Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 6/20/24 Jason Ditz on All the Bad News Coming Out of the Middle East

Episode Date: June 23, 2024

Scott interviews Antiwar.com’s Jason Ditz about various developments in the Middle East. They discuss recent escalations on the Israel-Lebanon border, the power breakdown in Syria, the latest concern over the Iranian nuclear program and more.  Discussed on the show: “As Israel Talks Lebanon War, Officials Evacuate a Border Town” (Antiwar.com) “Israeli Drone Strike Slays Military Officer in South Syria” (Antiwar.com) “US Threatens to ‘Increase Pressure’ on Iran Over Nuclear Program” (Antiwar.com) 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: 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 dot for you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show check it out you guys on the line i've got antiwar dot com's senior news editor the great jason ditts hi jason how are you i'm doing good scott how are you i'm real good man thanks for joining me hey um I just read a bunch of things that you wrote about Lebanon.

And I learned a lot and now I'm terrified. Well, not personally, but it seems like things could get really bad there. So can we start with the all important question of what exactly is the difference between a catapult and a trebushet? Well, a trebicee uses The trebice uses a weighted sort of a log kind of slinging things where the catapults more about

God, I don't really have a good explanation for this. Well, I think in your, I'm sorry to do that to you. I think in your piece you say that a trebouche is a kind of catapult that uses this swinging arm thing. So, yes, like a square is a type of rectangle sort of a thing. But, um, category deal. But, uh, so I don't know what other kind of catapults there are other than trebushes. Because if somebody says catapult, I just think of a trebusha. Anyway, this is important because the Israelis are using these things to fling firebombs at the Lebanese.

So I got that right? yeah we don't really know what kind of fire bombs they are although they have been noted to be using phosphorus bombs increasingly in a lot of parts of southern Lebanon but yeah over the they're saying that they're having a hard time securing the border areas because there's a lot of brushland and trees and stuff in the way so their answer was just to start flinging fireballs into the area and setting it on fire well that makes sense sort of clear-cutting, right? Right. And now, so this

is all private farmland? Is it inhabited by people? It's fields? Are people being killed in this? Well, we don't really know if anybody's being killed in it right now. It certainly was populated farmland a few months ago, but a lot of people have fled the estimates of about

100,000 people who've gone, who've gone further north to escape the airstrikes. And that's just on the Lebanese side, huh? Right. And on the Israeli side, you've got tens of thousands of people who lived in northern Israel that have fled further south to get away from the rocket attacks,

although most of the Hezbollah rocket attacks have gone against military targets as opposed to just random cities. All right, well, so now there's so many different categories of attacks by different people against different people here

I want to go over with you it's hard to decide which order to go in how about see if you can give sort of just a rundown of the tit for tap between Hezbollah and Israel on the not just the fire bombs

but Israeli missile strikes and rocket strikes and whatever attacks inside Lebanon and vice versa just I guess even over the last half a year like is it just sort of low level thing or I know obviously things came to a head when the Israelis kill those Iranians in Syria and that's not exactly a whole different question but just on Lebanon I guess what I'm getting at is is this really like a ladder of escalation to a full-blown war or it's sort of a status quo of

not too bad but it seems to be just escalating further and further as time goes on we started back in october when the gazo war started that we had some back and forth strikes a few rockets here few drone strikes or missiles there people were getting killed but it wasn't uh just a constant stream of warfare where now we have pretty much every day someone is striking uh southern Lebanon, mostly drones, although really anybody in a vehicle's going to be subject to attack lately,

it seems like. On the Israel side of the border, Hezbollah's been firing more and more rockets, especially following whenever people get killed in the Israeli airstrikes. And those rockets aren't always the most accurate things.

They tend to end up hitting open areas, which Israel treats it like, oh, these rockets were no big deal. They just hit an empty area. But they've been causing fires, too. And Israel is having nearly success putting out the fires as they pretend to because a lot of the media is reporting that fires are more or less constant in northern Israel right now. All right. So the last time that these two had a real. fight was in the summer of 2006, 18 years ago, and the Israelis marched in there like it was going to be easy, and they marched out like it wasn't very easy, only just a few weeks later.

But do we know, and I guess I don't really have any reason to think that the IDS capabilities have changed very much since that time. I guess the rumor is that, well, has Baal's been collecting rockets this whole time and missiles this whole time. Do you know what kind of qualitative difference has been made there in the event of like real war? Well, I don't think anybody knows for sure, but certainly they've come up with a lot better equipment and a lot more a lot more willingness to strike deeper into Israel than even what they have been in the last few months. They were saying that they view nothing in Israel is outside of their reach with the rockets anymore, which really, as we drift from

this sort of kit-for-tat attacks every day to a full-scale all-out war, that could really be a problem for Israel because they're saying things like, oh, Haifa's probably going to get attacked, Tel Aviv's probably going to get some rockets attacked, and I don't think Israel's ready to have a war that goes both ways. They're sort of used to this 2006-style Lebanon war where, oh, we go in, occupy a couple Lebanese bases that had nothing to do with the war, kill a few people, kill a bunch of civilians, and call it good. But I don't think there's much chance that it goes that way this time.

Well, I mean, I don't guess anybody thinks that Hezbollah has any kind of armored force to invade with but I guess we might be surprised by you know if they do some kind of invasion just with infantry maybe we shouldn't be surprised if they do and or you know find some other way of surprising Israel besides just with missiles and rockets they've had certainly a long time to prepare although yeah I would say that Israel's performance in Gaza doesn't bode too well for a fight with Hezbollah, which the Israelis themselves have always considered to be a far greater danger than Hamas by far. Right. And Hezbollah's had a lot of chance to come up with a lot of equipment to have almost two decades to prepare for the next war, which likely is coming up

pretty soon, but we don't really know what the next war is going to look like completely, because like you say, Gaza hasn't exactly been a walk in the park for Israel, although they sure seem to want to extend it as long as they possibly can.

And if they start losing troops in southern Lebanon and fighting Hezbollah, the way they are in Gaza, I think this could really be a difficult war for them. Yeah.

Now, do I have it right from your article here that Hasbala said outright that the fighting will continue until the war in Gaza stops? Peace in the north depends on peace in the south. Is that correct? That's what they've said. And that's what some Israeli officials have even said. They view that as likely the case, too. President Herzog said he believes.

The key to getting a lasting peace in Lebanon is to start ending the war in the Gaza Strip. Yeah. Well, and so this is the same position as the Houthi regime in Yemen. And I'm sorry, I just have to say this as a slight parenthesis, which I probably, you know, it's just annoying to you as well as it is to me. But somebody's got to say this, has got to get out into the world somehow that the, The Houthis ain't rebels. They seized the capital city nine and a half years ago, and they've ruled something like 70 to 80 percent of the population ever since then.

Nobody ever said that they were democratically elected. That wasn't the issue. The issue is whether they're rebels or whether they're the government. And the answer is they're the government. And the fact that the United States government recognizes some other kook is irrelevant to the fact that the Houthis have won. ruled the capital city for a decade. And yet I still gotta read them called Houthi rebels all the time, which just goes to show I think that the news people have no idea what they're talking about,

or they're willing to just shovel ridiculous lies and twists of reality like that right in your face. Why not just call them the Houthi regime? You have to love them. You have to call them the Houthi administration. You can call them the Houthi very bad guys, but they're the goddamn government of Yemen, whether you like it or not. After the U.S., UAE, and Saudi failed to destroy their regime in a giant eight-year-long war that they killed hundreds of thousands of people in any way. But anyway, the Houthis, just like Hizbala, they're saying, well, we're going to keep shooting rockets at American and or Israeli interests in that Gulf. Anybody else in Europe?

I guess I read that Russia and China had got a handshake that they'd be spared. But what, like everybody else in the world has got a sale around Africa, Jason, now, or what's going on? Yeah, it seems like that's the case. Certainly anything that goes through Yemen, which is to say heading for the Suez Canal, is subject to rocket fire. We even have the Houthis firing missiles into the Mexico. Mediterranean in some cases. So it seems like for the most part you don't want to. Goddain, that's a long way. They shot them from where? Just from North Yemen? Yeah, from North Yemen. And they've claimed, and I don't know that it's been confirmed yet,

but they've claimed to have hit a couple of Greek ships and just sort of on the Egypt area around the Mediterranean. Mediterranean. Wow. Not only did they shoot that far, but they hit something. That's what they said. Now, I know the war party's going to say they must have got those missiles from Iran, but I know they had a hell of a store of weapons all along. I mean, they were hitting targets in Saudi Arabia that were pretty far with missiles that, you know, it was documented in Janes, for example, that they got from North Korea, not from Iran. But that was years ago. So I wonder if they really, I don't want to. to underestimate them. I guess they got engineers. They can modify a North Korean rocket. They can

make their own, maybe. Right. I mean, Yemen's not that small a country. It's a very poor country, but... I don't know, man. They've had... They could have got that stuff from Iran, too. I don't know. The blockade ain't perfect. And I guess the blockade is somewhat lifted compared to before or no. yeah it's uh i mean every time the uh iranian ship gets seized out in the middle of uh the sea somewhere and they find something resembling weapons on board as always oh it's probably going to yemen or oh it's probably going to syria or something like that but we don't really know where weapons like that are coming from and it's never medium range missiles right it's always to say k47s and mortars and stuff right you know you know

Yemen already had a fairly substantial military at the start of all these, you know, the Saudi invasion and the GCC trying to impose a new government in Yemen. So there's a pretty substantial warehouse of missiles and the like that the Houthis have been drawing on. I'm not sure how deep that is going this far into the war, but it seems like they have access to the weapons and they're willing to use them. All right. So now let's talk about Syria. Everybody, you're catching on to the common theme here, all of Israel's Shiite enemies in the region. And I guess, you know, it's the Allah, whites of the ruling party in or, you know, sect in Syria. But they're very close to the Shiites and sort of kind of a break off in a way. I don't know the ins and outs of all the religious differences. But anyway. And they're, of course, allies with Iran, which makes them. de facto sheites anyway and they're certainly part of that axis of resistance as it's called and um i thought it was interesting the way you used the term in a recent piece here jason you called it the ongoing syrian civil war and here i thought a rock war three was over but not really it's still a rock war three and a half and that includes eastern syria and you know what i'm so out of touch

I don't even know who's killing who in the Idlib province right now. And I'm way behind on, you know, what's left of Islamic State, the Kurds, and, of course, the Americans still occupying the fields out there. Can you give us a kind of thumbnail sketch of what the hell is going on in Syria these days anyway? Well, it seems like most of what was going on five years ago in Syria is still going on today. We have the Islamic State, which was mostly defeated. I mean, they don't control any cities or towns of any import anymore, but there are a lot of fighters that never really went anywhere and ended up in the desert, waiting, biding their time,

and every once in a while they want to prove they can carry out attacks on their own. So they do, and they've been fairly successful with it. Yeah, them bin Ladenites are hard to kill, man. I don't know if you saw this, but I take this real seriously. I'm paranoid about it. That guy Ali Sufhan, I get back to Syria in a second. That guy Ali Sufant, the former FBI counterterrorism agent, he's got his own email list there with, you know, kind of subscription thing.

I don't know. I don't know what you got to pay for. I get it free. I don't know. Anyway, he had a thing that was called Islamic State Corazon determined to attack in U.S. You know what I mean? Where he's parroting the CIA warning that Bush ignored from August 6, 2001, which is really worth a read. They're pretty particular about, yeah, they've been practicing hijackings in the country.

There's a bunch of Al-Qaeda guys in the country right now. We know that to be true. It'd be pretty easy for Bush to have just said, what? Well, round those guys up and get them hell out here, right? Or something. That didn't happen. Anyway, sorry. Ali Sufhan, he says

They busted eight Tajik's all around the U.S. who snuck in from Mexico And they don't know that they really were planning anything But they'd written some crazy stuff on Tajik Facebook or whatever it was These are not guys who would have should have been allowed in the country And could have been, I don't know what the percentages are But could have been here

In order to accomplish attention Paris attack. And it seems like our government keeps over all these generations grooming and then betraying these bin Ladenites and that that war ain't really over yet as much as even our government wishes it was. And so I'm still really paranoid about that. And especially when, you know, like the Idlib province, that is the Islamic State, right? That is Barack Obama and Donald Trump certainly didn't do anything about it. But Barack Obama and res up Erdogan built that Islamic State for it's still Mohammed Abu al-Jolani is still in charge there of al-Qaeda, right? Basically, yeah. I mean, Syria has ended up with so many al-Qaeda's and former al-Qaeda's that it's kind of ridiculous. I mean, you have, especially in the Idlib province, you have current al-Qaeda, former al-Qaeda, fighting one another. over control of the area. They kind of view Idlib as the end-all-be-all of their headquarters for operating across Syria.

But for the most part in recent years, we haven't seen them try to expand outside of Idlib anymore, except maybe once in a while attacking something in the Aleppo province. But what they're doing is fighting amongst themselves to try to get control over the swarms of people that were bused into the area and told, okay, this is rebel territory now. Hey guys, I've had a lot of great webmasters over the years, but the team at

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Find the link and the QR code in the margin at Scott Horton.org. That's Moondoseartisan coffee.com slash Horton. I mean, they really have full autonomy from Damascus, right? I mean, are they under the control of the Turks? Or they really are just on their own there? They're pretty much on their own there. I mean, the Turks would like to believe they have some influence, but I'm not sure how far that would go if anything, if push came to shove on any of those issues.

It's so funny, man. You know, you and I've been having these conversations for years, and just so many times, it's just absurd and ridiculous. I can't believe we're talking like this. So what are we doing about the Al-Qaeda province that our government created there in Syria? I remember I bring this up to people sometimes as like a fun anecdote because I just remember it this way is not just what was happening, but I remember joking with Jason about it on the show in 2011 when we still had troops in Iraq that we're doing drone strikes against them in the waning days of Iraq War II, but only at their heels, chasing them across the border where they can be moderate rebels and heroes and all this. at the dawn of the war in Syria. And here we still are. Talking about things that sound like,

if you just got here, these guys can't. This isn't right. What do you say? America's been on the side of the bin Ladenites all this time and still? And then who is going to do? I guess Syria is forbidden from doing anything about it, right? They can't launch an invasion there because of the American and Turkish threat against them of the consequences if they try it.

So they're being protected. by America and Turkey there. Oh, absolutely. It's been going on for so long that every once in a while, Russia might carry out a irstrike in Idlib to try to target some specific group. But I think everyone just sort of become comfortable with that being the new normal in Syria, that there's just these pockets of resistance in the country from the last war that really is still the current war.

And they're just going to be there forever. Yeah. Well, there's blowback still coming from that. I mean, you talked about the splits there. I've heard even, you know, the Washington Post types, I guess, saying, well, you know, Al Nusra, they ain't so bad now, which is not really right. But it's that Harassal Din. They're the bad guys that we got to really worry about. Well, I mean, in other words, they created them, but don't control them. Just another group of Frankenstein monsters out there who could just as easily be turned against Russia or the United States of America. I mean, we're harder to get to from there, but still, you know, still have Americans all overseas as well. Right. You have the Americans along a Jordan-Syria border. You have the Americans sort of close to that pocket of oil.

that back in the Trump administration, they decided they were going to take the oil to pay for the war. And the troops are basically still there, not doing much of anything, but hanging out and just being targets. And then in Iraq, Jason, the whatever Shiite militias were attacking, the Americans basically quit since the Ayatollah asked him to,

and then that's the end of that for now anyway, or am I wrong? Yeah. I mean, every once in a while, you'll see the Shiite militias attacking Israel firing rockets toward Israel, which, again, that's Israel with another Shiite enemy. So, but yeah, you don't hear. How many of those do we got where the Iraqis are firing, what, trying to get them across Jordan? Yeah, we'll see, we'll see that report once a month or so of a few. few rockets here and there.

Well, at least they got rid of their enemy Saddam Hussein. Right. Now they just have Iraq in alliance with Iran and Syria and Hezbollah and Yemen. So that's an improvement. I'm sorry.

You were saying. Well, it's just I mean these groups mostly aren't attacking the U.S. anymore. and the Iraqis are trying to argue, you know, the only real threat anymore inside Iraq is ISIS and they're more than capable of handling ISIS on their own so they don't really need the Americans.

And trying to get the Americans out of Iraq, trying to get the UN out of Iraq, which the UN apparently has agreed to ultimately do, which means to be seen if they actually leave. but Iraq seems to have high hopes that they're going to get rid of some of these you know foreign interventionist groups

like the United States military at the end of the day and trying to keep the militias that are mostly aligned with the government from attacking them so they don't have an excuse to stay right um well yeah another example of the only actual dangerous guys out there are the bin lad nights but i certainly agree with bagdad that they can handle it doesn't mean we need to be there

this means we those are the people we need to be worried about our government grooming and creating and provoking to turn against us as they so often have um all right now so let's see I think that's all the... I mean, yeah. So now we get to Iran. But the big question about Iran is what you've been writing about concerning Iran,

which is something that you're quite the expert on, which is Iran's nuclear program and what it is and what it ain't. And I know there's been a lot of controversy lately. I was just reading the thing about, boy, they've been stocking up on 60% enriched uranium. And it's so much easy.

to convert that to weapons grade is the worry and this is not just propaganda it was you know i forget but it was one of these you know atomic expert website guys concerned about it and so i wonder what you know about what's the truth of that and what's the real significance of it well the reality is yeah 60% could be converted to weapons grade eventually if a run tried to do it and they probably would succeed in doing it if they wanted to. But the whole reason they're producing the 60% uranium in the first place was they're trying to get some sort of talks going on the nuclear deal because none of the other countries are really abiding by their commitments, certainly not the European nations. The United States pulled out of the deal entirely

in 2018. And the hope was, well, if we go a little bit farther and rich a little bit higher, we're going to force the issue and they're going to agree to talks. But so far, everyone seems content to just let Iran enrich a little farther and complain about it every few months. But as far as proliferation threat, it's really not a proliferation threat because Iran's not even attempting. Even the U.S. Director of National Intelligence agrees they're not attempting to make any sort of weapons out of it. They're just producing it sort of as a diplomatic ploy

to try to force the issue on the nuclear deal. Yeah. Well, I mean, it seems like Netanyahu's ploy has worked in the sense of only just imagining what could have been on the opportunity costs where once Trump got us out of the nuclear deal, that precludes real cooperation with Iran on any other thing now that we're back to that Cold War.

So, you know, whether it ever leads to an actual war, I don't know, still to me seems unlikely in the medium term. You know, I don't know. But they certainly prevented us from making real peace. And that was the real point after all. when it yeah it seems like having

the Iran nuclear threat so called as something to talk about and something to make threats over has kind of become an end unto itself every time that Israel aid comes up for debate of course not so much now

because Israel is actually in the middle of a war in the Gaza Strip but ordinarily it'll be like well we need to send them a bunch of equipment because Iran's a threat. So keeping Iran as this putative threat seems seems to be a very important part of the overall strategy, even though it doesn't really bear out if you take a closer look at what Iran's actually doing. Well, I mean, I'm not saying that this is directly correlated but it's sort of an insight into this type of thinking anyway was a document geez

i ought to be able to find it i bet it's out there somewhere someone had sent this to me years ago was a document from the iran-aq war and i guess it was the i'm trying to remember now if it was an israeli document or an american intelligence document about the israeli position either way point was, from the Israeli point of view, if Iran wins the Iran-Iraq war, which they didn't really want, they were supporting Iran, but they didn't really want them to win. It was just sort of the balance to American support for Iraq and just keep them fighting and this kind of thing, you know, making money and weakening them both. But they said, you know, if Iran does win and they end up taking over Baghdad and in alliance and with support of Iraqi Shiites

and all of that well then at least that'll help drive all the Arab states into our camp all the Sunnis in other words into our camp so it seems like you know with Iraq War II

it was supposed to be very friendly and compliant Shiites in control of Baghdad but if they're just Iran's puppets instead of turning the Iranians into the puppets like in the plan ah well at least it makes the Saudis want to ally with Israel more

and so and that is where we are now even with after october seventh it looks like the Saudis and the Israelis have still been negotiating although i don't know i guess they must be further apart than they were before but they're still talking about their version of the abraham accord deal right now aren't they they are as far as i know every once in a while you'll hear rumors that they're close to announcing a deal or a deal will be announced as soon as they're just kind of waiting out the war to announce a deal but

yeah I mean if if the Iraq War II hadn't happened this probably wouldn't be happening either yeah no none of it would it's like they created a perfect enemy for themselves like guess

you know that was what they were really after they got the strongest Shiite crescent alliance against them than ever before and more determined than ever before. I mean, where's this thing going to be in 10 years from now? I don't know. It's going to suck.

There's no resolution coming. Yeah, one thing that we can expect in the Middle East in the next 10 years is there'll still be a whole bunch of militant groups in the Idlib province fighting over control. And the U.S. and Turkey will agree that Syria better not go in there to try to do any think to them. Right. Yeah, I wouldn't take this position because I'm just against the government doing things. But reasonable man back 10 years ago said, why don't we just ally with Syria and Iran against these bin Ladenites? Why would we take the bin Ladenites side? I'm definitely with the second part of that statement. But the first part of it, at least that would be rational.

You know what I mean? I don't think it would probably be really productive and we'd end up probably creating more enemies and it would have other terrible consequences and I'd be against it. But at least that would make some kind of sense. But anyway. So I guess, I forget if you said,

and I don't think I asked specifically, is there any kind of diplomatic movement on the Iranian side in regards to the JCPOA? and any further negotiation here. Like, as you say, obviously, they're enriching up to higher quantities of higher grades, so they have them as bargaining chips as they have done repeatedly in the past. But are they even, is it even worth them bothering to try to get a game going with the Biden administration?

Or they're just waiting until whoever's next or the next administration after that or what? Yeah, I'm not sure what they hope to account. accomplish it anymore. Trying to start some sort of remedial talks for the nuclear deal has always been the plan, but I'm sort of clear that such talks aren't going to happen that the three European parties in the P5 plus one nuclear deal just are content to offer these occasional warnings and demands that Iran stopped their enrichment immediately. and yeah there's just not a lot of appetite for negotiations right now so i don't know if they're going to plan to keep the status quo of threats and pointless enrichment until somebody comes along that talks are a possibility with or they're just uh they're just going to have to back off and come up with something else to try to uh get negotiation started Yeah. Well, I mean, if it's, first of all, Biden had said to that lady at the, not in a speech to the American public, but to some lady at a fundraiser that, oh, yeah, the JCPOA is dead. Forget about it. You know, so, okay, I'll buy that. But then his only opponent is Donald Trump, the guy that got us out of the deal, has no incentive to get us back into it whatsoever. What's he going to do it? Admit he was wrong about something. So soon we go another four.

years after that, I guess the only consolation here is, at least the current Ayatollah is reasonable enough to understand, evidently, that he would only need a nuke to deter an attack, but that we're not really going to attack him. And so he doesn't need a nuke to deter us. And that's where we're at. That's the cards everybody's holding right now. But, you know, the Ayatollah is old, too. And, you know, I don't know who his successor is going to be. I'm sure it'll be extremely controversial who a successor will be now, especially. I read somewhere that the only guy who really agrees with him is his son, but they can't do that because, you know, the Shah and his father and all that stuff.

So that would make it look really bad. So in other words, you know, this guy is pretty predictable, but what happens after him is not, you know? And we're going to be stuck with Trump, who's going to be belligerent and probably more belligerent as he gets more Biden-like in his senility. Yeah, there's just Iran being an issue and Iran people talking about the Iran nuclear threat has been going on for so many decades now that it seems like it's just a constant, an American foreign policy.

Not that they actually do anything about it other than sanctions and threats, but they share like to make the sanctions and threats. So, yeah. To keep the threat at least sort of plausible.

Yep. All right, man. Well, thanks to the bad news. I hope, especially, I guess this, the hottest little brunt in this thing in southern Lebanon there

doesn't burn any hotter and this thing starts winding down but I don't know man I saw reports I'm trying hard not to look at Palestine except when I interview you guys on Thursdays I'm writing a book about Russia stuff but I see the headlines and things

they're very discouraging see Israeli generals talking about this is going to take years of this what do they mean years of this they're fighting against the Gaza strip have they ever looked at the Gaza Strip on a map before it's this tiny little territory it's half the size of a texas county or something maybe a third what do they mean they're going to go to they're going to be at war against these people like this for years and and what does that mean for the region seriously we expect the status

quo overall to hold through that i don't yeah i don't think people realize how small the gaza strip is. I've tried to map it out onto Saginaw County where I live. And it's like you could walk practically to any point in the Gaza Strip if he wanted to. Yeah.

I mean, you'd be subject to airstrikes, of course. Yeah, they'll kill you, but you could you could, you know, theoretically you could walk across it. God. What a disaster.

All right, well, I'm sorry. I'm going to let you go. I'm sure you have a ton of work to do. I know I do, but I really appreciate you coming back on the show, man. Yeah, thanks for having me. That's you guys. That's a great, Jason does. He's our senior news editor at anti-war.com, and

especially specializing in Lebanon news these days, too. You can find all that stuff at news. com. The Scott Horton show, Antire War Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.

APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, Scott Horton.org, and libertarian institute.org.