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April 2, 2015 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
08:35
Yemen: The Stage is Set

Saudi bombing of Yemen is escalating. US support for Saudi bombs is also support for al-Qaeda. What happened to the war on terror? Saudi bombing of Yemen is escalating. US support for Saudi bombs is also support for al-Qaeda. What happened to the war on terror? Saudi bombing of Yemen is escalating. US support for Saudi bombs is also support for al-Qaeda. What happened to the war on terror?

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Saudi Arabia and Iranian Tensions 00:07:14
Hello everybody.
Thank you for tuning in to the Ron Paul Liberty Report.
Today with me is Daniel McAdams who is the co-host and also the executive director for the Institute for Peace and Prosperity.
Daniel, good to have you today again.
All right, let's solve the problems.
Good.
This solved the problems of Yemen.
Uh-oh.
Not too long ago, I said that this could be the big one.
Still could be.
Of course, that doesn't say much about absolutes, but it's a very dangerous spot, and it looks like it hasn't settled since we talked last about this.
And I wanted to ask you a little bit about the Houthis, who are the ones who are on the move here, and they're taking over a significant amount of territory.
And the sentiment is in the general media, is, oh, they're instigated by the Iranians, and therefore this is, again, we've got to do it to stop the Iranians.
That's not exactly true.
No, and you'll see in every publication that it's the Iranian-backed Houthis, the Iranian-supported Houthis.
But in fact, and I'm far from an expert on Islam, but everything that I've read, they follow the fifth Imam, whereas the Iranian Shia follow the 12th Imam.
So it's if they have a completely different prophet.
And from what I've read, they're actually closer to the Sunnis of Yemen than they are to the Shia of Iran.
But this provides a justification for what would otherwise and what still is an illegal bombing of a neighboring country that Saudi Arabia is undertaking.
And we're very much involved in that too, of course.
So the Iranians, I imagine they might be thinking, you know, maybe this gives us a chance and maybe we'll have influence or something.
But they might stop and say, why do we have to go do it?
You know, we've been fussing with the Iraqis for a long time and even had a war with them.
But it looks like it's better if we just send in the Americans.
They'll mess things up so badly that they'll probably put somebody in charge that they'll actually be our friends.
And just look, they're closer allies with the Iraqis right now than they've ever been before.
And actually, the Iranians, they haven't hidden the fact that they have gone over to help try to get rid of some of the al-Qaeda and ISIS.
You know, the problems that they're facing in Syria and in Iraq.
So I think this is misleading, which leads to an interesting thought is if Iran's really not the problem, what we're doing in there and these other countries are doing, Saudi Arabia is doing, this might end up inviting or end up involving the Iranians more than they are involved right now.
Sure, absolutely.
The thing that strikes me about this intervention is it's seemingly the most nonsensical intervention I can imagine.
Think about the justifications.
So Saudi Arabia is going to invade and attack Yemen because the Yemeni people rose up and deposed a president who was elected by 98% of the vote in a single-person candidacy.
So are they going to argue this is to restore democracy in Yemen?
And are the Saudis the least democratic state on earth probably, the champions of democracy?
Well, that's part of our policy.
We fight and die and spend a lot of money spreading democracy.
They have elections, but they don't elect the right people.
They don't always put our guy in charge, so we have to throw him out and get somebody else in.
You could list several right now that this has happened.
I mean, that's what's happening in Egypt and other places like that.
We have to go in and straighten out the mess.
Well, the other thing that makes it so nonsensical, and I think a lot of the news media in the U.S. will not report this, but the Houthis are among the strongest fighters against al-Qaeda in Yemen.
And as a matter of fact, the bombing of the Houthis, we talked about this before the show, the bombing of the Houthis has actually opened the door for al-Qaeda to make some moves.
And you were reading about this earlier.
Well, the al-Qaeda are the ones that, I think, released the prisoners.
270 prisoners, so they got some of their radicals back out and their fighters out.
So it's sort of called unintended consequences and sometimes blowback.
But we've been there.
When was the USS Cole incident?
That was in the early 90s, I think.
And so we've been involved a long time as long as we had our guy there, you know, as long as we had our dictator there.
But this pretense of democracy sort of bothers me because I don't think we're very sincere about promoting democracy.
We're promoting our empire.
But your question you raise about why, why, why are they doing this?
And I have a suspicion that one motivation might well be that Saudi Arabia is not as stable as it appears.
And of course, they're backed up by the American government.
But that doesn't mean American government, you know, we said to Assad, it's time to go.
It's time to go.
Well, he's still there.
So I don't know how they can depend on that.
So I just don't think that they can depend on us to solve all these problems here.
Well, there is a sizable Shia minority in Saudi Arabia that's severely repressed and suppressed by the government.
So they are probably nervous about something like this spreading a Shia uprising spreading into the region.
Well, and there's a lot of questions still to be answered about Saudi Arabia.
Bin Laden came from there.
Of course, he was opposed to the kings who were allied with the United States government.
He saw that as an invasion of the Holy Land.
14 out of the 19 or 15 out of the 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia.
And then there's this report that our friend Walter Jones is trying to get released, the Congressional Report on 9-11.
And even though that is top secret information, a lot of it has leaked out.
And guess who's mostly involved in that?
And that is the theory is that's been reported in the paper has been that money coming from Saudi Arabia was used to finance these hijackers.
And that is what our government doesn't want.
And it's a hypocrisy, you know, protecting the least, you know, the worst human rights abuser on earth because we don't want to embarrass them.
You know, it's funny the other day, you know, Jen Saqi is the spokesperson of the State Department.
She often gets herself in a pickle because, you know, in her defense, she has to defend the indefensible often.
And she was asked by a reporter, he said, you know, hang on a minute.
The U.S. position is that in Ukraine, because Yanukovych left his post, he therefore is no longer the legitimate president of Ukraine and has to go.
But in Yemen, when Hadi left his post, we have to fight to put him back in his position.
So try to explain this to us.
And of course, she was tongue-tied and did her best.
But how can you explain these double standards?
Well, there are dictators and there are dictators.
So that is a big problem.
As long as we put him in power, and they're our friend, they're good dictators.
Why We Don't Want To Send Intelligence 00:01:19
But I think this problem is going to remain.
I think Saudi Arabia is very much involved in this and could explode there.
This hope, of course, that we're wrong.
But once again, what we're talking about makes the point that this is a mess.
We're trying to sort it out and find out who's doing what for whom.
The truth is that legally, it's not our obligation to do it.
We're not to settle that dispute.
We don't want to send our money.
We don't want to send the intelligence.
We don't want to pick size and we don't want to send anybody over there to help settle this.
It's a mess.
And the history is very clear in the last couple of decades, the more we've been involved, the more revolutions that have occurred.
And even if you go with Iran, I mean, the real beginning of that was 1953 when we put our own dictator in.
So it makes the case for non-intervention.
It's a moral case.
It's a constitutional case.
It's a very practical case when you think of the tragedies that we're facing today with our veterans and the suffering that they're going through.
And yet, what do they do?
We can't even afford to take care of the veterans, and they're out there looking for another war to fight and send more people over there.
So it's a real tragedy.
Anyway, I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Ron Paul Liberty Report.
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