Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 3/23/23 Kyle Anzalone on Somalia, Ukraine and the Growing Alliance Between Russia and China

Episode Date: March 25, 2023

Kyle Anzalone was back on Antiwar Radio this week to run through some of the most important foreign policy news. They talked about the famine in Somalia, the ongoing War on Terror, the state of the war in Ukraine, the permanent U.S. garrison being established in Poland, how China and Russia are growing closer, the false notion that Biden is soft on China and the anniversary of the beginning of Iraq War II.  Discussed on the show: “The UN Has a Plan to Curb Hunger But the EU Won’t Lift Sanctions” (Libertarian Institute) “U.S. Government to Blame for Somalia’s Misery” (The Future of Freedom Foundation) “With scant options in Ukraine, U.S. and allies prepare for long war” (Washington Post) “Another Failed 20-Year War: America vs. Somalia” (Antiwar.com) “Why Ukraine may embrace China’s peace plan” (Asia Times) “Ron DeSantis Is Right About Ukraine” (The Atlantic) “Army Establishes First Permanent Garrison on NATO’s Eastern Flank” (Libertarian Institute) “Iraq War II – 20 Years Later” (Antiwar.com) Scott’s Iraq War II series on Substack Scott’s Twitter thread about the run-up to Iraq War II 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, March 23rd, 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 editorial director of anti-war.com. an editor of the book, hotter than the sun. Time to abolish nuclear weapons. You can 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 Show. All right, today's guest again is the great Kyle Anselaone opinion editor at anti-war.com and news editor over at the Institute. welcome back to the show Kyle how you doing man doing very well Scott thanks for having me back on really great to have you here and we have so much important news to talk about but I want to start with Somalia you know way back when I first started

on KPFK in 2010 I tried to point out to people just how bad George W. Bush and Barack Obama's war in Somalia was that's 13 years ago and in fact it was 10 years ago that I wrote my article for FFF called U.S. Government to Blame for Somalia's misery about how it was really George W. Bush's dirty war and by that time Barack Obama's dirty war that had caused the drought to cause a real famine in that country because it was the war that prevented trade from making up for the damage caused by the drought, which had hit all of East Africa. but by 2013 Kyle the fuse net which is an NGO supported by the US and UK so against interest in a sense there reported that they thought a quarter of a million people had died and that was the first major famine there was another one in 2017 and now you're reporting this week there's another major famine in Somalia now Somalia still at war under the authority of Joe Biden. Biden, after Donald Trump tried on his last day or something to end the war and was overruled, the war continues, the famine continues, and there's a new UN report about it. So please let us know here. Yes, Scott. And that article that you wrote for FFF a decade ago is so important. And it's, I think, part of the reason why myself and Dave DeCamp at anti-war.com spend so much time covering

Somalia because not only do we understand the U.S. role in this war, but, you know, It's just I'm not starting from zero as so many people are when it comes to Somalia as far as their knowledge goes. So it's really hard to understand what's happening there today. But a year ago, I actually wrote an article in the United Nations was predicting that there would be a famine in Somalia. At the end of the time, they said there was well over a million people that would experience severe malnutrition in Somalia last year. now the actual famine i guess label that you know however they calculate that was pushed off and so they say there's not an official famine but 43,000 somalis died last year and half of those are children under five years old and that has died of starvation or as results of the famine you know i'm sure

there's other officials maybe cause of the death in some of these cases but that's the estimate And then they are saying that in the first half of 20, 23, it could be over 30,000 additional people starve to death or circumcumpt from the famine drought conditions in Somalia, along with all the instability, of course, caused by Joe Biden ramping up the war in that country. Yeah, this is obvious. We've known this for a full year going on. I'm certain people can find in the Washington Post the search term that you need there is countenance. the biden administration is willing to countenance increased hunger in the global south in order to enforce their sanctions against russia and now there have been deals where i guess the turks made a deal for the ukrainians and the russians to cooperate on exporting some wheat out of there but obviously

the war itself obviously the russians have their share of the blame in that but on top of whatever disruptions were going to happen from these two major wheat producing and exporting nations. You have the United States of America coming in and, you know, through its treasury, doing everything they can to shut down Russian trade to punish the Russians. And if that means more people go hungry, even starving to death or deprived to death like in Somalia, the Biden administration is willing to quote, countenance that the post reported a year ago. And we recently had that agreement extended by 30 days to continue the shipping out of the, the Bled Sea ports of Ukraine, agricultural products from, you know, both Russia and Ukrainian.

But, you know, the Russia really has a problem with how that deal is being implemented. And so, you know, several times this has been extended. This last time, it almost wasn't extended. But the extensions only for 60 days. And the Kremlin says, you know, the reason they're not extending it further is the way that the Western Sanctions are being applied. It's cutting against the initial agreement that was made between Russia, Turkey, and Ukraine. Yeah. And by the way, so if people want to go and, you know, look up a little bit more of the background of the story of the war in Somalia, if you go to or just type in my name, Scott Horton and FFF, you'll find that article from 10 years ago. But if you just look at my name, Scott Horton on anti-war.com, you'll see just a few articles ago I had reprinted my chapter on Somalia from my book enough already there.

So it's, you know, I don't know, 10 or 20,000 words on the subject or the background of all of this. It literally is America's longest foreign war, begun by George W. Bush in December of 2001. He sent the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command to start back in warlords killing people. before the end of the first year, the terror war there, the first few months of the terror war, before New Year's. And so, you know, it wasn't long after we pulled out of Afghanistan in 2021. And just a couple of months later, Somalia officially passed Afghanistan as America's longest foreign war. And then, you know what?

It is important that Donald Trump, according, again to the Washington Post, just through frustration because he probably didn't even know where Somalia was, He, and this is according to James Mattis, that Trump said, I want to get out of there. Why are we in Somalia? I just want to leave there. And that Mattis told him, no, we're there to prevent another Times Square attack, which if anyone knows anything about the Times Square attack, it was, which failed, luckily, in 2010, that that was a direct retaliation for a drone strike in Pakistan. So there's, it's a complete non-sequitur to say, using drones to murder Somalis will prevent

terrorism. That's what causes terrorism. And then secondly, he said, and this is again, Washington Post Secretary Defense Mattis to President Trump, you have no choice. And then what did Trump do? Salute and click his heels and obey orders from the guy that works for him. And so we're in Somalia to this day. Again, he tried to pull out at the – he gave orders to get out at the very end of his presidency and then Biden just overturned it.

Right. And from what the Pentagon has said that, you know, missions in Somalia really didn't decrease at that time, the Afriqom said that they had just been commuting to work after the Trump, you know, they, so they went to, I think mostly Kenya, and then they were just helicoptering to Mugendishu or whatever they were going to do in that country anyways. And I'm sure, you know, wherever they're based in Mugendishu, they probably take a helicopter at any time they leave. So it really probably didn't change things all too much for the situation in Somalia for those

like probably 18 months. that U.S. troops weren't officially stationed there. Yeah. And I know the war on terrorism seems like it's a previous generation, but it's not over yet. We still got troops in Iraq. We still got troops in, and I don't know if they're really going on missions against ISIS anymore, if they're just, you know, holding up in Kurdistan there in Iraq. They're certainly going on missions against ISIS in Syria, at least from time to time. They're still bombing Somalia, and they're bombing AQAP in Yemen, again,

because we're switching sides in the Yemen war and the war against al-Qaeda there was much less destructive than the last eight years of war for al-Qaeda there has been but if you go back to the 2009 through 15 terror war there before we switch sides

it was horrific enough and you know by our Pentagon's lights the long war is exactly that they're not done there yet Socom has to do something or they'll have to get jobs So the war on terrorism, if that means, you know, against sub-state Sunni groups with rifles somewhere in the Middle East in North Africa, then it's not over yet by a long shot. In fact, the Senate just voted down an attempt by Rand Paul and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and others to repeal the AUMF of 2001.

And yeah, they got nine votes for it in the U.S. Senate. The rest of the U.S. Senate says, nope, the terror war stays. so it feels like it's over you know compared to say the height of iraq war two or something like that and the level of news coverage but it is absolutely not over yet all right now it's anti-war radio i'm scott horton talking with kyle an zalone and um we're talking about the bad news american foreign policy um now let's talk about the war in ukraine of course that's the big one the fight over Bakhmut in the east continues. And I guess part of the news is not just the news,

but it's that the news is being reported, Kyle. And places like the Washington Post, again, are finally starting to admit what critics have been saying for quite a while now about that war. Yeah. So in particular with the fight for Bakhmut, we're having more and more sources say that, you know, this is a meat grinder that,

Ukraine is at spending a lot of soldiers and everything in the in weapons here and that it's not sustainable and so Russia continues to gain territory around the city but I'm not exactly sure how close they are to taking it there's a lot of other fighting going on in Ukraine as well a lot of people dying and as you mentioned a lot more honesty around the whole idea that you know Ukraine has lost a lot of their most experienced fighters and now they're just throwing conscripts onto the front lines that are poorly trained and not prepared whatsoever. Yeah.

It's really a horrible war. I mean, picture, you know, audience, whatever you saw from, I mean, hell, you can look it up on telegram and watch it yourself. But, you know, if you think of like a World War I movie, artillery shells going off everywhere, tank warfare, people being blown to bits, pink mist where your best friend was standing a second ago, that kind of thing. That's what's happening.

It's just an absolute horror show beyond any, you know kind of nightmare you could have is what the fighting is going on there and now it's important that there's this piece in asia times about chatham house that's the royal institute for international affairs essentially the british version of the council on foreign relations and they have you know what they call chatham house rules just like at the cfr where they have you know not secret but private meetings where everybody's encouraged to say whatever's on your mind and everybody promises not to rat on you to the newspapers later for having a controversial opinion, something like this. So the guy didn't attribute names to statements, but he reported on this overall meeting

at Chatham House there in London and how all of the people participating in the panel were hawks and all of them were recommending that America and or Britain double down, triple down, create a foreign legion of some kind, pour more weapons in, but that by the end of the meeting, it had essentially been made clear that everyone agreed Ukraine cannot win this war. So that just seems like something that they, you know, critics like Colonel McGregor said a year ago, and sooner or later, the Russians are going to win this thing. And, you know, we're essentially just expending Ukrainian lives to hurt Russia when we're not really protecting Ukraine from them at all. which is, you know, quite contrary to what the narrative on TV has been.

That's for sure, Kyle. Yeah, and I just read an article from the Atlantic from this week where the author essentially emits that, you know, what the U.S. is doing only prolongs the war. You know, there's no solution here with what the U.S. is providing support for Ukraine, that they win this war. And so, you know, we have more and more emissions that this really is just about we can. mean Russia's got in that, you know, they want to drag this thing on as long as possible, but that's that that's about as much as Ukraine's going to get. Yeah, you know, it's interesting too that, you know, that article is in the Atlantic and the guy that wrote it, Loyola is his name, is from the foundation for defensive democracies

and saying, you know, so this is a group that's a neoconservative, very hawkish group. Now, maybe they just prefer that Israel get all the attention. instead of Eastern Europe or something, I don't know, but, you know, for those two to come together that way, the FDD and the Atlantic, to say, here's a little bit of reality on this story, is, you know, it's almost like blowing the whistle in a way compared to how powerful the common narrative has been. All right. Now, so talk about this piece that you wrote for the Institute, Army establishes first permanent garrison on NATO's eastern flank.

Right. So this is the first time there's a permanent in the, you know, officially permanent, Scott, deployment of U.S. troops to Poland. Now, there are about 10,000 U.S. troops in Poland, and they claim they're there on a rotational basis. So, you know, this is a lot of just a symbolic gesture towards Poland, but at the same time as the U.S. ambassador of Brzezinski or Zabind, sorry, said. And then also the Polish defense minister, you know, this is a historic step

that Washington is taking here because, you know, it's another case of voiding out agreements that were made with Moscow after the Cold War about how, you know, the military balance and situation in Europe would be handled. And the U.S. said that they wouldn't put permanent troops stationed in former Warsaw Pact or USSR countries. And now we have, you know, officially violating that agreement. Yeah, absolutely. Hang on just one second. Hey, y'all, the audiobook of my book, enough already.

Time to end the War on Terrorism is finally done. Yes, of course, read by me. It's available at Audible, Amazon, Apple Books, and soon on Google Play and whatever other options there are out there. It's my history of America's War on Terrorism from 1979 through today. Give it a listen and see if you agree. It's time to just come home. Enough already. Time to end the war on terrorism. The audiobook.

Hey guys, I've had a lot of great webmasters over the years, but the team at Expanddesigns.com have by far been the most competent and reliable. Harley Abbott and his team have made great sites for the show and the institute, and they keep them running well, suggesting and making improvements all along. Make a deal with Expandesigns.com for your new business or news site. They will take care of you. use the promo code Scott and save $500. That's expanddesigns.com. Man, I wish I was in school so I could drop out and sign up for Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom instead.

Tom has done such a great job on putting together a classical curriculum for everyone from junior high schoolers on up through the postgraduate level. And it's all very reasonably priced. Just make sure you click through from the link in the right margin at Scott Horton.org. Tom Woods's Liberty Classroom, real history, real economics, real education. And I love harping on this. I just think it's so telling that a year ago, or before the war, more than a year ago, when the Russians, as part of their demands, we're saying we want not only a halt to NATO expansion and declare neutrality for Ukraine and implement Minsk to and all that,

but we want you to pull your military forces in the new NATO member states, to where they were in 1997, like in the deal. And the entire Washington National Security Establishment and media establishment all said together, what? 1997, whatever is he talking about? And they might as well have been mentioning some deal that we had made back in 1897. Everybody knows that Bill Clinton's word means nothing. And in fact, 1997 is so long ago that they weren't even going to look it up to try to figure out what he was talking about.

The Russian NATO Council Founding Act never heard of it and not going to look into it. It's something that Putin brings up. It's something that sounds long enough ago now. Their reaction was simply to mock the Russians and laugh and act like this was the craziest thing in the war. Oh, my God, you believe this. he's bringing up this thing from 1997 now. Yeah, it was Bill Clinton's sacred oath for all that's worth. Yeah, and there's a little fat sheet on the NATO website where they claim that, you know,

no Western states ever agreed not to span NATO and no NATO members ever agreed not to establish permanent bases in, you know, these Eastern flighten countries. But obviously you could look back, see the documents and read the documents, and that's as NATO propaganda, but that's essentially how most Western media outlets cover things as they go on the NATO website. They read the fat sheet, and then that's their basis for the situation. Yep, simple as that. And by the way, the source for this is Michael McFall, so I know that he's a horrible liar, but this is certainly against interest, the former ambassador to Russia under Obama. He wrote in his book that Bill Clinton mocked the Russians for trusting him. And the

quote is he says, this is Clinton talking. He says, what the Russians get out of this great deal we're offering them. It doesn't sound like Bill Clinton talking. What the Russians get out of this great deal we're offering them is a chance to sit in the same room with NATO and join us whenever we all agree to something. But they don't have any ability to stop us from doing something that they don't agree with. He's talking about the Russian NATO Council. They can register their disapproval by walking out of the room. And for their second big, benefit. They get our promise that we're not going to put our military stuff into their former allies who are now going to be our allies unless we happen to wake up one morning

and decide to change our mind. That's Bill Clinton. That's the word of the United States of America. Biden comes and says, I don't even know what you're talking about. See, we woke up one morning and we decided to change our mind. Yeah. And, you know, this is a fantastic point that Daniel Larison made time and time again is any time the U.S. sanctions a country now, you know, the sanctions they claim are there to persuade the governments to adopt, you know, policies that the U.S. lights, either more democratic or just, you know, supporting the U.S. foreign policy. But anytime you sanction a country and then you take off the sanctions after that government concedes the U.S. demands and then you re-sansion or do the regime change anyways,

why would anybody make an agreement? And I think we're seeing a lot more of this in the world as the, you know, Brits, which is, you know, an economic or just a cooperation agreement, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, other, you know, non-Western-based organizations have more and more new members all the time, including countries like Turkey and Brazil and Mexico. Yep. It could get to a point. I don't know exactly what the balance is, where they really just don't need us anymore. I'm like, fine, you want to sanctioned the whole world into an economic group against you? We can do that. The Americans

are, you know, Washington, D.C. They're so myopic, you know, myopic that that's exactly what they'll do. I mean, you can read 10 articles this week saying, oh my God, it's just terrible how close Russia and China are getting right now. Well, how can anyone say that without saying that this is a direct result of the entire failure of the American foreign policy establishment to accomplish their goals. Personally, I don't give a damn, but they're the ones who say it's the worst thing in the world. Well, then isn't this all their fault? Why hasn't Tony Belincoln been able to prevent this from happening?

Instead, he's made it happen. So who the hell are they to complain? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, for how many years was Ray McGovern screaming to everyone that what the U.S. is doing is pushing Russia and China together and nobody listened or just mocked him, you know, the Biden administration in 2021, what was going to go to Russia and say, now we know you can't have a stronger relationship with China because of all these regional issues that the two of them have when they've already moved past that years ago. And I think, you know, as far as it goes,

we may be at the point where the U.S. sanctions really can't hurt as much anymore. If you look at what's happened with Russia. When the war started, I wrote this article. The Biden administration thought they had an economic nuclear weapon to use against Moscow, and the sanctions have been a complete dud and arguably hurt the Western economies more than they hurt the Russian economy. Yep. You know, I found this old article by the war nerd, John Dolan, and he said that he was talking about, I don't remember the name of it now. I got the quote in the book. He was talking about the Russians just opened up this new pipeline to the east and that at this point now if the Europeans and he wrote this years ago years ago if the if the Europeans try to sanction Russia to

punish them they'll simply commit economic suicide and they won't hurt Russia at all because Russia will just ship all their gas east there are plenty of customers in the east and just you know these guys are so full of themselves they really don't I don't know. I mean, this guy, Joe Biden, he could probably be the manager of your local grocery store or something like that if he had a good assistant. But for this guy to be making decisions? I mean, here's Joe Biden talking, okay? And then the Russians say to me, you keep expanding NATO, we're going to make friends with China. I almost laughed. I could barely contain myself. And I said, good luck to you guys. If you fail with China, try Iran. Right? Because Joe Biden just knows that he owns China and China is never going to choose Russia over Joe Biden because he says so. That's just not right. He actually doesn't know anything. He's actually just some idiot. Yeah. And look, there may be some real corruption between the Biden family and elements within China, but I do worry that the Republicans are going to push really hard on this issue. And we're going to see a kind of a Trump-like reaction to Russia gate where Biden comes even more.

hawkish on China to prove that he's not owned by China, as the Republicans say. Yep. Yeah, we've seen that kind of dynamic before. And it has come out in the past week. I guess the Republican committee got their hands on some documents and proved that this Chinese company had paid the Biden family. But I think people really should hold their horses. And, you know, for all the public corruption case, they're fine.

But people should not presume that that means that Chinese intelligence or the people's Liberation Army or this or that have compromised the Biden's and this government's foreign policy at all because as the guys at anti-war.com, you and Connor and Dave do the best job of keeping track of anybody in the world, Biden has a more hawkish foreign policy toward China even than Donald Trump. And even worse than Barack Obama, who he and Hillary Clinton, his secretary of state had coined the age of pivot back 12 years ago. Yeah, no, Biden has completely abandoned the one China policy. We now even have the director of national intelligence,

April Haynes coming out and saying that, you know, the U.S. would defend Taiwan if it was attacked by China. So, you know, we've completely abandoned that. And look, you know, it's really interesting, Scott, because you have like the same group of people who say Biden's incompetent, Biden's not running the government, also saying that Biden is taking this money from China and directing the U.S. government to be pro-China.

You know, those two things really don't balance because, you know, if Anthony Blinkin's in charge or Sullivan or Newland or somebody like that, then, you know, why do they care who gave the Biden family bribes? Yeah. I want to switch back to Eastern Europe here because we've got some political news as well. Clearly, they have given, you know, huge incentive to the far Eastern European countries like the Baltic states to double down on their commitment to NATO and NATO's commitment to them. and apparently they are even bringing Finland and Sweden, who have stayed out and have stayed neutral into the alliance at this late date. So what's the progress on that? So it looks like at least Finland will be admitted into NATO sometime around this summer. We have two countries that haven't approved membership, and all 30 members do have to approve it.

That's Hungary and Turkey. I speculate that Hungary is kind of waiting for Turkey to make the decision. that they rather not upset the Kremlin, but they definitely don't want to upset NATO. So if Turkey goes ahead and admits these countries, then Hungary will. But if not, then I think they'll let Erdogan kind of take the fall for being the bad guy keeping them out. So the issue has been around these two Nordic countries support for Kurdish groups in Turkey that the European Union, the U.S. and everybody does say are terrorist groups. And yet they do receive some support from these Nord states and some of their exiles live apparently in Switzerland or not Switzerland, Sweden in particular. So Turkey is really pushing forward those extraditions and now a lot of them have happened yet.

Initially, it was reported that because it was a joint bid that the two countries had to be admitted together, now they're saying that they're willing to do it separately. and so Turkey Erdogan said that before the May elections in Turkey that he's going to go ahead and give Finland approval to join NATO so I expect hungry to do so around the same time and then the ceremony to happen at some point this summer at NATO. All right. Well, listen, man, I didn't even realize how overtime and late on time we are here. But we got to go. That's it for anti-war radio for the day. I just want to point people real quick to anti-war.com. if you want to read my 20th anniversary of Iraq War II article that I wrote there.

And I've republished the entire Iraq War II chapter of my book, enough already, on my substack for free. It's Scott Horton's show.substack.com. And you can read it's 14 sections, my Iraq War II chapter, republished in its entirety for you there. And if you look at my Twitter feed, you can find a thread that I wrote of 23 articles about how The neoconservatives lied us into war in Iraq and why. And that's all at Scott Horton's show. And with that, that's the show. Thank you very much for your time again.

Kyle, you're great. Thank you, Scott. All right, you guys. And I am here every Thursday from 2.30 to 3 on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. See you next week.