Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 9/11/22 Scott Explains the War in Yemen, and the Effort to End It

Episode Date: September 12, 2022

Yesterday, Scott did a solo show for Antiwar Radio in which he lays out the ongoing grassroots campaign to end U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s brutal war on the people of Yemen. He gives a brief but thorough background on the war and then explains how you can help bring it to an end.   Discussed on the show: 1833stopwar.com every75seconds.org Friend’s Committee on National Legislation Just Foreign Policy Demand Progress Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft Yemen Relief and Reconstruction Foundation “In Strategic Shift, U.S. Draws Closer to Yemeni Rebels” (Wall Street Journal) “US maintains intelligence relationship with Houthis” (Al-Monitor) 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

Hey, you guys, on Monday, September the 19th, Gene Epstein is hosting another great edition of the Soho Forum debates in New York. No mask or vaccine mandates required anymore. And it's at the Sheen Center featuring Ward Wilson and Peter Husey arguing the question. It is imperative to eliminate nuclear weapons. Now, Ward Wilson is a real expert, worked on nuclear weapons policy. for 35 years. And Peter Husey is present of Geostrategic analysis and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute

and visiting fellow at the Atlantic Council. So that is going to be great. Again, it's Monday, September the 19th, at the Sheen Center. That's 18 Bleaker Street in New York. Doors open at 6 o'clock. And so for all you, Yankees and anybody else with a travel budget,

go and check it out. You can read all about it at the Soho Forum website, which is thesohoforum.org. Or just type in Gene Epstein and the Soho Forum. It'll come right up for you there. Again, Monday, September the 19th, Ward Wilson versus Peter Husey on nuclear weapons. For Pacifica Radio, September 11th, 2022, 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 editor of the new book, hotter than the sun. Time to abolish nuclear weapons. You can find my full interview archive more than 5,700 of them now, going back to 2003 at Scott Horton.org and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton Show. And, of course, you can sign it for the podcast feed on all the different podcatchers out there.

And you'll follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show. All right, well, today is a bit of a departure. I almost always do an interview for you guys. But today it's just going to be a half hour of me explaining a thing or two about the war in Yemen and what you can do to help us end it. So, bottom line first, we have a campaign right now to force Congress to pass the war powers resolutions. And they're already introduced in both houses.

It's House Resolution 87 in the House and Senate Resolution 56 in the Senate. And what it does is it forces the president to end all support for Saudi Arabia and UAE's war in Yemen. their attempted regime change against the Houthis in the capital of Sana'a there. And it's easy for you to get involved. There's a nonprofit group called Demand Progress that operates a phone number. 1-833 Stop War. And in fact, you can just go to 833 Stopwar.com. Isn't that a great idea?

833 Stopwar.com. And you can read, they have all kinds of great talking points. for if you're talking to your congressman or your senators about the resolutions and why you want them to support. And it's very well done. It's quick and it's easy. And when you call 833 stop war, it directs you directly to, you just type in your zip code and it connects you directly to your senators and then your house members. And so it's very quick and painless. And the group demand progress is a progressive group, a nonprofit organization, a nonpartisan organization. There's no conflict of interest. You have to understand there's no Yemen lobby in the United States of

America. It's just peace groups. It's just people who care about this, who are trying to do something about this. Yes, led in some cases by Yemeni Americans, but also including all different groups across the political spectrum, as we'll talk about a little bit later. But this is going on right now. And people are always complaining, including me, complaining and complaining that. What else can we do but complain? We can cover these atrocities. We can try to expose them, try to drum up, sentiment against them. Well, here, that worked, right? We, a lot of us, have done it over the years. Again, there's no Yemen lobby here. It's just peace groups who have pushed this issue and brought it to the attention of enough of Congress. And there's some great leaders in Congress on this issue who have

taken up this cause. And so listen, I'm not a big believer. in political action. I'm not the type, I honestly don't have a lot of faith in the democratic process in America to deliver us from evil here. But I think that we can stop the worst things if we all care about it and if we're all acting together. You know, call your congressman, son, doesn't make much sense unless tens of thousands of us are all doing it. And right now, that's what's happening. There's a massive movement led by Yemeni Americans and religious and left-wing and progressive groups, but also including libertarian and conservative groups, veterans groups, and others as well to help push and support this thing. So if we all work together, we literally,

quite literally, and especially with the power of the radio stations in the Pacifica Network, if all the different hosts work together on this as well. I really believe everybody that we could churn out tens of thousands of calls to Congress just over the next few weeks here. And look, we all can't just be Yemen war activists for our whole lives. But how about for a few weeks? And what about all you people out there listening who you have your own groups? Your gun groups, your anti-gun groups, your bowling league, your sowing bee, whatever it is that you have, especially any political groups that make donations to political candidates and can bring that up to them when you bring this subject up to them.

our group donated last time how you vote on this issue whether you co-sponsor this bill might be the deciding factor on whether we do again that's a powerful phone call that a congressman will want to listen to but you know i'm a texan and i called ted cruz's office what am i going to do you guys could hear me shrug over the microphone right i call and i talk to was staffer, and I made the best conservative case for ending this war that I could to try to make it okay for Ted Cruz. And I thought, you know what, I probably didn't get too much mileage out of that. But if thousands of people all called Ted Cruz's office and attacking the right from the right, you know, persuading him politely from the right, not, you know, a left-wing attack against

this right-wing position, but a good conservative argument for non-interventionism on this issue. at least. I think it could make a difference. Dozens of calls, hundreds of calls. What if he got a couple of thousand calls? You know, Ted Cruz has, I don't know, five or six different offices around Texas and in D.C. What if just for the next few weeks, that's all they get is Yemen, Yemen, Yemen, and the people won't stop? And then what if we can replicate that across the country in Congress people's offices and in senators' offices across this country? This is basically unheard of. It's true. Just a a couple of years ago, we did pass, and it's a great precedent. We did get the war powers resolution passed in 2019 through both houses of Congress, but Donald Trump, quite unfortunately, vetoed it.

But I think, one, that proves that we can do this. And two, Biden could veto it, but I think it would be much more difficult for him to veto this, especially with the Democratic Congress passing it. So especially if we can get this thing through before the midterm elections and really push this issue. And frankly, Biden promised to end the war. And I think he probably, he probably all he does want to end it, but he just doesn't care that much. And he is faced down by the leadership of the Republican Party who still are George W. Bush war party conservatives. And for them fighting this type of thing is their highest priority in a lot of ways. So assuming the best about Biden, he needs the Democratic Party's support in the form of them passing this war powers

resolution. Listen to Mr. President, you have to stop this now. to help him do what he wants to do anyway, you know, maybe what he promised to do. That's certainly a good way to frame it when you're persuading your Democratic Congresspeople that, you know, if you live in a Democratic district or have a Democratic senator, that, listen, this is what Biden promised. And he is faced with Mitch McConnell, which hard to believe that guy carries much weight, but he seems to. So, you know, we got to get this pressure built up.

now again i'm scott horton this is anti-war radio i'm interviewing myself to you about the importance of everybody getting on board to support the war powers resolutions it's h j res 87 in the house of representatives and s j res 56 in the senate now this airs on sunday and the house will be back early this coming week the senate is already back and so this The time is now for everybody to come together to push this thing. Now, the easiest thing for you to do is go to 833 stopwar.com. 833 stopwar.com. They've got the bottom line bullet points right there at the top to get you informed.

They've got calling instructions for how you can call Congress, how it connects you to your Congress people, and then great talking points. If you have a Democratic member of Congress or if you have a Republican member of Congress, what to say or even if you have a congressman or a senator who's already good on this what to say to them about how important this is to you and how much you appreciated and how to help share this information across social media and the rest and now at the bottom of the page at 833 stop war dot com you'll find a link to another activist group every 75 seconds and that goes to the estimate of how often a child essentially starves to death in the war in Yemen. I'll be breaking

down a bit more of the war in a minute. But I want you guys to hear, and you'll see if you just page down at every 75 seconds.org, these are some of the progressive and left-wing groups and religious groups supporting this effort. Just foreign policy, and I've known those guys for years, they're absolutely excellent. And the Yemen Relief and Reconstruction foundation, another group that is absolutely wonderful, and spends something like 99% of the money that they bring in directly on helping people in Yemen. A friend verified for me that they essentially, unlike any charity you've ever heard of, they give, you know, what, everything, but the phone bill goes directly to Yemen, okay? And there's a bunch more I'm going to have

to leave off the list here for brevity's sake. But the great Quincy Institute for international state craft, Massachusetts peace action, demand progress. As I said, they deserve great credit for hosting the phone number, 833 Stop War, and hosting that website, 833 Stopwar.com. Then you have church and society. That's an organization supported by the United Methodist Church. And then you have Peace Action, Code Pink, the Presbyterian Church of the United States of America, officially is supporting this, believe it or not. I know that they're good on Palestine. time but that's just absolutely great to see and then most importantly to me i just think the absolute heroes of this and so many other stories is the friends committee on national legislation

that's fcnl.org and you can find out tons more information about this there fcnl.org of course that's the quaker lobby and all they do is work for peace on capital hill there fcnl.org some of the great left-wing nonprofit organizations who have been taking the lead on this project all along. And there are more than 100 other groups, mostly left-wing and progressive groups, that have signed on to the various letters and efforts to support this. The Yemen War Powers letter from June 1st is signed by 104 organizations, and you can see that letter at fcnl.org. And you know what? There are some pretty good conservative groups that are supporting this effort to libertarian and conservative groups, including the Libertarian Institute

and Anti-War.com, the National Libertarian Party, Young Americans for Liberty, bring our troops home. U.S., our street, freedom works, concerned vets for America, the Taxpayers Protection Alliance and Defense Priorities, and at least a few more. And now, so for the Pacifica audience, what uses that information to you? Well, I could think of a few ways. First of all, if you live in a Republican district. And you want to cite that fact to your congressman when you call. That makes a lot of sense. Look, all these conservative groups are supporting it. We're not asking you to move left. We're asking you to do what concerned veterans of America wants. You know, look up their position on it. It's fine. It's good. And same thing for making the case to your Uncle Bob, who might be conservative and knee jerk toward, well, we wouldn't be bombing them if it wasn't a good idea to. Well, maybe it's not a good idea. Maybe it wasn't a good idea in the first place, but then we switch sides in the war. And now it's even worse than that, Uncle Bob. And you could explain that. Look at all these conservative Republican congressmen like Congressman Massey and Gates and others who support it. And look at all these conservative groups who are saying the very same thing.

And then I don't know how well this would work, but it seems to make sense to me that if you live in a Democratic district, then you could say to your Democratic congresspeople or their staff when you call or when you write. Listen, you can't let the Republicans make us look bad on this. If we even have a serious handful of Republicans who are going to be good on peace, then we got to make sure we always stay to the left of them on it, right? I don't know. Seems reasonable. Hey, y'all, the audiobook of my book, Enough Already.

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

Time to end the war on terrorism. The audiobook. Hey, guys, I've had a lot of great webmasters over the years, but the team at Expanddesigns.com have by far been the most competent and reliable. Harley Abbott and his team have made great. sites for the show and the Institute, and they keep them running well, suggesting and making improvements all along. Make a deal with expanddesigns.com for your new business or news site. They will take care of you. Use the promo code Scott and save $500. That's expanddesigns.com. Man, I wish I was in

school so I could drop out and sign up for Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom instead. Tom has done such a great job on putting together a classical curriculum for everyone from junior high schoolers on up through the postgraduate level. And it's all very reasonably priced. Just make sure you click through from the link in the right margin at Scott Horton.org. Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom, real history, real economics, real education. So just a few ideas of ways to approach it. You don't want to attack the left from the right or the right from the left. You want to essentially ask them to be the best version of who they already think they are. And wouldn't it be the right thing for them to end support for this war? So again, and I'm in no way connected with this group,

I'm just saying, and they're not connected with anyone either. Again, these are all just non-profit organizations of peace activists. There are no conflicts of interest here. It's 833 Stop War. That's it, 833 Stop War.com to get some great talking points for use on on your congressional staff and your Senate staff when you call them. And for that matter, for, you know, sort of reform in your own way, I think plagiarism is all right in circumstances like this. And make them emails, make them letters, make them telegrams, make them pieces of paper that stack up in, do they stuff telegrams?

Make them faxes that stack up in Congresspeople's offices. You know, pieces of paper that take up physical space. And again, if it was just you, I wouldn't bother asking you to spend 10 minutes on it. But it's not. It's tens of thousands of us all doing this together, really making the case to Congress. Hopefully one, if we can be loud enough that they just can't ignore, that for the last X many weeks, all we hear is Yemen, Yemen, Yemen from people. They want this war over. And it is something that we can do.

an active war powers resolution in both houses of Congress right now. 833 Stopwar.com for more information about that. All right, and again, it is anti-war radio here on Pacifica. KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A. I'm Scott Horton, anti-war radio. And let me tell you a little bit about the background of this war. I'll give you the fast version. Obama came in in 2009 and started the drone war there famously.

the CIA and the Air Force teamed up bomb and al-Qaeda targets now that never worked it just made the al-Qaeda problem there worse and there were some real al-Qaeda guys not just al-Qaeda linked guys but some real al-Qaeda guys they had tried to blow up the coal they participated in organizing September 11th they later tried to blow up a plane over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009 so there's some real al-Qaeda guys there but the drone war just killed innocent people and created chaos and rally more people to their cause. Terrible anyway. All right. Step two is, in order to wage that drone war, Obama

had to bribe the dictator of Yemen, Abdullah Salah. Now, every American president has supported Sala since H.W. Bush. So Bill Clinton and W. Bush as well, in the meantime. But Obama gave him a bunch of money and weapons

in order to allow this CIA drone war to take place. We know from Julian Assange rotting in solitary confinement right Now, at that behest of Joe Biden and the American Empire, that Abdullah Saleh was taking the blame for the American strikes, even though really everyone knew it was the Americans behind it. But now, importantly, Sala took all the money and weapons that Obama was given him,

and he waged his own personal war against his enemies, the Houthis, a group of Zadis Shiites from the north of Yemen. And he actually played a double game against the Americans and backed the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda and used them as auxiliaries with his military to fight the Houthis at the same time that he was using Obama's money and guns that he was giving them to let us bomb those same groups.

Now, even worse, he's playing a triple game and was actually arming the Houthis too in order that they would weaken his army and the al-Qaeda Muslim Brotherhood forces, especially his own army, which he felt was getting a little too big for its britches, I guess. and was worried about their power. So very convoluted Yemeni politics here.

Then Chelsea Manning leaked the Iraq and Afghan war logs, the Guantanomophiles, and the State Department cables. And that touched off the Arab Spring revolts in Tunisia and in Egypt and then around the rest of the region in early 2011. Well, in Yemen, all the groups came together peacefully in the town square, mimicking the Egyptian revolution and trying to overthrow the government and find a new way forward. Well, Sala refused to go. And so eventually somebody tried to assassinate him twice. And on the second time, he was wounded and forced out of the country to Saudi Arabia, to the hospital, to Convales.

Well, at this point, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Saudis came in and they decided they would get rid of Sala, the Yemeni dictator, and they would replace him not with what the Yemeni people came together to decide, but what they decided was the so-called vice president, Mansur Hadi, would become the president. And I swear this is true. And everyone can look it up right now in Google Images yourself. NPR News did a story on it, as official as it gets, state media, that there it is. They actually had an election with one man on the ballot, one oval to fill in to vote for him. There he is. And that was in 2012. And then he refused to stand for election after that, he abused his power. He was a terrible dictator, but without the skill of his predecessor who was able to hold the different factions together. And so Hoddi's dictatorship was a mess.

Now, his predecessor, Abdullah Salah, he came home from Saudi Arabia. And instead of going home to a quiet life of study like Mullah Omar in Afghanistan, he, in fact, went away mad. And he took about two-thirds of his army with him. But then get this. went north and he joined forces with his old enemies, the Houthis. Turns out he was a Zadis Shiite, like them, even though he's not part of the Houthi tribe and political faction, but close enough to form an alliance. His forces combined with theirs, then marched south and seized the capital city, chasing Hattie out of power at the end of 2014. Now here's what's so important, and everybody. Our current

Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, was then the head of Central Command. And it's very credible reporting in the Wall Street Journal and in Almonitor in January of 2015 that Austin was sending the Houthis intelligence

the Shiite group to use for them to kill Al Qaeda with. Just two months later, Barack Obama stabbed them in the back and took Al Qaeda's side against them at the behest of the Saudis. Now, they had at that time the brand new 29-year-old deputy crown prince Muhammad bin Salman, also the brand new defense minister. And he launched this war mostly for

his own political purposes to move up and rank inside the royal family. And it did help him solidify power. He then moved and arrested his cousin, Muhammad bin Nayef, and took his place as crown prince. We all know him now as crown prince, Bonesaw, the butcher of Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post columnist and the butcher of many hundreds of thousands of Yemenis then as well. And the Obama government explained

to the New York Times that they gave Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates a green light to launch this war with American weapons, American maintenance, American intelligence, American resupply, and at that time mid-air refueling and support for their naval blockade.

All of this with American support only possible with American support and that they did this. They told the New York Times, even though they knew the war would be long, bloody, and indecisive that they had to do it to placate the Saudis because they were passing the Iran deal and Saudi Arabia was nervous that they were losing their place in America's order in the Middle East. As insane as that sounds.

Even though, of course, that wasn't happening. Barack Obama was only taking the threat of war over their nuclear program off the table. He was not putting an opening of a real friendship with Iran at Saudi expense on the table, and only a fool would have thought so. But anyway, the Saudis needed to be placated. And so Obama helped them launch a genocide. Now, time is short, so I'll just let it go in short measure here, but we all know it's true, and I covered it on this show through the whole four years, that Donald Trump kept this war going on essentially what they would call autopilot the whole time. He didn't care. Anytime anyone asked him about American relations with Saudi, he would say they're spending

$400 billion on weapons, which is just absolutely ludicrous. Yeah, they're spending $400 billion on American weapons over the next hundred years. They spent about $3 billion a year on weapons. Trump claimed that was worth millions of jobs, as though millions of jobs is worth killing a million people, which has been the results of this war, and possibly that's exaggerated, but it's definitely over 500,000. It's hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people. I'm willing to bet that when the whole thing is over and the epidemiologists go in and do the excess death rate count, that it's going to be more than a million people who've been starved and otherwise deprived to death. Because what the Saudis have done from the very beginning, again, all with American support from the

Obama years all the way through Trump and through just a few months ago, they have bombed the civilian infrastructure of the country, two absolute smithereens, the water, the electricity, the sewage, and, you know, any kind of public service, you know, the garbage men, and then also any truck or car dealerships, any major marketplaces, any factories, there was a potato chip factory, they bomb it, a major funeral where people are trying to make peace, they bomb it, And the farms, they bomb the grain silos, the flocks of sheep in the field, the irrigation ditches, the horses in their stables. And then, of course, they bomb all the fishermen's boats on the Red Sea there. And they have deliberately inflicted, essentially, a cholera campaign.

They say the worst one in recorded history, which means worse than H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton deliberately inflicted on Iraq during Iraq War one and a half in the 1990s. so this is absolutely not hyperbole the worst humanitarian crisis in the world it's the worst war in the world it's america's war in yemen and now get this though we are now four months into a two-month ceasefire it's not a perfect ceasefire there been violations and the Saudis are still withholding fuel supplies but all the more to the point we have an organized group of activists working to push legit for real active right now war powers resolutions in the house and the senate that make it a crime essentially that can force the president to bring the troops home and to end all involvement and the resolution is specific everyone can read up on it it's h j res 87 and s j res

56. And if you want to take part in this, especially if you have a group and you can help get your group involved, you can call and say, listen, I represent 56 people and we're the local chapter of whatever it is, little old ladies who like to read books, whatever it is, that we are dead set determined to see this through and we want to see this resolution pass to end this terrible war. And it is, as I say, and for the longer version of me, you can just put my name Scott Horton into YouTube with the word Yemen, and you'll find all kind of interviews of me and interviews by me, by the hundreds, all about this topic if you want to learn more about it. But it has been absolutely directly to the benefit of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula this

whole time. It is not exaggeration to say America's war in Yemen for the last seven years. And the First part was bad. From 09 to 15 was bad. But since 15, this war has been genocide and treason. It is absolutely against the interests of the American people. And that should be absolute consensus, no matter where on any political spectrum that you fall. It's an absolute atrocity. It must be brought to an end. And now we have an advantage to press. So please do your part with your people. Get organized on your own shows. your own platforms, your own social media, publicize this very simple page,

833 Stopwar.com. That's the phone number, and that's the website. 833 stopwar.com. They have some very simple, important points and some very simple talking points for you to use to contact your congressmen and senators, and by all means, again, write emails, right letters, send faxes, anything especially paper

that adds up in the office. We don't have a lot of money. We don't have interest groups involved. The Yemenis don't have a lot of oil to steal, although the French are getting away with stealing some right now. But it has simply got to be a matter of massive public support, an absolute critical mass. This is what we care about. We demand to see this war brought to an end now. So there it is.

833 Stop War. 833 Stopwar. And again, if you want the deep background on this, just put my name, Scott Horton, into YouTube with the word Yemen, and you can learn all about it. And you can also go to FCNL.org to learn more as well. So thank you, everybody, for listening. Again, this has been anti-war radio. I'm your host, Scott Horton. I'm here every Sunday morning from 9 to 9.30 on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A.

We'll see you next week. Thank you.