Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 1/26/23 Kyle Anzalone on Escalations over Ukraine and Zelensky’s “Anti-Corruption” Measures

Episode Date: January 28, 2023

Kyle Anzalone joined Scott on Antiwar Radio this week to go over some of the week's biggest stories. They talked about the German Foreign Minister’s admission that NATO is fighting a war against Russia. Of course we all know that’s the case, but Scott and Anzalone discuss why it’s a big deal that the FM said it out loud and on the record. They then talk about the deal to send heavy tanks to Ukraine and the immediate pivot made by Kyiv and its western supporters to now push for sending F-16 fighters. They put these escalations in context and also discuss weapons company lobbying, the Doomsday Clock and Zelensky’s apparent anti-corruption maneuvers.  Discussed on the show: “German FM Says ‘We are Fighting a War Against Russia’” (Antiwar.com) “Lockheed Says It’s Ready With F-16s If US and Allies Choose to Send Them to Ukraine” (Antiwar.com) Conflicts of Interest Foxes watching the hen house? DC insiders oversee Biden defense plans (Responsible Statecraft) More of Eli Clifton’s Reporting at Responsible Statecraft Kyle Anzalone is news editor of the Libertarian Institute, opinion editor of Antiwar.com and co-host of Conflicts of Interest with Will Porter and Connor Freeman. Follow him on Twitter @KyleAnzalone_ This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; 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

For Pacifica Radio, January the 26th, 2003. I'm Scott Horton. This is Anti-War Radio. All right, y'all welcome the show. It is Anti-War Radio. I'm your host, Scott Horton. I'm the editorial director of Anti-War.com and editor-of-War.com and editor of the new book, Potter than the Sun. Time to abolish nuclear weapons. You find my full interview

archive, more than 5,800 of them now, going back to 2003 at Scott Horton.org and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton's show. And you can follow me on Twitter, if you dare, at Scott Horton's show. All right, introducing our first guest today. It's Kyle Anzalone. He's opinion editor at anti-war.com. Welcome back to the show. How you doing, Kyle? doing great scott thanks for having me back on the show i'm really happy to have you here hoping we can start off by catching up on the bad news top headline on antiwar dot com right now german foreign minister says we are fighting a war against russia you don't say huh yeah bad news but a big omission here because you know those of us who have been covering and talking about the war have

known that this is, you know, has surpassed a proxy war, particularly over the past couple of weeds with the announcements of, you know, sending Maine battle tanks to Ukraine, the striker, the Bradley fighting vehicles, and talking about ramping up production of our, you know, ability to produce artillery shells by 500 percent. And this is going to take a couple of years, Scott, but the plan is to use this for the war. So, you know, we're just getting from the German for a minister what the rest of us already knew, but it's still a really big deal for such a ranking official to say this. And I'm sure we're going to see a reaction from the Kremlin. Yeah. Now, General Millie, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff, and I think, again,

it's fair to say speaking for the rest of the chiefs, too, said last week that he doesn't see how the Ukrainians are going to, I believe the quote was, dislodge the Russians from eastern Ukraine. so he said you know the way things are going the war is going to continue going on for years and that sounded like a warning something to avoid rather than just you know a diagnosis of the situation but more confirmation really that you know our military cease this contest as a unmovable force versus immovable object type situation the russians can't conquer all of ukraine hell they can't even conquer all of the east but nor can the ukrainians drive them out. So we're supposed to just keep this thing going for another year or two or three somehow? That's what they're talking about in Washington, D.C., huh? Yeah, and maybe even longer, Scott, because it now seems that the White House is relapsing on the idea of attacking Crimea, and there's new discussions in the White House about helping Ukraine to attack Crimea. And so, you know, the ambitions are not getting any more realistic, but actually

quite a bit more extreme, especially from the, you know, Washington Kiev side of this war. And, you know, with how much they're ramping up production. And again, this is going to take years. They're sinking billions of dollars in this. And it's going to take years. And so they're really anticipating that they're going to need, you know, to be able to send Ukraine 90,000 plus artillery shells every month, two years from now. Yeah. And you know what?

if it's just a rip off and, you know, the military industrial complex has to make their money, that's one thing. They're really planning on this war lasting for another couple of years. I got news for the radio audience here today. We'll all be dead by then. There's no way that this war is going to continue on for years longer without this escalating into a major power conflict between NATO and Russia. Absolutely, Scott.

And, you know, especially how fast the escalation. are now coming from the West. You know, this week we had the big announcement of the Abrams tains, the Challenger Taints, the Leopard Tanes, the main fighting tains from the main European and American, the NATO powers. But now, you know, we're having renewed conversation about Lockheed Martin from Lockheed Martin and saying they're ready to meet the F-16 demands for the U.S. and its allies so they could ship them to Ukraine.

And this is something that I've been talking about a little bit on my show, conflicts of interest over the past couple of weeks because the Pentagon recently was looking at a Boeing plan that would put rocket motors onto small diameter bombs and then shoot those up high enough that they could use guided systems to hit targets. Well, the Pentagon is saying that that's going to be a redundant technology, and I think that means they're planning on just putting those small diameter bombs on the planes, which is the typical way those ordinances are delivered to their targets. And so that would make the rocket motors completely unnecessary, the Boeing plan completely

unnecessary. So I do think that this is on the horizon, too. And you know, if it was right, the honor general dynamics or anybody else, it'd be a little bit different. But we all know the history here of Bruce Jackson, the executive vice president of Lockheed, was the founder of the committee on NATO expansion. And the whole thing was a racket. The whole thing was about getting rid of airplanes.

If the Eastern European nations can afford them, the American taxpayers can. And so, you know, to get to the point now where Lockheed is saying, hey, we got plenty of F-16s to go ahead and transfer on for use in Ukraine is no surprise. This is the culmination of Lockheed's, a.k.a. America's foreign policy. Right. And there's been some great articles this week at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft by you like Clifton and Ben Armbruster. and then we're going to have one in anti-war.com this weekend by Guy Somerset, going over how, you know, these military industrial complex, these weapons makers are funding the think tanks and those think tanks are then informing our politicians on what they should believe on this war. And so, of course, if Lockheed Martin says, you know, they're ready to sell F-16s, I'm sure that means they've told all these groups that they give large chats to that, hey, we're ready to sell F-16s, and we're going to start to see more articles. from people like Kimberly Kagan and Jack Keene telling us, oh, it's a really big deal that we get those episodes teens to Ukraine in the coming months.

Yeah, give me just a minute here. At the Libertarian Institute, we published books, real good ones. So far we've got Will Griggs-Snow Quarter. Sheldon Richmond's coming to Palestine and what social animals owe to each other. And four of mine. Fool's Aaron, enough already, the great Ron Paul, and my brand new one, Hotter than the Sun. Time to abolish nuclear weapons. And I'm happy to announce that we've just published our managing editor Keith Knight's first one,

The Voluntarius Handbook, an excellent collection of essays by the world's greatest libertarian thinkers and writers, including me. Check them all out at libertarian institute.org slash books. And for a limited time, signed copies of enough already and hotter than the Sun are available at Scott Horton.org slash books. Hey guys, I had some wasps in my house So I shot them to death with my trusty bug assault 3.0 model With the improved salt reservoir and bar safety I don't have a deal with them

But the show does earn a kickback every time you get a bug assault Or anything else you buy from Amazon.com By way of the link in the right-hand margin on the front page at Scott Horton.org So keep that in mind And don't worry about the mess, your wife will clean it up And boy, you know, they were talking before about, geez, we would never send in battle tanks. I mean, that would be an escalation.

That would make us co-belligerence. Joe Biden whispered loudly into a microphone. That would mean World War III. And now they're going for it. But that's nothing compared to throwing in F-16s. Yeah, this seems like a huge escalation that's going to happen. And we haven't even seen really what Russia is going to, their full response to the. the sending the taints in because of course none of them have arrived to ukraine uh but just in

the hours after the announcement uh there's been some pretty heavy bombing of ukraine's infrastructure by russia uh which seems to be a response to the the western announcement of the tanks going in and you know the ukrainians presumably still have thousands of tanks left over from the soviet union and why i mean obviously they're not as high quality supposedly as whatever the these German leopards are, but they have thousands of them still just sitting in storage. And yet it's the height of importance that they get these Western tanks by the dozens. Do you know, what's the supposed trick there? You know, I've seen a lot of speculation around Scott that the idea is you want Russians blowing up Western made equipment and that those visuals will help to propel the war among the Western audience.

Or not. I mean, I saw Representative Massey say this will be a humiliation when we have footage of our best tanks in, you know, burning husks all over the ground over there in Ukraine. It's going to cost us. Never mind, literally costing us our tanks. It's going to essentially be revealing of the lack of American power and ability to change the circumstances on the ground there when they do this. So. But again, I guess, fine, just more fodder for the next argument for more escalation. Well, that's why we need F-16s. Hell, that's why we need B-1 bombers. Hell, let's just nuke St. Petersburg. I don't know. That's the scale that they're on. That's why they call it an escalatory spiral.

Yeah. And, Scott, there's a new report from the bulletin of atomic scientist out this week, and they move the doomsday clot 10 seconds closer to midnight. So it's now at 90 seconds to midnight. That's the closest point in the history of the group doing the doomsday clock. And a lot of what they contributed to is the war in Ukraine, the refusal of the West to engage in tots. But a lot of the concern in the report is around the fact that there's no one way to unwind this conflict or to de-escalate it. And so, you know, there's no tots going on.

Nuclear Accords have already been ripped up. It doesn't look like there's going to be tots on. the new start or replacing the new start treaty anytime soon. And so even if, you know, the world gets lucky and we skirt disaster in Ukraine, it's not like there's a way to wind down nuclear tensions between Russia and the West. And, you know, we've seen heightened tensions now in Serbia and Kosovo. And, of course, we're looking at, you know, bringing more states into NATO. You know, we reasserted Georgia could come into NATO.

We're looking at Finland and Sweden. And so there's plenty of potential conflict places between Russia and the West in the years to come with no ability for the two sides to de-escalate the situation whatsoever. Yeah, it's really something else. We would need a full-scale regime change here and probably there for the two governments to be able to sit down and talk again. And it doesn't look like Putin's going anywhere. It doesn't look like the American national security regime is going anywhere. But, of course, it would be the right thing to do.

All the good liberals remember, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton announced their reset, they wanted to get along with Russia. Was that treason? Or they were trying to do the right thing, but the neocons undermined him, you know? Well, Hillary herself undermined it all, but Obama was clearly trying to get along with Putin and got his, you know, worked with him on Syria, worked with him on Iran, and it was the neocons who ruined everything with this coup in 2014. But anyway, listen, it's anti-war radio. I'm talking with Kyle Anzalone here. And to wrap up, can you talk a little bit about this corruption scandal that has rocked Ukraine as the headline reads here? Yeah. So, you know, I have a lot of

questions about what's really going on here. If this is a political move by Zelensky to consolidate power, if it's a way for him to try to signal to the West that he's attempting to bring Kiev up to the standards of maybe the European Union or NATO, because both, of these groups often aside the corruption in Ukraine being too high for Kiev to become official member of those organizations. But there has been well known for a long time, particularly if you read articles dated before was at February 24th, 2022, they regularly refer to Kiev as being the most corrupt European country or the most corrupt country in like, you know, the NATO sphere and things like that. And now Zelensky, you know, fired a bunch of deputy ministers and then a bunch

of heads of different governance. But a lot of those were in regions that Russia had made gains in and had control for a certain period of time. So again, I kind of suspect that this is somewhat, something of a power grab on Zelensky's side, probably a little bit of a PR move from the Ukrainian state. There's plenty of corruption to clean up there. So they pick out a few deputy ministers. They call it a high-ranking thing. And then, you know, now they have a better case to join these international organizations. But it's certainly probably going to cause quite a few problems within Ukraine administratively as, you know, they love to get new people in these positions. Yeah, that's the whole thing about all these anti-corruption drives. We saw this in

Saudi Arabia, right? Oh, Muhammad bin Salman is launching a massive anti-corruption drive. Well, let's see. is that because he's against corruption or he just wants to arrest his cousin and take his place as crown prince so it's the same kind of thing going on here obviously Right and that doesn't mean that cousin isn't corrupt

Right of course But Mohammed bin Salomon is corrupt as well And we know Zelensky is very corrupt himself Well listen we better run We're all out of time here But thank you so much for your time And all your great work at antiwar.com Kyle Thanks Scott

All right you guys That is Kyle Anne Zillan, Opinion Editor at Anti-War.com. All right, y'all, and that's it for Anti-War Radio for today. I'm your host, Scott Horton, editorial director of anti-war.com, an editor of the new book, Hotter Than the Sun. Time to abolish nuclear weapons. Find my full interview archive, more than 5,800 of them now,

going back to 2003 at Scott Horton.org, and follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton's show. I'm here every Thursday from 230 to 3 on KPFK, 90.7 FM, in L.A. See you next week.