former prime minister, saying in an op-ed that was published not that long ago, saying this is the war that America needs to be fighting. he was saying, well, Israel needs to focus on Hezbollah and Syria and things like that, and maybe not so much on Hamas. Hamas is kind of a distraction from the real fight against the Shiites.

But he is also clear that when it comes to Iraq and Iran and fighting the major Shiite nations, that's America's job. And it's just a question of convincing. America of that fact man and then who's calling the shots i mean i guess it's still biden but he can only pay so much attention and blinking you know i know is his trusted guy but he's only at state he's not in the white house all day every day which means what is where his chief of staff and his national security visor hillary clinton's man sullivan agree or nobody really knows exactly

like who's even calling these shots or you know it seems like where Biden does call the shots all he can say is just keep cranking it up to 11 whatever Netanyahu wants whatever recovery he needs although I guess like we're talking about he's urged some restraint in Lebanon here supposedly

possibly but I don't know there's some I know Kyle has been keeping track of this and Adam Johnson as well, all the different times that the Biden government has claimed to have told the Israelis that we want them to scale things back and then just keep shipping them tons and tons, 10,000 tons of weapons so far, according to the Israeli media, just since October the 7th, which is talk about a blank check, you know, they might as well say, yeah,

we have a deal where we sometimes pretend to publicly reprimand them a little bit, but we don't mean it. You know, I mean, it's as obvious as that. I mean, it's absolutely, you can see why they're urging restraint for Lebanon and other nations that Israel might want to attack because if they do attack them and things get out of control, it very quickly becomes America's fight because they've been backing Israel from the beginning. And Gaza is kind of a safe enough choice for the Americans. I mean, they just have to deflect accusations of genocide and human rights violations. And Lord knows they've done that with

Israel for years anyway. So stepping in and saying, oh, the 25,000 or 30 or 40,000 or however many it is killed in Gaza. It's not that big a deal. It's a military goal. Yeah. Yep, sure seems to be the way it's going.

And then it's funny to read in the Post and the Times and everywhere, the Wall Street Journal and whatever, everybody's very open about this, not, you know, including government officials, not just the reporters, but the government officials talking to them that everybody can see the public choice theory in this. the worse it is the better it is for benjamin netanyahu his interests do not necessarily align

with the interests of the people of israel much less the united states of america oh right he's politically before the gaza war he was kind of dead in the water those that was like he's on his way out you know he's getting older he's not really as popular a leader as you once was, even though every election, he seems to drift farther and farther to the right and pander to the worst impulses of settlers trying to get a few more seats for Le Cood. But at this point, it seems like the only way he can pander any more than he already has is to start wars. And that seems like he's going to do it if that means saving his pulse. political knack yeah you know all these stories where Biden is saying well you better create a

Palestinian state after this and then him saying no to me that seems like a dog and pony show there where the Americans are only saying that just to give him the ammo the excuse to say see everybody the Americans and the Europeans and the leftists they'll all try to make us give up a Palestinian state. Only I can prevent that. Only I have the political chops to keep them at bay and prevent that from being forced on us. Any of these lesser men as PM will have to give in, right? Doesn't that seem fake? Especially coming from Joe Biden. It does. I mean, for decades, the United States has given lip service to a Palestinian state. But whenever things really, when push comes to shove on the matter, if Israel says no, that's good

enough for them. And Biden has been such a lifelong politician. It's clear he's intimately involved in the status quo of the occupation and supporting the Israeli war efforts. So I don't think if even public opinion starts to sway toward a Palestinian state, I don't think Biden can be counted on to make too much of a push on that matter. Yeah, certainly not. And you could see where maybe he's remembering some talking points from previously or whatever, but he certainly doesn't have any heart behind it. It's always going to be whatever.

and you know who wants ultimately um well now so can you talk to rewind back to the beginning here can you get into some of the details of some of the strikes you mentioned some of the assassinations but can you talk about the strikes on the military bases and then the israeli strikes back and just how bad that has been or not i think you mentioned this dIA report that warns that the Israelis aren't going to be able to handle this? Yeah, the Hezbollah fire has focused a great deal on an air, strategic air base on Mount Marin, and they've been hitting it with rockets and doing massive amounts of damage in the first attack, and they've launched a second round of attacks over the last 48 hours.

We haven't really heard how much damage that's done, but they sure see. to be good at hitting runways and hitting radar and all the things at the air base. So Israel responds by firing airstrikes into tiny little Lebanese villages in the south. And they say they're killing Hezbollah terrorists. And you have to remember, Hezbollah is practically a part of the Lebanese government as it is. So when they blow up a medical clinic, even if it's an Islamic medical clinic and they kill a couple of Hezbollah members that happen to be working at the clinic, they're not really killing terrorists. They're killing a couple of paramedics. Yeah.

Well, they kill a bunch of journalists and all kinds of. of people things just nuts um well i don't know you want to put odds on this whole thing turning into a massive regional war that make george w bush blush well it certainly is a potential there uh the reports i'm hearing say israel's giving the u.s until the end of the month to try to negotiate some sort of deal with lebanon to prevent the ground war but chances are even if they come up with a deal israel's going to reject it anyway and launch the ground war as it is i mean they don't send tens of thousands of troops to the north to prepare for an invasion with any intention of not invading when uh when they decide they want to

yeah all right man well i'll tell you i'm happy to have you back covering the bad news for us it's great to be back yeah we missed you dude um okay you guys it's the great jason did he is senior editor now at antiwar dot com news dot antiwar dot com and he's especially been keeping very close track of all the cummins and goins and fighting back and forth on israel's northern border on that part of this war so thank you again man good to talk to you jason yeah thank you for having me. The Scott Horton show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on K-P-F-K 90.7 FM in LA. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, Scotthorton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.