Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 9/14/23 Kyle Anzalone on the Counteroffensive, Elon Musk’s Starlink and the Failures of Western Sanctions

Episode Date: September 17, 2023

Kyle Anzalone joined Scott on Antiwar Radio this week to run through some of the biggest Ukraine news of the day. They start with a look at the many factors that doomed Ukraine’s counteroffensive and examine how American and Ukrainian officials are trying to process the failures. They also touch on the escalating drone strikes on Kyiv and Crimea, the fury directed at Elon Musk over Starlink, the West’s declining leverage over the world stage and more.  Discussed on the show: Scott’s Speech to the Travis County Libertarian Party “Zelensky Blames West for Failed Counteroffensive” (Libertarian Institute) “Report: Russia Doubled Tank and Ammunition Production Despite Sanctions” (Antiwar.com) “Blinken: US Does Not Oppose Ukrainian Attacks Inside Russia With US-Supplied Missiles” (caitlinjohnstone.com) “Blinken: US Does Not Oppose Ukraine Targeting Russian Territory With US-Provided Missiles” (Antiwar.com) “West Declines to Adjust Russian Oil Price Ceiling as Moscow Exports Above the Cap” (Libertarian Institute) “G20 Weakens Condemnation of Russia After India Summit” (Libertarian Institute) “The Inside Story of How the Navy Spent Billions on the ‘Little Crappy Ship’” (Pro Publica) The Pentagon Wars (IMDb) “Prosecution Unable to Locate Key Evidence in Teixeira’s Case, Judge Orders Alleged Discord Leaker Remain in Jail” (Libertarian Institute) Kyle Anzalone is news editor of the Libertarian Institute, opinion editor of Antiwar.com and co-host of Conflicts of Interest with Will Porter and Connor Freeman. Follow him on Twitter @KyleAnzalone_ This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For Pacifica Radio, September 14th, 2020. 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 author of the book, enough already. Time to end the war on terrorism. You can find my full interview archive,

almost 6,000 of them now, going back 20 years there, at Scott Horton.org, and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton Show, and at all the other video sites and stuff, slash Scott Horton Show. And you can follow me on Twitter, if you dare, at Scott Horton Show. And speaking of which, if you do that, you can go and click on a speech I gave on September 11th, just three days ago there on the anniversary for a group here in Texas where I explained the American policy of global hegemony

and how it provoked Al-Qaeda and Russia and how we're working on China next. So that's all at my Twitter feed if you want to go look at that slash Scott Horton's show. All right. Introducing the great Kyle Anzalone. He is

our opinion editor at anti-war.com and our news editor at the Institute. And he, He hosts a great podcast called Conflicts of Interest. And boy, have you been working hard lately. Welcome back to the show, Kyle. How are you doing? Doing well, Scott.

Thanks for having me back. Very happy to have you here and very happy to read all your stuff, keeping me up to date on everything going on in the world. Of course, the only thing going on in the world. The war in Ukraine. Zelensky blames West for fail, counter-offensive. Well, I guess it wouldn't be his fault, would it? Tell us the story there.

Yeah, so he was on with CNN and giving an interview with Freed Zakaria, and he was basically asked about the counteroffensive, and he said that Ukraine waited too long and that Russia laid down minefields, and Ukraine didn't have enough weapons to launch the counteroffensive. And so I do feel for Zelensky a little bit here, because I do think there's some truth to what he was saying, that when the New York Times first started reporting that the U.S. was helping Ukraine prepare for a spring counteroffensive in southern Ukraine. That was in March. And at that time, Zelensky asked for more weapons. And in May, he was still asking for more weapons for that counteroffensive. And so, you know, there were a lot of us at the time who were observing. It seemed

like the West had really maybe shown their hand a little bit too early on this counteroffensive because Russia was just fortifying these defenses in the South. And for some, you know, reason that you know they really push ukraine to launch that counteroffensive in june after you know russia prepared for months for it and the ukrainian forces predictably failed and have just ran into an absolute buzzsaw and uh you know zalinski has just fed his own people into it all right well a couple things about that call first of all we're talking about the american military establishment the least competent military professionals on the planet the guys who just lost to the Taliban.

The guys who have not won a war since 1945, unless you count Grenada. Some people try to count Iraq War I, but I don't. Look what it led to. But he's right. You're right in the sense that they announced for months, for half a year, more leading up to it, where they were even going to attack. We're going to try to bisect, you know, that land bridge between, the Crimean Peninsula and the Donbass

and then it wasn't a feint or anything that was what they did and with no air cover and with far too few armored vehicles as Zelensky complains and so yeah the whole thing was guaranteed to be a turkey shoot and they even said the Wall Street Journal a couple of times that well look we just had to prove that we're capable

of showing up and doing work otherwise the Americans are just going to stop paying us so we got to do something this is something We've got to do it. And at the same time, wouldn't it also the weather's fault? Because this was supposed to be the winter offensive, but the ground never froze. And so they would have just been stuck in the mud.

It would have been a disaster for other reasons then. And so then they had to wait till the spring, and then it was a very wet spring. So they had to wait till the summer for the ground to dry out enough to even try to bring their track vehicles in there to even make a difference. but as Don Rumsfeld says you go to war with the army you have and in this case they just didn't have nearly enough for the mission and again telegraphed exactly what they were doing up front and gave the Russians all the time in the world to as Zelensky says here defeat them with simple landmines 50 cents apiece you know right and my point isn't to agree with Zelensky that the West should have delivered weapons faster, just that the actual policy didn't make any sense

and led to a predictable failure. And I think Zelensky is right about those things. Yeah. Well, and, you know, I don't know about the numbers. You can't ever really believe anybody, but it's clearly 10,000 or more something. Ukrainians have died in the offensive so far, been killed in those horrible ways. And I think the more, you know, kind of conservative estimates say they've lost over 70,000 killed. That's not including the wounded, just the killed 70,000.

That's more than America lost in Vietnam over almost 10 years. And so where are we now? I mean, I saw last week there were at least some headlines, Kyle, that said that they were making some real progress in a couple of places. Yeah, you know, Scott, I guess when you're at gaining meters of territory a day, if you turn that into gaining tens of meters of territory a day, then you could change the headlines to say that you're gaining momentum. But in reality, it hasn't meant very much on the ground. And now we've had, you know, sources from within the U.S. government saying that there's no way they're going to meet their first or second objectives in this counteroffensive. And so Blinken was in Kiev.

have last week and announced that the U.S. is giving Ukraine depleted uranium, and those will be for the U.S. Abrams taints that I think they're saying are expected to arrive in Ukraine mid-S. So they may be there now. They may be on their way there. Who knows when they're actually going to end up in Ukraine, Scott. But so that's what they're announcing. And they're looking really long term for this war because, you know, they're talking about F. Sitz-Tines gain to Ukraine.

And we have U.S. generals admitting that those. really won't make a difference on the battlefield for four or five years. They're talking about 2027 for Ukraine to be able to operate the Apsit Steens in a way where they would really be able to make a difference. It really is insane to hear them talk about that. The same way they said, you know, a decade ago, yes, we'll be fighting the long war against the jihadi terrorists for generations to come. Now they're saying that about Russia. Yeah, we're just going to be fighting Russia. Forget Cold War. We're going to have proxy war right on their border for, yeah, through the end of the decade at least, you know, what? They're crazy. We're not going to live

that long, if that's the case. Something's going to escalate out of control before all of that's over. Anybody could see that. We need regime change here as soon as possible. Yeah, or we're going to run out of Ukrainians. I mean, I think in the initial opening of the war, a lot of us were talking about how this is, you know, fighting Russia until the last Ukrainian, although, you know, with some sarcasm or exaggeration in there, but that really does seem to be the policy. I read an article in foreign policy today, Scott, where the author is basically explaining that what we need to continue to do is incrementally increase the kinds of weapons that we give Ukraine so that we don't provoke Russia into a major escalation, but we keep Russia fighting

in Ukraine for as long as we can. And so if you look on the page of anti-war.com today, Dave DeKamp has a great article about how Russia has doubled its ammo output, and they're now making two million shells a year. And so just if you look, if you turn this into a war of attrition, it's clear that Russia is going to win, but that's clearly what they're doing as well. And so you're feeding Ukraine into a war of attrition, and this is your support. pose a ally it's absolutely crazy yeah and i love the way they framed that too that piece of foreign

policy that yeah we just want to keep the russians in the war as long as we can not we want to force them out of ukraine and liberate our friends that we love and care about so much but no we want to prolong the war just to make it expensive for russia and they just keep saying it out loud too they don't know that this is supposed to be for their little you know dinner party conversation Right. We should all be horrified by it because, you know, this is supposed to be in defense of the Ukrainian state. And really, it's the destruction of Ukraine, you know, almost entirely. I think if you look at it now, Scott, I feel like it would be very unlikely if Russia really doesn't push to take Odessa and try to cut off Ukraine from the Blat Sea. And whatever is going to be left of Ukraine will not be in any way a state that resembles what it was before the war, especially when you look at the destruction. how many Ukrainians are probably going to settle outside of the country if the war goes on for three, four, five years. People aren't going to return, although I did see Ukraine is now trying to send draft papers to Ukrainians who had left the country previously in our living elsewhere

Europe. Oh, yeah, I'm sure that's going to work. Well, listen, speaking of Odessa, it seems like Kharkiv would be first, and I had read that there was some progress going on from the Russian point of view as far as them retaking that from the Ukrainians. Is that right? So Russia has made some progress in that region. And, you know, if you read analysis of this, Scott, some people say that Russia is doing this to try to draw Ukraine's attention away from other areas of Ukraine. And Russia has shown that they're really not interested in this city by the fact that they withdrew from the areas around it earlier in the war. Or, you know, that this is Russia's plan that while Ukraine is destruction.

in the south, that they're going to start to move on these Ukrainian territories in the east. Yeah. All right. Now, let's talk about the escalation from the Russian side on drone strikes. Well, and for that matter, I guess Ukraine's drone strikes on Crimea and then Russia's got drones and missiles hitting back at Kiev update us there. Yeah. So in the past week, I mean, dozens of Russian drones have been fired at Kiev. course, you know, both sides just put out, we intercepted all the other sides, projectiles, whether they're missiles or drones or something like that. And any damage that occurs either in Crimea or Kiev is always attributed to the debris of the interception that came down and

injured some people. So Kiev will occasionally report a few injuries or something like this. They tend to report more injuries or more damage if it happens to something that people will be a little bit more outraged by, so some drone debris lands on a school yard, then they're going to make a big deal out of it where if a missile strike gets thrown on a military target, they tend to downplay that. So it's really hard to know exactly how this is impacting the battlefield and how much success Russia is having with this drone campaign in Ukraine, just because everything we get out of the Ukrainian side is propaganda. Ukraine is also stepping up its attacks outside are on Russian territory. that's Crimea and, you know, Russia itself.

And Anthony Blinken, our secretary of state, just signed off on this over the weekend. So there's a really good article by Caitlin Johnstone by this, and then Dave DeKamp wrote it up at anti-war.com as well. But, you know, Blinking gave a straight green light for Ukraine to carry out attacks inside of Russia with American or British weapons. We just had a British storm shadow missile. It's a cruise missile used to attack a Russian, I believe, poor. in Crimea, damaged a couple warships. Russia says no big deal. They'll get repaired quickly.

Ukraine also launched some drone strides on Russia while Russia was holding local elections, and this was happening across Russia, but also in Russia-occupied territories of Ukraine, so Zafarisia. And there, there was a Ukrainian drone that was reported to have hit and destroyed an election facility. So lots of drone attacks going on, and it does seem to be escalating more towards Kiev, Ukraine's capital, and then Ukraine carrying out of tats inside of Russia. All right. So talk about what's going on with Romania because I know that at least at first there was some confusion about whether there had been some Russian drone strikes there on the wrong side of the river, Kyle. So we had Ukraine tell us, I believe, on September 4th,

that there were Russian drones that struck on the Romanian side of the border where Russia was carrying attack on a Ukrainian port, and that port is on the Danube River that separates Romania and Ukraine. And so, you know, Ukraine portrayed it as a Russia attack on Romania. Romania quickly downplayed this and said it didn't happen at all. A couple days later, some, I believe journalists, I believe it was CNN's Romania affiliate, turned up some debris that they said was from a Russian drone. It's unclear if maybe that drone was intercepted in Ukraine and then it crash landed in inside of Romania.

But Romania has downplayed this saying that it presents absolutely no threat at all to Romania. NATO has also downplayed this and says it, you know, no chance that this leads to Article 5 or anything like that. So I think the fear here, Scott, is that Ukraine is going to use this as propaganda to try to get NATO more involved in the war. The good news is that NATO, Romania are showing no interest. in playing along with Kiev. Yeah. Well, that's good. And in fact, if anything, there's a benefit in seeing the Ukrainian say, Article 5, Article 5.

See, you have to go fight them for us now. And then it's just silence in the room. That look at the fight that they want to get us in. I got one of these quotes I collected for the book. I probably poached it from you in the first place where one of these guys is asked, one of the military leaders of Ukraine has asked. but you know what if this leads to a nuclear war and he says well look we're already in a war anyway so what differences have made to us that's the way they look at it's completely crazy

that we're going to let people like that decide just how far a war with russia goes they said remember at the start of the war general milly said rule number two of the war keep it contained inside ukraine yeah that's so much for that and now have they made an official move on these so-called attack-hams yet, these longer range artillery pieces, Kyle? Not to my knowledge. It's been reported that that decision is coming soon, but they haven't announced the weapons package that's coming in. And, of course, you know, it's important to remember that once they announce it, sometimes

they really do rush the new weapons to the battlefield, and that may happen this time because our chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Mark Millie says Ukraine only has about 30 to 45 days a good fighting weather left. And we know that the spring counteroffensive was meant to be kind of a propaganda move for the American people to see Ukraine making some success. So, you know, maybe once they announce that they'll try to rush them to the battlefield so Ukraine could color in and change the territory of the map a little bit more before they have to call an end to the fighting because of the weather change. But at the same time, they could drag it out out of fear that Ukraine is going to use these to attack Russian cities or something,

and it could take a long time for them to reach the battlefield. But I do expect that announcement that they're sending them sometime in the future to come pretty soon. Give me just a minute here. At the Libertarian Institute, we published books. Real good ones. So far, we've got Will Griggs Snow Quarter. Sheldon Richmond's coming to Palestine and what social animals owe to each other. And four of mine.

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The Voluntarius Handbook, an excellent collection of essays by the world's greatest libertarian thinkers and writers, including me. Check them all out at libertarian institute.org slash books. And for a limited time, signed copies of enough already

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Your wife will clean it up. It's anti-war radio. I'm Scott Horton. Talk with Kyle Anzalone from the Institute and Anti-War.com. And so what's all this about Elon Musk committing high treason by not getting us into a nuclear war? I knew I had a problem with that guy. So Elon Musk, of course, owns space sets, and space sets manufacturers and maintains Starlink, which is a low orbiting satellites that, you know,

if you have a node for it, you could get internet provided to you. And so early in the war, you great, are startling provided, I want to say thousands, maybe tens of thousands of these to Ukraine, and then allow them to use them free of charge to maintain government services and that included the military. However, SpaceS was pretty specific that these are not meant to be weapons. They're meant to be communications. And I'm sure some people see it as, you know, maybe trying to split hairs to say that we're going to allow.

a general to communicate with, you know, his soldiers and order them to carry out an attack that way versus, you know, using Starlink to relay to a drone that then goes and explodes. But Spaceheads does draw a difference there. And if you look at their terms of service, they say it's because of the U.S. Arms Export Act, where if Starlink is used on weapons, then, you know, it should be subject to arms control. And previously in the war, when Ukraine tried to do this, Starlink. Starlink stopped it or SpaceS stopped it and did something with the Starlink system to prevent

Ukraine from using them on drones or for actual attacks. And so that's that's SpaceEd's policy. And then there was a report that what happened was is Ukraine was carrying out an attack on Russia's fleet in the Blat Sea in Crimea. And there was an explosive drone that was headed to the location. and Elon Musk decided himself to deactivate Starlink to prevent that drone from reaching its target. Now, later we learned that that's not the truth. What actually happened was Ukraine made an emergency request at the last minute from Starlink

to give them additional range for their attack submarine and Starlink space sets said no to Ukraine on that. And so this has been portrayed as treason as Elon Musk stopping an attack when really that's not the case. It's just SpaceX following their terms of service in U.S. law. Well, and it's so funny, too, that I guess Ukraine's a state in the union. So if he doesn't follow the orders of their governor, now it's treason against the United States of America or something. And I saw in his statement where he said, if the White House had asked him, he would have done it. But it was the Ukrainians asked him in the middle of the night to help them sink Russian. ships in their harbor, I guess. And he said that he'd been warned specifically by the Russians

that this could lead to a nuclear escalation if they think they're going to lose Crimea. And he said, well, I'm not making that decision to, as you put it correctly, extend the range of the Wi-Fi services so that you can use them to escalate the war and to this massive degree, this huge step of escalation without being told by anyone in America to do it but just being asked by the Ukrainian military for it is

completely crazy. Yeah, and if you look at Elon's statements here too, Scott, I mean, you kind of feel bad for him a little bit because he says like, look, I designed this for people to get on the internet and work, do homework, watch Netflix, and here it is like being used

in an attack that's going to start a world war. Like, I never signed up for this. And so I do kind of sympathize with him on that. I know he does contract with the Pentagon. His, you know, hands aren't completely clean and everything like that. But at the same time, I think this guy actually does take exception with his system being used in something that could escalate to nuclear war. And only barely, though, right? He said if seen how old Biden had asked him to do it, he'd had gone ahead or of Anthony Blinking or I don't know if Blinking counts. Jake Sullivan had

asked. Yeah, I guess as long as he complies with the U.S. law, he's okay with it, maybe. Yeah, well, at that level, there's no law. The president can do what he wants when it comes, especially foreign wars. All right, now, in the last few minutes here, and we don't have that many.

I got a couple of your stories here. I want to talk about. West declines to adjust Russian oil price ceiling as Moscow exports above the cap, and G20 weakens condemnation. of Russia after India summit. These are two very important stories on the question of America's economic war against Russia

since the outbreak of the war a year and half ago. Well, the full-scale escalation. The real war has been going on since 14, as we all know. But go ahead. Right. So I'll start with the G20, just because I think this is really important, where last year in Bali, the G20 signed a statement that explicitly condemned Russia for the invasion of Ukraine. It just hedged the language by saying that some members have different views, but the invasion was bad and we condemn it.

So this time that was taken out. It just said that, you know, the war is regrettable, and, you know, there's a UN Security Council resolution that we affirm. And that a Security Council resolution does condemn Russia, but in the actual statement that there's no condemnation of Russia. This was, I think, a really big deal, Scott, because if you look at the New Delhi Summit, So this was held in India for the G20. And the Chinese president, the Russian president, both set it out and stayed home, where you had the U.S. and U.K. leaders both attending. And still, the statement weakened its language on Russia.

And I think this really reflects that there's a growing body of countries that no longer want to comply with the U.S. economic war on Russia. And we've seen the expansion of Brits Plus to include six new countries including Egypt and Ethiopia, Argentina, and Russia find more and more partners to export oil to. And if you look at the oil cap in that article, kind of what I lay out is that initially when the West placed that price cap on Russian oil exports, it did have some effect. And Russia had to sell their oil at a discount. They were still able to sell it, but for less.

And that discount has now almost completely been erased. I think it was like $26 plus at the start of this thing. And now that discount is reported to be as low as $5. And so, you know, Russia is also ex-supporting above the oil price cap. I think their average ad-support price is now $74 a barrel. So this is really showing that it's the, you know, Western economic war against Russia is increasingly ineffective. And we also see this by Russia able to really ramp up its military production. As I mentioned earlier in the show, they're making 2 million rounds of artillery a year that's up.

from one million pre-war. They're also making 200 taints, and that's up from 100-taints free war. And that's per year? That doesn't sound like that many. That's the report, and I believe it's actually quite a bit more than the West can produce. All right. I guess I'd buy that.

I mean, I don't know. In fact, as long as we're at it, let me just mention. I don't know if you saw this article. I submitted it to the database at anti-war.com for ProPublica, how the Navy spent billions on the failed literal combat ship program and it just goes to show and this you know we're talking about the bradley you know and they're getting blown to pieces out there the bradley is such a piece of junk a guy wrote a book about it called the pentagon wars and they made a movie about it people might

have seen it stars uh robin hood men in tights is the uh air force officer sent to investigate the army's bradley program and it was such a death trap they're and send their guys out there to just get killed and that's the same thing. vehicle they ended up making. They've improved it a little bit because of his work. And then this ProPublica article about the literal combat ship, it's all politics, has nothing to do with sailing at all, nothing to do with war at all. You know, it's just, it's so corrupt. You let them go to war against, you know, any kind of major power. They're going to be swimming. And it's incredible to see. But it's not just the literal combat ship, Scott. We also have the Zoom wall class

of destroyers. They're supposed to make 32. They only built three because none of them work. They don't have a gun because the rounds are a million dollars each and it's not worth it. And now their plan is to put hypersonic launchers on them and they don't even have the hypersonic missiles developed. And so if you

look at, you know, major recent projects by the U.S. military industrial complex, whether that's the little crappy ships, the Zoom wall class, the Ford aircraft carriers, or made the Reagan aircraft carriers, or the F-35s. I mean, they're all riddled with so many problems. They're barely effective.

Yeah. They say in this article, they just mentioned as a side point, the $13 billion U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford still cannot reliably launch planes. It can't launch planes. What's it for? It's just for taking $13 billion from us. That's what it's for. Absolutely. They better pray they don't get in a fight. what a funny thing to say about the world's most dominant navy but i guess that's how it goes um hey kyle you had this piece from september the sixth prosecution unable to locate key evidence in the discord leaker case can you sum that up for us real quick here yeah so dad chat chair was in court right at the end of august and uh during that hearing it was in a federal

court in Boston and he asked to be released under the custody of his father, which the judge said there was reasons to do, including the fact that he's not a previous offender and his father is a good standing citizen and all this other stuff, but she said they can't in part because they haven't located any of the original classified documents. They haven't located his hard drive or a cell phone. So I guess there's kind of two thoughts here. One is that he either destroyed all this or that maybe it wasn't him. So I'm not sure, you know, what the, what, what's going on here, but I thought this was really interesting, important to point out that they don't seem to have very much evidence on this kid other than his alleged post in this discord room. Well, and,

you know, of course, infamously, it was the New York Times that ratted him out and directed the FBI right to him. But maybe they got it wrong. It wouldn't not be the first time over there at the Charlie Savage Times, where they fail a lot. All right, well, listen, we're out of time, but thank you so much for your time on the show today. It's been great, Kyle. Appreciate you. Thank you, Scott.

All right, you guys. That's Kyle Anzalone. He hosts his own podcast. It's called Conflicts of Interests, and he writes the news at the Institute, and he approves the opinions at antiwar.com. And that's it for Antiwar Radio for today. I'm your host, Scott Horton.

I'm the editorial director over at Antiwar.com, and you'll find my full information. interview archive at scothorton.org and at youtube.com slash scott horton show and i'm here every thursday from two 30 to three on kpfk 90.7 fm in l a see you next week