Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 3/9/23 Kyle Anzalone on Bakhmut, the Chinese Peace Plan, Nord Stream, Syria and North Korea

Episode Date: March 10, 2023

Kyle Anzalone joined Scott for Antiwar Radio this week to go over all the biggest foreign policy news. They start with JDAMs, the American-guided bombs that are now operational in Ukraine. Next they discuss the brutal battle for Bakhmut which may be about over. They also touch on the Nord Stream stories coming out of Washington-friendly media outlets, the House Progressives teaming up with MAGA Republicans to vote against the US occupation of Syria and how the Biden Administration is escalating tensions with North Korea.  Discussed on the show: “American Guided Bombs Are ‘Operational’ in Ukraine” (Libertarian Institute) Scott’s interview with Douglas Macgregor “Most Front-Line Ukrainian Soldiers Killed Within ‘4 Hours’” (Libertarian Institute) “Ukrainian soldiers in Bakhmut: ‘Our troops are not being protected’” (Kyiv Independent) Scott’s interview with Seymour Hersh “Intelligence Suggests Pro-Ukrainian Group Sabotaged Pipelines, U.S. Officials Say” (New York Times) “Nord Stream pipeline attack: Germany searches suspect vessel” (The Times) “In Nord Stream attack, US officials use proxy media to blame proxy Ukraine” (Aaron Maté’s Substack)  “On NYT Nord Stream theory, German official raises specter of ‘false flag’” (Responsible Statecraft) “Pentagon Blocks Sharing Evidence of Possible Russian War Crimes With Hague Court” (New York Times) 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 Pacific Radio, March the 9th, 2023, 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 I'm the editorial director of Anti-War.com. And I'm the 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 Show. And you can follow me on Twitter, if you dare, at Scott Horton Show. All right, introducing this week's guest. It's the great Kyle Anselaun, opinion editor of anti-war.com and news editor over at the Institute. Welcome back to the show. Kyle, how you doing, sir? Doing great, Scott. Thanks for having me back. Very happy to have you here. So let's start with your piece at the Institute here. American guided bombs are operational in Ukraine. And this is something that we had talked about a few weeks

back about the J-dam kits. Now, as far as I understood, this is essentially a satellite guidance kit that is attached to bombs dropped by airplanes. Either, you know, fighter jets or bombers. And yet they've come up with this new innovation. Somebody's getting paid, huh? To put these J-DAM guidance kits on artillery rockets? Do I have that right? No, actually, I think they have found a way to stit them onto Ukrainian planes.

So we already know, and we've seen the mounts for attaching the harm missiles to the Ukrainian planes. And I believe, from my understanding, you can attach a mount for a bomb onto the mount for the harm, for the missiles. And so I think they attach the bomb mount onto the missile mount on the Soviet airplanes that the Ukrainians have. And so with J-DAM, you know, it's a kit that you put on another bomb. And the article in the drive, they had a statement from the U.S. commander of forces in Europe, who basically said that the variation, the only known use for it, the extended range ones, they were developed by Australia, and therefore quit strike mines, but the quit strike, these are underwater mines, are actually the same size

as like 2,000 pound or 500 pound bombs. And so they believe what's happening is they're mounting these jams with extended range onto planes and then they're plugging in the coordinates and then the j dams help guide them to the coordinates, although I'm not sure what role American satellites are playing. It's also possible that the jams are giving them are laser guided. And so that would require Ukrainian forces on the ground to, you know, guide the j dam to its target. But that's another possibility too. I have seen a couple videos that people produce that do seem to show these extended range jams. And they're a little bit easy to identify because they have a few feet long wings on each side of the bomb that seem

to be used on land and not on sea. So it would suggest that they are attaching them to bombs, not to the quit strike underwater mines. Interesting. And now, so what kind of aircraft are they flying in this war? Because I thought the Russians and the Ukrainians were pretty much staying out of the air because of each side's ability to shoot the other down. Yeah, so we know Ukraine has some aircraft that, you know, take pictures with helicopters every now and then we see some videos that alleged to show Ukrainian fighter aircraft. I don't imagine they last long once they're in Ukraine. I'm not sure maybe if another country is slowly transferring them in or if Ukraine had

some in storage somewhere that they're slowly rolling out. I'm not sure how many missions each pilot gets to fly with each one. these jams because, you know, there's just not a lot of public information available about it. All the details that the U.S. provided have been pretty slim initially when Biden said that they were transferring these. He just listed it as precision guided munitions. It wasn't until this past Monday that we even knew it was the extended range variation of the J-dam that we're sending to Ukraine. And we still don't know what size bombs are even attaching to those or exactly how they're working. A lot of this is just

some speculation on my part. And then I taught to somebody who actually assembles J-Dams for the U.S. And so he was able to give me a little bit of details of how it could be mounted to a Soviet plane. Okay, so

now let's talk about the fighting on the ground in East Ukraine now. There's been this horrible battle for the city of Bakhmut going on since I guess last August, right? And they're saying it's all but over now? Yeah. So as of this morning, I'm seeing some reports and some videos that do seem to show quite a few Ukrainian forces trying to flee the area at this point. Although it's unclear what Ukraine's going to do because Kiev seems to be under the belief. And I don't know if this is true or not that holding that city is pretty key to holding the rest of eastern Ukraine. They've warned that if it falls, you know, Russia is going to make a lot of advances in the region. And so, I mean, that could be because of the amount of lives and the amount of military equipment.

Ukraine has expended in Bakhmut or it could, you know, end up being that critical of a city. Although you had a recent interview with Douglas McGregor that was absolutely excellent. I recommend everybody to check it out where he explains, you know, one of the challenges for Russia right now is the, you know, conditions in Ukraine being as warm as they are at this time of year, have made the battlefield extremely muddy. And so it's been hard for Russian forces to maybe gain a lot of territory quickly because with the mud makes it a long time to move their armor and other equipment. So I think, you know, it's possible that we don't see major Russian gains, at least at the current time. But it does seem that Ukraine is moving out of that region.

Last week I wrote an article for the Institute, Scott, where there was an former American Marine who was serving in Ukraine. He was, you know, a mercenary over there. And he said he was on the front lines, Bachmood. ABC interviewed him. And he said that the average life of a soldier on the front lines was about four hours. And I got some pushback of people saying, oh, that doesn't sound right and everything. But then there was that story by the Kiev Independent, very recently saying that I think if you go to the front lines, there's only about 30% chance he'll come back.

And this is a very pro-Ukrainian outlet that's making these statements. And so it makes me think that the situation really is that bad for the Ukrainians in Bakhmu. Yeah, that article is just horrifying. If people look at that in the Kiev Independent, the headline was something like we have no support out here or something like that. And it's a real in-depth piece about these guys just being fed into a meat grinder, dropped off in the middle of the night, told in the morning, all right, get out there and get blown up. And it's just, I guess McGregor corrected me. This is not total war.

total war is like full blitzkrieg or whatever this is more world war one stop but it is high level fighting between two first world armies almost every casualty right is an artillery shell or a tank round right in other words people on both sides are just being absolutely blown to bits in this thing yeah that that seems absolutely right and the marine who spoke with abc said that the Russian artillery fire was constant and, you know, there's been a lot of discussion in the U.S., especially like on our cable TV news shows around, oh, Russia's going to eventually run out of ammo or something like this, where it really seems to be the Ukrainians in the West that can't provide Kiev with enough ammunition to keep up their rate of fire and the Russians are now able

to it. And that's contributing to the massive Ukrainian losses here. Yeah. Man, can you talk to me real quick, Kyle, about the American reaction to the Chinese peace proposal, which I gather was not very specific, but it just said, hey, let's stop fighting and start talking. And then the Americans just completely condemned it, right? Right. And the West did all along when at the Munich Security Conference, the Chinese foreign minister was there. And he spoke with Stoltenberg and a bunch of other Western officials who all kind of poo-poohed the China peace proposal. Then the Chinese foreign minister did speak with the Ukrainian foreign minister. And both the Ukrainian foreign minister and Zelensky at least tried to point to the parts of

the peace plan that Ukraine agreed with and didn't completely shoot it down. But the Americans in the Western position has basically been China cannot be this. country that mediates this conflict because China hasn't condemned Russia, which of course is a massive problem here. The West is basically saying the mediator has to agree with Ukraine and has to condemn Russia, which, you know, makes it that you're really not a mediator or unbiased. You know, you have a side in the, a dog in the fight. Right. You know, it's so funny the way, and I guess, you know, this came up in the McGregor interview as well, that the American position is, and they keep saying this to the newspaper. I mean, in public, you know, on stage, they'll say as long

as it takes, but then in the newspaper, they'll admit that the Ukrainians cannot defeat Russia and drive them out of the country. We're just trying to get them in a bigger and better position of strength before we negotiate. And yet, they're losing. As we were just talking about, in Bachmuth, their guys are getting ground up to bids and they're about to lose that city any day now will be the final retreat from there. And so it seems to me like the momentum, And maybe this is not indisputable. If people got disputes, let's hear them. But it sure seems like the momentum is with Russia, that they're the ones in the position of strength

and don't even really have a reason to negotiate at this point, unless they feel like it. But the Ukrainians, as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Staff Millie, was saying their best position of strength was last November after they had finished taking Northern Lahans and the Harkiv there in September and October. That was when they should have deal. Now they're losing ground. So now they're in less and less of a position to negotiate from the American-slash-Kieb point view, I guess.

Yeah, I mean, well, just think of what the White House has said all along. You know, at first they refused to negotiate whatsoever. And had they negotiated just over a year ago, let's say January 2020, they could have just had the Minsk agreement enforced where the Dombast region of Ukraine would have remained a part of, you know, Ukraine under the Kiev. government just with more autonomy, and then they refused that. And then in April of last year, or March and April of last year, there were deals put forward by both the Israelis and the turts that really moved the ball forward on diplomacy and could have ended the war with Russia

withdrawing from Ukrainian territory. And the West refused to let Kiev negotiate then. And then when we got to November, you know, I think if you look at what happened between April and November, Ukraine was in a far Warsaw position, even if they retook a lot, a little bit of territory that Russia had initially taken, the amount of Ukrainian infrastructure that had been destroyed by

Russian attacks at that point was huge. And so, but even then, they could negotiate it. And the U.S. said, well, you know, you'll do it in a few months. And now Russia is in a position where they've really mobilized, they've gotten their entire country, their economy, ready for war. Russia,

by the way, responded to the Chinese peace plan. This was pretty surprising to me because China actually spoke with Russia about the peace plan before they dropped it. And Russia said they're not interested in negotiating. And I think that's because Putin realizes that his forces now hold the upper hand. And he could take a lot of Ukrainian territory in the coming months here. And while the White House insists that, oh, Ukraine will be a better position, then they'll negotiate. If you look at the past what year and a half, the Ukrainian position has continued to get worse, and they've continued to say that. Now, the other thing they've continued to say is that we want a week in Russia, which is, I think, the real policy

here and why they don't want negotiations to happen. And that's because the longer Ukraine fights Russia, the weaker they think Russia's getting. Although, if you look at the, you know, the European and the American armories, they're almost depleted. So it's interesting how they, you know, factor all this in. Yeah, all right. Now we've got to talk about Seymour Hirsch. got an interview if people want to go check out the archives at scot horton dot org i got a great interview an hour long interview with seymour hirsch about his nordstream article and then you know i don't know if you saw this but fiona hill i think was the first one to leak this that she heard some ukrainians did it and now the new york times and the london times both have run these extremely thinly sourced

pieces saying well they don't even mention hirsch but they just say oh yeah no it was some they imply a Ukrainian oligarch. The Times says somebody, you know, wealthy enough to rent a yacht, took the yacht out there and did this, this strike. So I was just wondering, you know, what you know about that or what you've seen of the reaction to those stories. These are the same people who say, oh, you can't trust Seymour Hirsch, the greatest reporter in American history.

And yet they run these articles that are just full of a bunch of nothing. I don't know. Yeah. You know, I agree with you. the narrative that they're putting forward seems to have a lot of holes in it, including, you know, we're talking about hundreds of pounds of explosives and diving equipment and everything. And they say, sits people on a yacht. I know yachts, private yachts could get pretty big, but a large private yacht hauling a lot of cargo.

Also, how they procured hundreds of pounds, thousands of pounds of explosives and the concrete needed to get this job done. It seems like huge question marks that somebody would have to answer. It's also kind of baffling to me that if this was a Ukrainian oligarch, for six months now, we've heard from Western intelligence officials like shrug, we have no idea who did this, no evidence. Well, if it was this amateur job by an oligarch who must have procured a thousand or so pounds of explosives somewhere, you would think they would have a lead on it, especially since, you know, they launched from a western.

important, everything like that. So I have a lot of question marks about this story. Aaron Mante has a great article out, and he's kind of pointed to the fact that maybe this is a signal that really what the Western governments are getting tired of supporting Ukraine. And this is a way to start to give them an out, essentially, right? Like, you know, their governments have an excuse now to say, well, you know, they did try to use a false flight to draw us into a larger war with Ukraine, so, you know, this is a real problem. We also have a viewpoint on anti-war.com today by Kelly Blahos on this. Yeah.

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They deal nationwide over the phone at 619-299-1500. That's Leo Hamill find jewelers out of San Diego. Go to JewelrystoreSD.com to check out their fine selection and to find out more. 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? Scotthortonshow.substack.com

Hey, y'all, libertosbella.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 libertasbella.com. Now, I don't know if you saw this last night, but the satire bot, all it has to do is copy and paste the actual headline from the New York Times. Because the actual headline reads, Pentagon blocks sharing of evidence of possible Russian war crimes with the Hague court. because they're worried it'll set a precedent that Americans can also be prosecuted for war crimes

in the Hague court. And so they're not going to cooperate with any investigation of the Russians. Yeah, I saw quite a few tweets people putting that out with not the onion as, you know, their tweets. So this is, it sounds like satire, right? And this is one of the few times where I think

Lindsey Graham's actually not in line with the Pentagon because he really wanted to prosecute the Russians at the ICC, and the Pentagon doesn't want to do it for fear of opening themselves and American officials up to prosecution. The headline really says it all, but, you know, another interesting point of all that Scott is that the Ukrainians say a precursor to negotiations with Russia is the Russians, you know, being tried at the ICC, and the Pentagon isn't in line with that, apparently.

You know, and I wonder whether they really, like, that's the real. problem here is they know that this is an obstacle to negotiations and ending the war. I mean, when Kamala Harris got up there Munich and said, we have determined that Putin is guilty of crimes against humanity. What she means is we're going to keep this war going longer and more crimes against humanity being perpetrated every day because we're now making it impossible to negotiate with this guy or doing our best. So, but this looks like maybe a step back in the other direction that look nobody's really prosecuting anybody for war crimes here so let's have a negotiation it has been the pentagon out front on negotiation with the state department trying to stop them all this time

so you know yeah i think this is in part two one those cases uh that that's happened a lot i think in the ukraine war where the politicians have to constantly get more extreme in their rhetoric to stay in the headlines and so you know but then they get so far out ahead, the lawyers at the Pentagon finally take realize of what they're saying and then have to rein it back in and say, oh, no, no, no, we can't set this legal precedent here of working with the ICC. Right. Well, we should mention here, too, that this New York Times piece is by Charlie Savage,

so it might be a completely invented lie passed on by him from the CIA or something like that because Charlie Savage is a liar and a fraud. So, you know, sometimes he writes press releases that are, you know, essentially credible. This one seems to be. But we should always add that caveat. This is the guy that claimed that the Russians were paying bounties for the Taliban to kill Americans in Afghanistan. Because he's a discredited liar, Charlie Savage of the New York Times. Anyway, so now, let's talk about what happened in the Congress yesterday.

the America Firsters, led by Representative Matt Gates from Florida, teamed up with the Progressive Caucus and the squad, AOC and the group to, and not just the squad, but the whole Progressive Caucus, without their leader, by the way, to support this resolution to get us out of Syria. Kyle, are we in Syria? Yeah, 900 troops still in East Syria, occupying between a third and a quarter. of the land of Syria, and very importantly occupying the portion of Syria with a lot of the oil, with a lot of the farmland that could grow wheat. And so this country where even before the earthquake last month, that killed thousands of people in Syria and wrecked a lot of that country's infrastructure in the northern region, there were already babies just dying in the winter cold.

You know, there's so little heating. There's so little resources that, you know, babies get cold and die. in northern Syria. And so that's obviously only going to get worse, especially since you have Israel bombing Syria a couple times a week, including bombing the Aleppo Airport, which is probably the largest airport near where the earthquake damage is in Syria. By the way, the UN even bothered to condemn that airstrike. So Matt Gase put out this bill that would require Biden to withdraw all troops from Syria

within 180 days, the Progressive Caucus, the Democrats, came out and, you know, said that they were going to support this legislation. About half of them did. I think there's 100 members of that caucus and 56 Democrats voted for 47 Republicans, which, you know, I wish it was more, Scott. But at the same time, having that balanced number in everything, I think could really help to propel this movement forward. And that's a world record.

Yeah, I mean, we're talking about the war power. Act. Who in this audience ever thought that Congress would ever invoke the war powers resolution of 1973 to try to stop a war ever? And yet they've tried repeatedly with Yemen and now is Syria. So the precedent has set the momentum is there. Yeah. Absolutely. And just with Yemen, it took years before this many representatives would vote for that war powers bill. So maybe in some progress here quickly on theory at least. Yeah. And look, there's a lot of problems in our society. but what our government does to foreigners exploding them to death all day every day and creating

new enemies for the american people is by far the worst and should be the highest priority of all political factions to bring to an end secretary austin was on the board of directors of raytheon but the rest of us weren't so it should be us versus him and bring all of this to an end now enough already and so yeah i'll take it 100 votes out of 435 is not good enough but But it's definitely something, and especially when you have, you know, this rising block of anti-war Republicans. Not that they're in charge. Of course, McCall and McCarthy and all of these horrible warmongers are still the rulers of the Republican Party in the House of Representatives. But some of the more powerful newcomers are really taking the correct stance on this.

and that should make it possible and feasible for more Republicans and more conservatives to start supporting peace too, you know? Yeah. No, and having high profile representatives like Marjorie Taylor Green, Thomas Matsy, Matt Gates, Alon Omar, AOC, all voting for this legislation. You now have, you know, no matter who you're talking to almost, Scott, you have somebody you could say, well, you know, she voted for it. voted for it so don't you support it now right and uh that that's a pretty powerful message and i think a very persuasive point to make you know it may not be the most detailed argument against the war but i think it's one that people really respond to because they have people who

they think are good people who make good decisions and so if you say well that person who you think's a good person agrees with this then i think they're pretty likely to as well right and you know what like it just sets a great precedent that if aOC and Matt Gates can get along on this maybe they can oppose other bad things together too you know I don't think anybody would expect

them to work together on a new positive program of anything but maybe they can help obstruct stuff that would be okay you know yeah eliminate some corruption I wrote the bad things yeah yeah exactly and you know I saw a great tweet and said look obviously the centrist of the problem

we got the populist wings of both parties want to stop a war. And the so-called moderates are the extremists. You know, you got Lindsey Graham, who's the walking center, wants to invade Mexico. Not that he has any sons whose lives would be at risk or anything. But anyway, and listen, let's talk about Korea, too, because this is a problem that's not going away. Donald Trump, to his credit, did try to negotiate with Kim, but to his discredit, he hired John Bolton, who ruined it. And so now we are are right back to George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Joe Biden policy, which is, what, insult them and hope they go away someday?

Yeah, no, I think this is even worse than it's probably been in quite a few years, Scott, the tensions, maybe even worse than the early Trump administration, because the Biden administration is talking about deploying more strategic assets to the Korean Peninsula. The North Koreans are saying there's a real listed chance of nuclear war that they view the American War Games as preparation for an attack and approaching the level of actual war. They said they put their forces on essentially, you know, top alert, like they're ready to go to combat. And a lot of this is because the U.S. has resumed full Eagle war games.

These are suspended by Trump and the then South Korean president, Moon Jae-in, to help buster diplomacy with North Korea in 2018. And the Biden administration resumed them. They're very large war games. As they announced them, they had a B1 bomber fly near the demilitarized zone. Apparently, they're going to bring an aircraft carrier to the region to carry out these war games. And they're deploying Reaper drones to South Korea for the first time. Can I add to that?

I think there's something really important going on more in the background. But I'm sure it's a very big deal in Pyongyang. And as the U.S. is working very hard to wrap up a... and eliminate all the lingering issues between South Korea and Japan from Japan's colonial occupation of South Korea and all the terrible abuses that Imperial Japan committed against the Korean people, you know, taking so many of the men as slaves, the women as set slaves and stuff like this. And so it looks like the South Korean government is going to resolve a lot of those issues. And the U.S. is increasing military ties between South Korea, Japan, and Washington. North Korea really, really doesn't like this. And I'm sure a lot of it has to do with the legacy of, you know, Japanese occupation of the Korean Peninsula, which, of course, you know,

South Korea was a part of that, but so is North Korea. And they're not seeing, you know, any real end or restitution for the imperial abuses. Right. So, yeah, I could see how that would be something that caused a lot of tension over there, but that the Americans, you know, in the State Department and then the public might overlook. All right. Well, listen, I'm sorry that we're. We're all out of time for the show. I could interview you for the rest of the afternoon, but we all got other work to do.

But it's the great Kyle Anzalone, news editor at the Institute and Opinion Editor at Anti-Wore.com. Thank you so much for your time, Kyle. Thank you, Scott. All right, you guys, and that is Anti-War Radio for today. I'm your host, Scott Horton, editorial director at Anti-War.com, and editor of the book, Hotter Than the Sun. Time to abolish nuclear weapons. Find my full interview archive, more than 5,000.

800 of them now going back to 2003 at Scott Horton.org and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton's show. Follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton's show. And I'm here every Thursday from 2.30 to 3 on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA. See you next week.