Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 8/8/22 Bonnie Kristian on America’s Ongoing War in Somalia

Episode Date: August 12, 2022

Scott interviews Bonnie Kristian about her new book and an article she wrote recently on America’s war in Somalia. After the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan last summer, Somalia is now America’s longest war. Though Trump temporarily shifted it to an air war while in office, Biden has ordered the troops back in. Scott and Kristian discuss the state of the conflict and examine the war’s place in the Global War on Terror.  Discussed on the show: Untrustworthy by Bonnie Kristian “I Didn’t Want It to Be True, but the Medium Really Is the Message” (New York Times) Technopoly by Niel Postman “Biden Sends U.S. Troops Back to Somalia” (The American Conservative) “Afghanistan Did Not Have to Turn Out This Way” (The Atlantic) “The Taliban’s Dangerous Collision Course With the West” (NYT Magazine) “Somalia appoints al Shabaab co-founder as religion minister” (Reuters) Veep (IMDb) “Yemeni Civil War Unleashes a Plague of Locusts” (Antiwar.com) Bonnie Kristian is a fellow at Defense Priorities, and a regular contributor at The American Conservative. Her writing has appeared at TIME, CNN, Politico, The American Conservative, and many others. Follow her at her website or on Twitter @bonniekristian. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; and Thc Hemp Spot. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. 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 all right y'all introducing bonnie christian she is a fellow at defense priorities and a regular writer over at the american conservative magazine and she is the author of the new book untrustworthy

the knowledge crisis, breaking our brains, polluting our politics, and corrupting Christian community. Welcome back to the show, Bonnie. How are you doing? Good. Thank you so much for having me back. Very happy to have you here. So, you got this great piece at the American conservative magazine about Somalia that I want to talk with you about. But first of all, tell us about this new book that you have, untrustworthy. Sure. So it's coming out in October, October 11th, but you can pre-order right now. And the idea is to look into why we increasingly don't know what is true, what is knowable, whom we can trust,

and also what we can do for ourselves and also for our communities to become better consumers and information more able to parse truth from lies. Okay, can you give us a little taste of that? What do you mean? Well, so there's six topical chapters that look at sort of different facets of what's going on. one looks at like traditional and social media, another looks at mobish behavior online, a third looks at conspiracism. And those are all sort of more descriptive saying like what is the problem that we have. And then toward the end of the book, I turn to talking about building intellectual

virtue, building habits that support those virtues, and also thinking more deliberately about how we acquire knowledge and how we think about thinking, essentially, if we're going to be online all day and taking in information constantly, as so many of us are. I think we need to be more deliberate about that process, not just sort of let it happen to us. Yeah, that's interesting. I actually, this is sort of thing where Ezra Klein discovered Neil Postman. Yes, it was a great story. Have you read Technopoly by Postman? I have. It's been a wide. And then he was also talking in that article about the shallows, which is another great one.

Right. Yeah, I always wanted to read that like Klein, I guess. He finally got around to it. I never have. But I definitely am feeling that. In fact, I'm in withdrawals right now. I'm trying to re-kick my Twitter habit in order to get my next book written. And it's really difficult. It has rewired my brain. Yeah, yeah, that's a tough one. All right. Well, now, here's the thing that they can't rewire out of my brain is I still am interested in and care about George W. Bush's war in Somalia. It's now America's longest war. It really has been since last December. It was the Bush sent the CIA and Jay Sock. In December 2001, right when they were letting bin Laden and I'm an al-Zawari escape from Torbora, they were sending special operations forces to Somalia. You might say, instead. dead. And also, of course, to prepare for a war with Iraq. But anyway, we've been a war there ever since. And, of course, the war has helped induce a couple of famines, you know, doubling up on the damage from the drought with the war going on all this time and that kind of thing. Hundreds of thousands of people have died unnecessarily. And at the end of the Trump administration, he

actually ordered all our troops out, but then he rescinded that order. and said, okay, well, move them to Djibouti, but don't end the war. And that was, I guess, the compromise at the end of the Bush, pardon me, at the end of the, they all look alike to me, these people, at the end of the Trump years. So then Biden came in, and your headline reads, Biden sends U.S. troops back to Somalia. So now they are no longer, quote-unquote, commuting to work,

like it said in, was it task and purpose or military.com? But now they're right back in Mogadishu where Washington, D.C. believes they belong. So now what, Bonnie? Yeah, well, that's the question. I mean, I think for many Americans, when they think about Somalia, it's like, oh, Blackhawk down. And then there's so little awareness that we've been there pretty consistently for, you know, well over a decade now. The Trump withdrawal, quote unquote, to neighboring countries and this idea that they're going to commute, it didn't really change that much, but it did at least have the virtue of not having them just sort of perpetually at some degree of risk to be in the line of fire and then potentially to escalate from there. So now they're back in, and the argument, you know, is essentially that they're doing advise and assist stuff and that goes better.

on site and you're like building relationships and maybe that's true but none of this really answers the question of like why we need to be there at all um and that's just something that uh it's sort of broadly written off as like well there's a threat um the the primary group that we're fighting al shabab is a threat to the united states and so we just sort of have to be there like we sort of have to be in so many places for so long yeah exactly and i think it was a few years ago you called it the chicken and egg war you know why is pot wrong because it's illegal why is illegal because it's wrong same thing with the war in somalia how come we're a war in somalia because we've always been a

war in somalia we can't quit now and then that's it yeah i mean a lot of people uh you know who have much more specific uh expertise on this than i do a lot of people think that the the threat to, like, people on U.S. soil, like the United States proper, and indeed to many U.S. interests abroad from al-Shabaab is, like, slim to none, right? Like, the idea, just because they dislike us, just because they would like to attack us, does not mean that they actually have the capability to come over here and do this. And so the reason why we are at risk from them is because we've put ourselves in their neighborhood much more, and that risk exists significantly because we're there to fight that risk.

And so it just keeps going forever and ever. And so, you know, this headline, Biden sends U.S. troops back to Smalia, that really refers to a shift that happened in late May, if I recall correctly, so it's not brand new. And there are our senses, as I discussed, and as we've discussed here, in which it doesn't make a huge difference because we had not like fully gone before but it is discouraging to

you know insofar as we're making tweaks this is a tweak back towards being more committed there than we had been earlier this year well in fact at least the story goes but this is you know Mattis's version of the story that he told the Washington Post was that

at the very beginning of the Trump administration Trump wanted out of there And essentially the way he conveyed it anyway It was Trump didn't even know where Somalia was And didn't want to learn or care What are we doing in Somalia? Wherever that is, it's too far from here For me to care about it

So let's get our troops out And Matt has told him You have no choice And he told him this ridiculous lie too We're there to prevent a Times Square like attack Which first of all That came out of Pakistan That had nothing to do with Somalia at all

And second of all it was direct revenge for a drone strike against the Pakistani Taliban that had never attacked us or done anything to us. And that was what had motivated Faisal Shazad to try to blow up Times Square in the first place. And then what did Trump do? Trump said, I-I, Captain,

and gave him not just special operations forces, but even infantry. And they escalated that war for four years before he finally tried to draw it down. I was going to make sure to add that to the story because he could have ended the war back, what, six years ago now? He didn't do it.

And that point about the escalation, I think, is key to remember as well, because I've seen some framing of like, oh, you know, Trump was going to get us out of it. And not to say that he didn't, like you said, at some point, have some impulses in that direction. But the pace of U.S. air strikes in Smalia during the Trump years as compared to the Obama years went dramatically upwards. And so, you know, even though under Biden now we have more U.S. boots on the ground there compared to the end of the Trump administration, the the airstrike pace is still lower. So it's sort of a wash in terms of who was better on the subject. But yeah, I think that that incident with Trump and Mattis is sort of a, such a stereotypical Trump foreign policy story, right? Where like there's this some good impulse to sort of like withdraw from things that aren't our business, but it's so ill-informed and there's not really any real principle there.

And so it's easily overpowered when someone like Maddo. us comes in and says, like, no, this is what we've got to do. Yeah. And it's so unfortunate to see it happen, and it did happen over and over again. And, you know, the explanation for that in terms of the increase was because, you know, there's this mythology from Vietnam, which I'm sure is true to a degree, right? But the mythology is about that Lyndon Johnson's nitpicking and control over the generals and the battle plan, well, that's why they lost.

Otherwise, they would have won if the Democrats had just stayed out and let the generals do their job and that kind of thing. And so then nobody wants to be accused of that. And George H.W. Bush explicitly said, we're not going to have any of that LBJ type micromanaging from me in this war. You know, that's like a huge thing in Washington, D.C., you know, that you can't be ever be accused of that. And so that was a big thing for Trump, too, that whatever is legal, do that. As far as you can devolve the battlefield command over strikes, devolve it all the way down the chain of command, whatever rules and regulations and legal restrictions,

the Obama people have put on their expanded drone wars and so forth. Get rid of all of those things. Do the utmost of what is legal. Unleash the military. That way, no one can ever accuse me of holding them back whenever they fail. And so that was what they did in Afghanistan too. And, of course, there was great reporting that came out about a year ago, about the massive increase of the drone war in the south of Afghanistan and the absolute hell that they brought to those people.

Tens of thousands of people killed essentially for nothing. They're just killing whoever on the ground. Yeah, well, and relatedly on the subject of Afghanistan, I'm sure you saw the big David Petraeus piece that came out of the Atlantic today. And the meat of his argument was essentially we did not do enough. And if we'd kept doing more, we could have committed to Afghanistan. indefinitely and just stayed there forever and both parties would have liked it and it would have been great and uh he specifically pointed to to 2010 like the height of the surge when there were a hundred thousand u.s boots on the ground in Afghanistan as the time when we got the inputs right

which is just it's remarkable that that thinking is still uh around and in such prominent places and voices that's hilarious I seem to remember him promising that he would have the Taliban on their knees with a bloody nose eating out of his hand by July of 2011 and how that did not happen. He lost that war personally. In his telling now, it's because the President Obama announced plans to withdraw as soon as he announced the surge plans. And so, you know, it was never quite strong enough. We just needed to do the war harder. And, you know, he just couldn't do it. Before that, the Taliban were under the impression. that North America was right next door

and we weren't going anywhere ever. Yeah, I guess. Something like that is I have a solution. We just drop David Petraeus on Kabul. And then tell the Taliban, unless you want some more of that, you better shape up.

Let those girls go to school. Which, by the way, there's just, I'm sorry, I'm throwing this all over your interview here, but we're talking about Afghanistan. I don't know if you saw the new Matthew Aiken's piece in the New York Times Magazine about it's like about half

girls' education being denied still and half the famine and humanitarian crisis going on and essentially the Great Depression of Afghanistan now with the collapse of all the international aid and yeah he's just the best so that's really worth taking a look at everybody and I'm going to try to have him on the show this week if I can't but yeah

so now back to Somalia here for a minute the you make an important point in this it's a silly little legal technicality I guess shrug right but you do bring it up I'm glad you do it so I'm bringing it up now too this war is completely illegal there's no authority from Congress from the baby blue United Nations or any other pretended authority that says that this is okay other than George W. Bush felt like it yeah I mean this is one of the many conflicts in which, if I recall correctly, this one was sort of thrown under the authority of the 2001 authorization for use of military force, which was directly in the aftermath of 9-11.

But, I mean, you know, it's a different location. This is not the group directly responsible. Shabab is not al-Qaeda. Obviously, there are, you know, there are connections. But the way that that's been used, it's become so boundless. And it seems, you know, it's, this is one of these things. where it's, it's, you call it a war. I feel like it is a war, but it's, it sort of doesn't conform to our traditional

like imagination in America of what a war looks like, which is so shaped by World War II. But it is essentially a war that we got into purely on presidential prerogative, and that has now continued for years and years without any sort of formal congressional debate. There was no, none of the proper authorization that should have happened. Yeah. Well, and, you know, people might wonder about the status of al-Shabaab back in 2001 when George Bush sent the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command to fight there and to back, to start bankrolling people there. And the answer was that the answer is that they didn't exist. Right, they were founded like 2005, 2006, right?

Something like that. Yeah, exactly. They were the smallest, weakest part of the Islamic Courts Union until George Bush invaded and destroyed the Islamic Courts Union. And then they were the ones who picked up the rifles to fight. In fact, you know, the media always says that al-Shabaab means the youth. But I forget which expert it was now. But I had an expert on the show. I bet it was Bronwyn Bruton from the Council on Foreign Relations, who had done so much great work on this. And she said, I think it was her. Oh, no, no. Maybe this was just something I read by that other lady. Anyway, but she says the al-Shabaab actually is better translated to the boys. And so, you know, their job was to sit in the corner and be quiet while the uncles and grandfathers and imams and elders decided what to do. Once the war began, of course, they're the fighting age males. So they're the force we've been dealing with ever since the actual, you know, it was the Ethiopian invasion that America, of course, sponsored in. supported in at christmas 2006 and it was only then that al-Shabaab even became a threat at all so you know that was fully five years into bush's intervention there before that even happened um yeah i was

i knew that they post-dated 9-11 but i did not know uh certainly not that translation uh detail yeah um so yeah it's a hell of a thing uh that whole story is just completely crazy where all this comes from it's uh you know juster romando called it the war on terrorism them writ small. I think that's why it gets left out too because you know how Iraq leads to Libya leads to Syria and Iraq War III and all these things. Somalia is sort of its own little story off on the side. And so, you know, even when I'm telling the story of the terror war, often it gets the short shrift, even though it's no less important than any of these other ones. Yeah, I think we think about being like in the Middle East much more than we think about

North Africa. But we're in, if I recall correctly, like the vast majority, more than three quarters of African nations we have some military presence in. And it's just not, it's just not covered much. It's, you know, we found out after that ambush in Niger a few years back that even Congress knew very little about all this, let alone the broader public. Right. Yeah. And for people interested in that, Nick Ters is, you know, really America's foremost expert on where is so common Africa all the time and you know there's only one place in the world that you can read that yeah America has lost

special operations forces fighting in Nigeria and that's from Nick Terse but his source is General Bullduck who is in charge so it's a pretty good single source story there and otherwise we didn't even know they were fighting there people say no you mean

Niger right nah on Nigeria fighting Boko Haram and you know embedded with local forces fighting them, that kind of thing. And that's what the majority of it is, right, is training and embedding with indigenous forces to support

whatever the status quo is in whichever country, you know. Yeah. And by the way, well, I wanted to point out this story that just came out, I guess, a few days ago on the second. Somalia points

Al-Shabaab, co-founder as religion minister. I didn't see that. Yeah. It's, it's, uh, what's this guy's name? Oh, I'm stuck behind a Reuters paywall now. I had it the other day. But, you know, this is, you know, Rice in 2008, she went ahead and let Sheikh Ahmed Sharif,

who had been the leader of the Islamic Court's Union. She went ahead and let him come in and take a job in the government. The same government, you know, the same guy she had overthrown, essentially. In the war, two years later, she's like, okay, fine, never mind. but then al-Shabaab kept fighting. So, but it seems like this could be an opportunity for reconciliation here. I mean, if al-Shabaab really has a more profound presence inside the government itself, and this guy's not, you know, a turncoat to them,

but is actually like their liaison to the state, something like that, then maybe there's hope here for ceasefire. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, without having, you know, read up on that at all, certainly the Al-Shabaabye. of attacks that you read about on like in Somalia that typically have these incredibly high numbers of civilian casualties it's it's they they need peace so if this is a step in that direction you know hopefully that helps yeah hey y'all scott horton here for tennessee hot sauce company man this stuff is so good they get all different flavors garlic habanero honey habanero

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Rick Casali.com slash Ron Paul. And there's free shipping, too. Well, and just the fact that they've been trying to put this insurgency down since 2007 just proves that they can't. I mean, that's it, right? It's just like the war in Afghanistan.

Well, you created a nice little Potemkin village here, and as long as you have American forces and American dollars backing it up, it can stand. As soon as you don't, it's going to evaporate. And everybody knows it. And that's where the war has stood for the last whole time.

So, nothing has changed in that. So it is, really, it is, I think, almost a perfect analogy to Afghanistan there. Where, you know, it's not like Iraq where they were putting the super majority in power, who then told us, fine, thanks for winning the war for us. Now don't let the door hit you in the house on the way

out kind of thing. This is a completely failed endeavor. Yeah, I mean, I, it's another, certainly we haven't gone full-scale nation building as we tried to do in Afghanistan. So it's the scale of our involvement is different. But I think you're right that there are comparisons about, you know, we think that we can go in and create a stable situation. And time and again, it turns out we cannot. Yeah. Well, we do have AU forces occupying the place in place in NATO in this case. But essentially it's the same thing, I think. You know, a smaller

scale again but yeah but yeah so listen um i think it's great that you're highlighting this story most people most you know even foreign policy analysts and so forth just completely ignore it i suppose most of them don't even know that this is going on which is kind of its whole huge topic right how can we have a war for 20 years and nobody even knows about it yeah i mean it's it's hard even to i sort of think of it as like part of the the regular rotation of topics to check in on but there's only so much checking you can do when yeah that you know the our government isn't really doesn't really talk about it very often unless there's some sort of big shift like this moving troops back in and so it's just sort of hard to even find out what is happening over there what are we doing

it's not the government doesn't advertise it it's it's undoubtedly difficult to report on and it just keeps on happening year after year yeah and you're right i mean that's an important point right that, you know, I guess because the media at large, ignoring all that, there's no pressure anywhere for the government to explain, what's the plan? They have a strategy for Somalia? Where is it published?

And how many times have we fallen short, you know, since they originally published it, this kind of thing. It's just, there's no debate over it whatsoever. Whole thing is some autopilot. I think a really pernicious effect of, you know, like the huge

scale of investment in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is that it makes it easy for the government to point to these smaller interventions like in Somalia and say like, you know, this is not a big deal. It's really small scale. We're only spending a few million, a few billion, whatever on it every year. Like, just don't worry about it. Yeah, exactly. Somebody convinced me to watch the HBO show Veep with Elaine from Seinfeld.

that's the vice president. And I could just totally see this in that, you know? Like, hey, mad at vice president, here's an issue. Somalia. Somalia, get the hell away from me with that, right? Like, what could I possibly have to gain for sticking my neck out on an issue like that? That would be the perfect representation of the point of view of all 535 on Congress, on Capitol Hill, and for everybody in the White House and the vice president's office, too,

is that if this is anybody's pet issue, it's how to make the military happy by giving them some more money over it. It would never be that, geez, people keep laying down dead a starvation because of our war. Maybe we should knock this off. That would never even occur to them.

Yes, it would be pretty ideal for Veep, which is, I think, any time that you come across something that would fit well in Veep, it's a tragedy. But, yeah, I mean, if my hope is that if we can pay a little bit more attention to it, then perhaps that could create some pressure to change things there, whether that's realistic given the way that, for the foreseeable future, given the way that these things sort of happen

on autopilot at this point, hard to say. It's difficult to be hopeful with these very longstanding interventions. since there's not really any, they at least don't seem to have some sort of end game in mind. It's very hard to ask for accountability, right? If there were a goal, we could point to it and say, like, have you reached this? Do you have a way to reach this? What is the concrete plan here? But there's just, there's nothing to measure the situation against.

Right. And when we know that they cannot defeat them, I mean, I guess if you want to send in 100,000 American troops, to try to completely decimate al-Shabaab and and their, you know, civilian supporters and all of that in a, in some kind of full-scale war. And, yeah, we would win against them for temporarily anyway, but and gain what. We did that. We did that in Afghanistan and look where we are now. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I don't even know if that's, I don't know if it's, if there's any scale of, you know, military intervention and occupation.

that can defeat what is significantly an ideological movement in a country where that, you know, we're pretty ignorant about. We don't really understand what we're getting ourselves into. Right. And, yeah, for all of that, I mean, what would, even if we won and they were just gone, yeah, then what, what do we even gain for that? Nothing. You know, the whole thing makes no sense.

And as you say, you know, the ideology of get the hell off of my front. lawn is never going away anyway. So there would always be an insurgency, no matter what. But then again, nobody is proposing anything like that because they know how foolish it would be. And so instead, nobody proposed anything other than, I guess, just more or less the status quo here, as we've talked about, you know, dialing up or down drone strikes or dialing up or down special operations boots on the ground is not much of a difference. you know a tactical difference not a strategic one the strategy is just keep going and then that's it

hope nobody notices yeah that uh that seems to be about the shape of things and and has been for what three president four presidents now yeah hey and by the way i got to bring this up because there keeps being famines all the time there and i think the first real one was in like 2010 11 12 and then they had another one in 2017 and then I saw a thing the UN was warning that things have been going there.

You know, I know it's been bad for a couple of years, and they're warning about the worst year yet coming this year. So I haven't, that's a few months ago, actually. I read that. But a huge part of that, and nobody knows this. There's, like, one great story about this in the world. That's why I'm bringing it up, is to help spread it around. It's by Morgan Hunter at anti-war.com,

and it's about the locust plague. A lot of people heard about the locust plague in East Africa. But what a lot of people don't know is that it's all Barack Obama's fault, him and Donald Trump. And what they did was by waging the war against Yemen, they essentially canceled the university in Sana. Well, at the university in Sana'a, the graduate students, I guess, or whatever, the students, had a program where every spring they went out and committed genocide against the grasshoppers. And the grasshoppers in Yemen apparently are legendary. And what you've got to do is you've got to murder them all while they're still grasshoppers. Because if you don't, they get overpopulated and they turn into locusts.

Well, because of the war, the university was shut down. The program was inactive. And the grasshoppers overpopulated and turned into this massive locust plague, which then crossed the Red Sea and decimated crops in East Africa, in Kenya, Ethiopia, Iritrea, and Somalia and maybe more than that and leading, I don't know exactly what the excess death rate is or whatever, but from everything I read, it was an absolute catastrophe.

Huh. I, uh, the locust plague came. Yeah, I haven't heard that, but we'll have to look it up. Yeah. So, yeah, it's Morgan Hunter at anti-war.com. And that really is, like, come on, straight out of the Bible, right? Like, that's something that God would do if he was really,

really angry, or maybe Satan, if he was, like, really having a mischievous day, he would help American foreign policy to unleash a locust plague? I mean, what in the world? It certainly has a biblical ring to it. It's just, God. And then, I mean, just on the face of it, it means innocent people dying of starvation, right? It means it's just absolute collective punishment like the Old Testament God. It's just, you know, completely out of control.

You know, violating, if it was deliberate anyway, it would be the worst kind of, you know, violation of the Geneva conventions and that kind of a thing to deliberately wage a famine against a population, which it is deliberate in Somalia, not the, I mean, in Yemen, not the locus part, but the blockade. But the locus part is just, I don't know what to say about it. It's just, it's what makes it all so unreal and so very real, you know? Yeah, no, I'm familiar, much more familiar with the famine conditions in Yemen than in Somalia. But yeah, it's unbelievable the suffering that's going on over there. I mean, it was estimated that 250,000 people had, which means mostly, you know, children

under five years old, had starved to death in 2000, by early 2013. That was in the first big famine there. There was another big one in 2017, and they say they're going through one now. Now, so combine that with the locust, which again are, it's an accident of war, but it is a consequence of the war, a completely aggressive, unprovoked war against Yemen. And the illegal one, another completely unauthorized war. Yeah, and that's, that's another one where the both, well, in that case, the Trump administration really refused to scale things down. The Biden administration has improved things somewhat, but we still haven't completely found out what their cancellation of offensive operations consists of. It was that big announcement as soon as President Biden came into office.

But then I'm sure you saw that there was that big Washington Post article earlier this summer, which indicated that quite a lot of U.S. support for the Saudi-led coalition is still continuing. And so we're still involved there. and it's hard to say exactly to what degree. Yeah, I mean, so the way I took that was, I believe, was the end of April or the beginning of May of last year, 21. The Admiral Kirby said, oh, well, of course, we still got to provide them maintenance and stuff,

or otherwise their planes wouldn't be able to fly. And so I just took that to me. It's all continuing. Obviously, we're still helping with the blockade or there is no blockade. And then I never got, I guess, This was never, you know, really confirmed, hard one way or the other, whether they were still providing intelligence and logistics and, you know, all of that, you know, and more ammunition. But they just announced another massive new arm sale, which was obviously arranged during Biden's recent visit. So to UAE and to Saudi, too.

And there was nothing in there that said on the condition that they stopped bombing Yemen or anything like that. Yeah. Yeah. Well, they do have that for several months now, and I believe it's still going, a ceasefire. Did they end up re-upping that? Yes, they did. Yeah, that seems like, I mean, hopefully it continues. It's certainly much better than the previous, like, five years. Right, yeah, absolutely right.

And in fact, I don't know if you know about this, but maybe it's something to cover in your articles, is there's a war powers resolution now in the House and the Senate. It's H.J. Res. 87 in the House and 50 Senate resolution, SR 56 in the Senate, 87 and 56. And so this is, you know, the same one that Trump vetoed back a couple years ago. That presumably would be more difficult for Biden to veto. And there's, I know in the House, I already have more than 100 co-sponsors, including a dozen Republicans. Oh, that's great. I was not aware that that was back. Uh-huh. So the thing is, they're gone for their August break now anyway.

Right. Yeah. So, yeah, now, I don't know if you had heard, but the good guys took over the Libertarian Party at the end of May, and one of our first major projects was to drum up all of our, you know, email list recipients and Twitter followers and so forth to all get on board this campaign. And there's a bunch of other left-wing groups and Quakers, you know, at the Friends Committee. and all of these other groups that, you know, it's their idea. They're the ones doing it. But we're just helping them with their, you know, what they had, the week of action. We kind of turned into a month of action and trying to keep up the phone calls to Congress and all that. So I'm hoping that we can, you know, create a new narrative here for after Labor Day, whenever it is.

I think it's like the middle of September they finally come back from their break, something like that. And then maybe we can all get really ready and do a massive bombardment of Congress with phone calls and emails and, you know, at their D.C. offices and their local ones too and just get everybody talking about this. As you know, there's no one on TV who cares about this and champions this whatsoever. So it has to be, you know, just as it has been all along. And it's been remarkably effective, the grassroots campaigning on the issue of the war in Yemen. So it's going to take millions of us, you know, it's going to take, I don't know, hundreds of thousands of us at least to just absolutely bombard the Congress with the message that we demand that they pass this thing right now. And then obviously Biden could ignore that or veto it or do whatever he wants, but it's what we can do. And I mean, the law says that he would have to obey it. He'd be breaking the law to ignore it. I mean, they'd have have to remove him to enforce it, but still, like, you know, I don't know. On the margin, I think

it's definitely worth the effort. So I'm hoping that, especially since we can't do anything for August, maybe we can kind of save up all that energy and just unleash it in September, you know? Yeah, yeah, it would be, it would be great to have, I remember the last time this legislation came around. Like I said, I wasn't where it was back, but it would be wonderful to to pass it. And by the way, I could put you in contact with some of the many activists and so forth who all have great stuff to say about this, Aisha Juman and all of them. So if you're interested in any of that, let me know.

Yeah, I'll let you know. Okay, great. All right, well, listen, I really appreciate your time on the show again, and I always appreciate seeing you in print, Bonnie. You're great. Thank you so much, Scott. Good to talk to you. All right, you guys. That is Bonnie Christian, and she is at Defense Priorities, and she's also the author of Untrustworthy, the new book coming out in October, the knowledge crisis, breaking our brains, polluting our politics, and corrupting Christian community.

Check out this important article and share it around, would you? It's important to show people who don't know nothing about this might be a real red pill moment for them. Biden sends U.S. troops back to Somalia. That's at the American Conservative.com. The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, scothorton.org, and libertarian institute.org.