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Jan. 15, 2024 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
32:02
Biden's Yemen Attacks Fail To 'De Escalate' Red Sea Tensions

As could have been predicted, several rounds of US and allied airstrikes on Yemen have failed to "de-escalate" tensions with the Houthis, who have declared that they would halt shipping to and from Israeli ports in response to Tel Aviv's destruction of Gaza. In a bind, what will Biden do? Also today...Netanyahu tells the truth. Finally: US watched as American journalist died in Ukrainian dungeon.

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Airstrikes And The Wanted Saudis 00:14:31
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning into the Liberty Report.
With us today, Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you this morning.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
Are you freezing yet?
Yeah, boy, I sure wished I was in Iowa so I could campaign.
I do remember one interview in Iowa.
They showed the Capitol building, and I remembered there was like a patio out there, and they were doing interviews on it.
And I can remember, and I hated wearing overcoats.
Oh, yeah.
And I think the media was against me.
Could that be possible?
They had me out there and they were testing me.
How long is he going to stay out here without a coat on?
But I was pretty cold.
But anyway, good memories and some shaky memories about having been there one time.
But it's something I'm thinking about making a prediction.
I'm very cautious in prediction.
I think Trump's going to win.
I think Trump's going to win big, yeah.
He'll probably win.
But the real winner has to be the people eventually.
And I think they're down on the list.
I think this bipartisanship and sharing in on the spending and planning wars, it's so sad.
Even the war planning where we were a little bit more hopeful that the Republicans would stand up to this constant warming stuff.
But anyway, we're going to talk a little bit about what's going on with Bidenomics involved with foreign policy.
But I thought, I had to stop and think, how does this work?
How do these airstrikes and what he's doing help inflation?
What's going to make inflation worse, isn't it?
But then again, from their viewpoint, it's to me rather bizarre because they're saying, well, what's going on over there now is interfering with traveling, trade, and shipping, which is true, and which is true, that pushes prices up.
But what is not true is that's not the fundamental understanding of inflation.
They think it's a reflection, but it's interrelated because, and that's what happens frequently, is when prices start to go up, they don't say, well, they print too much money.
A lot of people are saying that more now than they used to.
And it is related, but they'll tie it in and say, well, that profiteering.
Those businessmen are doing it.
The bankers are doing it.
But it's never the Fed.
It's never the Congress that allows the Federal Reserve to do it.
So that is their bizarre.
So they're trying to talk us into saying, well, this is actually a very good thing.
But I don't think Biden's numbers went up over the weekend.
I don't think that Bidenomics, anybody believes in any of that stuff.
But in a way, all that mishmash is generally what we hear.
We have different people proposing these silly notions.
And as long as the country is wealthy enough and they have enough savings involved and the country can pass out welfarism to the rich and poor, people tolerate a lot.
And I think why they don't get away with it now, even though the targets are very easy, you know, the administration, very easy.
The main reason is, is there's not as much stuff to pass out.
You know, like there's nothing.
Every time they spend a nickel, they have to borrow it.
And now they have to borrow enough money to pay the interest on what they have already borrowed.
And I don't think they have the vaguest notion how serious this is.
But time will tell, and I hope we're just all way off track and completely wrong.
But I'm afraid that the people who have argued Austrian economics and sound money and warned us about this all the way back, especially 1971 or even to 1913, it would end badly.
And I think that, unfortunately, is what's happening.
It's ending badly and it's coming together.
It's the loss of the reserve currency.
It's a loss of our empire.
At the same time, we're flat out broke.
And that's why they're trying to come up with all this gimmickry.
Yeah, no, it's the old canard that war is good for the economy.
Yeah, that's it.
That's the old.
I didn't make a clip, and I just slipped my mind, but you're referring to this Yahoo Finance piece over the weekend that said the title is, what is it?
U.S. Airstrikes Target Inflation 2.
So they're putting a positive spin on the fact that we're spent, I don't know how many millions, $100 million, who knows how much, attacking Yemen, a tiny country with no real military, just sort of militias.
But I think we hit them at least twice now, maybe three times.
The U.K. and France have joined in.
And of course, the media is all for it.
Hey, it's going to be great for inflation.
War is good for inflation.
But let's take a look at the airstrikes over the weekend, if we can start with that first clip.
I described this at random.
Houthis vowed strong response after second round of U.S.-UK strikes on Yemen.
They hit, I think, six or seven targets on Thursday night, came back on Friday and hit the airport in Sana'a.
And I guess France has joined in as well.
The Houthis have been, as our viewers probably know, have essentially shut down shipping traffic in the Red Sea because they have vowed to block any ships that go into or out of Israeli ports because they support the Palestinians and they're opposed to what's going on in Gaza.
And so they have the geographic ability because of the unique geography of the region.
They're at a real chokehold point.
I should have put up a map to where they can affect that.
And I wanted to just do a couple of reactions to the U.S. airstrikes because I think, and you do too, because you wrote about it this week, one of the dumbest things that the administration has ever done.
Well, let's turn to our friend David Stockman, who has a good piece on anti-war.com today.
I think he breaks it down fairly well in the next little clip.
He makes a point that I think you would make.
The Red Sea is not the Gulf of Mexico, Long Island Sound, or the Gulf of Catalina, meaning that the Houthi blockade on ships heading to Israel in retaliation for the latter's genocidal assault on Gaza is Jerusalem's business to treat with, not Washington's.
Moreover, Stockman writes, the U.S. Navy has not been hired by the U.N. or any other global body to safeguard every sea lane on the planet, nor should it take the assignment if offered, because the homeland security of America does not depend on Washington functioning as a gendarmerie of the world.
You know, this idea that if you have a lot of money and a lot of planes and you want to achieve some political, geopolitical success, frequently the bombing does the perverse thing.
It brings people together who are being bombed.
The bombs aren't as effective.
Of course, there's exceptions to that.
But here's an article on anti-war.
It says, Houthi's offensive capabilities not damaged by U.S. air.
What did we spend that money on?
That's a lot of money.
And now, you know, you say, well, good.
Now they've used up their wisdom, they won't be able to start a war.
Well, they plan the wars anyway.
It'll be an emergency, and then more money will have to be, we have to make an exception.
$34 trillion of debt, it's not relevant.
It's just relative to, it's not, it's just temporary.
We'll print more money and the people will suck it in and take care of it.
Well, there's always a limit, and that's why this is so messy.
And this is why I think the political structure in this country is so mixed up.
You know, nobody has a concise set of beliefs where they can say, well, these are the principles we believe in.
There was a time that they hinted, and they still hint to it.
They say, well, the unifying issue is we all take the oath to the Constitution.
We all obey the Constitution according to our own personal biases.
That's the problem.
Well, we covered the war for a number of years.
We covered it closely when the Saudis were attacking Yemen.
And it was a horrible war.
But you had, at the end of the day, the Saudis had the latest American equipment.
They spent a fortune on it, yet they lost to this, quote, ragtag army, the Houthis.
They lost.
They sued for peace.
There was a peace.
So the idea that the Saudis could not defeat the Houthis now has been lost on the Biden administration because they have, I would argue, and many others have argued, they've fallen into a trap.
They believe that they will de-escalate in the region by attacking the Houthis.
When in fact, many people argue that that's exactly what the Houthis wanted.
They wanted the U.S. to attack.
And here's a great article.
Bernard at the Moon of Alabama has a great piece that I definitely recommend, moonofalabama.com.
I took out a couple of excerpts where Bernard quoted in this first quote, if you can put it up, this is from the New York Times, and I think it's making a very good argument.
They said, Analysts who study the Houthis, go back one if you can.
Analysts who studied the Houthis said that the American-led airstrikes could play into the group's agenda and might be unlikely to stop the group's attacks.
Well, we'll follow up on that in a second.
And this is a senior research official at the ARCA Group.
This was not a miscalculation by the Houthis, said Hannah Porter, a senior researcher.
This was their goal.
They hope to see an expanded regional war, and they're eager to be on the front lines of this war.
End quote.
And it goes on.
The New York Times goes on to say, within hours of the first wave of strikes, a senior Houthi official, Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, said that the United States and Britain would soon realize they had engaged in the biggest folly of their history.
I would say this Houthi spokesman is probably right.
If you go to the next one, he's quoting, Bernard is quoting further in this piece.
A Laurent Bonifoy, a researcher who studies Yemen at Sciences Po in Paris, said the Houthis, this is the strike that they were looking for.
And this is a quote from this expert.
They're gaining what they want, which is to appear the boldest regional player when it comes to confronting international coalition.
And there's a lot here to read, and if you want to read it, you probably should.
But to summarize it, Dr. Paul, Biden, in attacking the Houthis, he didn't do significant damage because they don't have a military base.
They don't have a Pentagon there in Sana'a where they can hit.
They have caves, they have tunnels, they have weapons that are smuggled in.
They have a capacity of shutting down that strait.
They gave the Houthis exactly what they wanted, which is to turn them into a major player and the only country that has really stepped up physically to challenge the Israeli attack on Gaza.
So he played right into their hands.
You know, this is not isolated.
This is not a new invention of our foreign policy.
Because I was just thinking as we were talking here that, you know, the Houthi thing is designed and broadcast is going to do certain things and ends up doing the opposite or no good at all anyway.
But are things much better in Ukraine?
I mean, a lot of the conditions that you just described, you could apply to Ukraine.
How many times have we bombed them?
There's even more money in lives.
Just think of the lives lost up there.
But what about the Palestinian-Israeli war going on?
And we can't duck the responsibility there either.
But we're participants.
We promote this because that's the job of an empire.
And that's why, you know, in many ways, people think this is un-American, but I think I feel very comfortable with it.
I do not think the American empire has anything to do with protecting personal liberty and making us a better country.
And it's a trap.
Right now, there's nothing Biden can do.
He was talked into, I don't know, Austin from his hospital bed somehow pushing buttons.
He was talked into, let's send some missiles over to the Houthis and let's bomb them and they'll back down.
Well, they haven't backed it in, back down against the Saudis.
They're not going to back down.
So the only thing, there are two choices left for Biden.
He can say, well, that didn't work.
You know, too bad.
Or he can escalate.
And that's exactly what the Israelis want, of course, because they, and we'll talk about this later, they want to make this America's war.
But it's also what the Houthis want.
And I think it was in the Moon of Alabama article where Bernard pointed out that, you know, after this peace with Saudi Arabia recently and this sort of a little bit of peace in the region, well, it was a little bit of a problem in Yemen because the Alansar coalition that was running Yemen, I probably mispronounced that, but led by the Houthis, they were having a hard time delivering the goods.
Their popularity was waning.
People were frustrated.
They've been through a bunch of war.
Things weren't improving on the economy.
They were getting more unpopular.
Now all of a sudden, they were attacked by the biggest power on earth and they withstood it.
The popularity shot straight up.
The day the U.S. bombed them, they had a million people in the capital demonstrating.
All of a sudden, everyone's saying, viva Houthis, you know, they love them.
So it served the purpose of the Houthis in Yemen.
It served Israel's purpose.
The only people whose purpose it did not serve was the American people, right?
You know, I think the expression that we get from our president is amazing.
Netanyahu's Truth and Sons Darkness 00:11:50
It's sort of an expression of total unawareness of, you know, you hear the words, you hear the intent, but all I see is the confusion that his mind is in connecting with reality.
And there's this staring.
But I get to thinking that, you know, he's been around.
I think he's been in Washington maybe 50 years plus.
And it's almost like the brain starts working differently, you know, because you can't self-deceive oneself.
A lot of people do that in a small sort of way.
They're deceived into thinking, oh, if I only do this, it's going to work out.
But that's trial and error of human nature.
You try something, I thought it was going to work, but you sort of laugh about it, kick yourself, or you change tunes.
But this is something different now.
You know, it's just this attitude that this is not that serious.
This whole idea that I'm behind on the polls, no, that's not true.
I mean, the polls have been wrong before, and it's oblivion.
But I don't worry about it because I think that I try to prepare people and tell them there's an alternative, because eventually the truth comes out, and it leaks out now.
I think that's one of the reasons as the economy deteriorates and the foreign policy deteriorates, the popularity of the president goes down.
But it is a system that when the truth comes out, I think that is what's happening, and that's why we do have bits and spurts of people supporting our position of saying, you know, it's time we just minded our own business.
Let people spend their money and let the government just forget about the government spending our money.
And we would be better off.
The world would be better off too, because we wouldn't be fighting these wars.
Yeah, and people will say, well, hang on a minute.
They're disrupting shipping.
It really is against our interest.
Well, that is a fact.
They are doing that, and they're able to do that.
But the fact of the matter is they're doing it in response to the Israeli attacks on Gaza.
And who's facilitating the Israeli attacks on Gaza?
We are.
It's like the old story we keep telling over and over again when we were in the committee hearing, and they said, well, they're shooting at our planes without saying, well, our planes are bombing them.
So that's the result.
And I think, aside from anything else, even if you think that they deserve some punishment, the fact is it's not going to work and it's not working.
And I would offer exhibit A, and I was just reading about this.
There's been an 80% drop in revenue at the Israeli port of Eilot due to shipping companies refusing to go through the Red Sea.
So it's crippling the Israeli economy, the Houthis' actions are.
And secondly, they are not deterred.
In fact, they are encouraged by U.S. strikes.
And put this next clip up because this just happened a little bit before we started the show.
Breaking.
Houthis hit a U.S. container ship.
And Lord Bebo on Twitter X commented, the fact that they hit it will for sure signal other ships not to cross the Red Sea.
As a reminder, the Houthis goal is to stop the flow of Israeli-linked ships, not to sink them.
They're trying to stop commerce in and out of Israel.
The U.S. Navy, Lord Bebo continues, was not able to prevent this.
It's a pure gamble for civilians in the ships.
CENTCOM reported the attack at 4 p.m. on the 15th, which is today.
Now that's Exhibit B.
Now here's Exhibit C. If you go to the next one, Qatar has announced that it will halt all gas shipments in the Red Sea due to the Houthi attacks.
So Qatar is out of the game.
And the U.S. is even admitting that these attacks on Yemen are not serving to dissuade the Houthis.
Go to the next one.
The U.S. admits it.
This came out just today, and here's a tweet from Zero Hedge.
U.S. warns its ships to avoid the South Red Sea until further notice.
U.S. warns its merchant ships of potential for Houthi retaliation.
Well, hang on a minute.
That wasn't supposed to happen.
We're supposed to scare them and cow them.
No, it looks like we're emboldening them.
Well, it looks like it's going to be a challenge to Biden's understanding of inflation because he's going to need a lot more bombs in order to clear the area and free up shipping over there, not realizing that we're involved very much in participation of the whole mess over there, both money-wise and interference with trade around the world,
with our attitude about sanctions and our attitude about Penalties and us telling people what to do.
And if they don't do what we do, we use bombs, which don't work.
Make it work.
They make it worse.
They make things work.
Worse.
Also, Netanyahu, who I found an interesting little statement here that Netanyahu tells Blanken, this is also your war.
And I can remember being in Congress.
And, you know, Netanyahu has been around.
And I think, I'm pretty sure when I was there, Netanyahu has been to Congress for a long time.
But it's always bothered me back then, and more so as we go on because we had Zelensky there.
It's almost, I feel like it's an invasion to be able to go down there, and they get more time on the floor than I could get.
No kidding.
And they get just talking and there, nobody's interrupting.
So Netanyahu, who's been there, but now he said he was talking to Blanken, and he says, this is not just our war.
It is also your war.
This is the war of the sons of light against the sons of darkness.
And that clarifies everything.
So now we understand that.
But he is right.
Give him a A plus on telling the truth.
But what is he going to do about it?
He gets an F because he's going to flunk what the policy ought to be.
Yeah, it is.
You're right.
He gets some credit for telling the truth.
You can't blame Netanyahu in a way, though.
If you pick some fights and you walk into a big bar and start a fight with someone, if you know there's going to be someone behind your back who's going to take on the fight, then you're going to be very bold.
He told the truth.
But this is the kind of language that he's used throughout this war.
And I find it to be chilling language because I'm not going to, harkening back to events in history, this is how things were framed.
Certain people were intrinsically evil and needed to be eliminated.
And this is how Netanyahu sounds.
The sons of light against the sons of darkness.
It does remind me of leaders in Europe several decades ago who framed it that way.
It's a very, very bad idea to frame fellow human beings in a way that they're sons of darkness.
He used the term Amalik, which was a justification for the slaughter.
So it's a very bad move.
Of course, he can do what he wants, obviously, but they're suffering a lot of losses, the Israeli, the IDF is.
I think I saw something like 6,000 severely, severely wounded and handicapped by this.
But nevertheless, you're right.
This is your war, too.
You gave us the money.
You gave us the weapons.
You got our back.
You're attacking the Houthis for us.
You know, you're in it too.
And I think we'd argue it's not in our interests.
You know, there's another time here that Netanyahu speaks a half-truth.
Netanyahu also took issue with South Africa's charges of genocide, genocide.
And because it's before the International Court of Justice right now.
And I don't think globalism and internationalism, even the League of Nations didn't do too well.
United Nations and NATO and all this stuff.
It just doesn't work.
But no one will stop at the Lahague, not the axis of evil, do not, and not anyone else.
He's talking, who's Netanyahu's talking about that.
So these meetings there and these charges, once again, you know, there are some people who are talking about genocide, but are the two factions going to sort it out?
But, you know, it seems like this is a big issue, and I don't believe that it just was discovered a week ago or a month ago.
I think this has to have been smoldering for a long time of what the real goals are and have been, and certainly in recent times, because there's been biases.
I figure the interference in that area, if you eliminated all the interference by the Europeans and the Americans since World War I, all the way through, I bet they'd have worked things out differently.
And they have, and there's been examples where they have worked things out when people don't take charge and they come from 6,000 miles away to tell them what they should be doing.
And like you say, if Netanyahu knows we're there with the money and the bombs and whatever, he's going to be very bold.
And that's why bankruptcy is going to be good.
They'll have to back off on this.
But it's also going to be very messy.
And that's what we'd like to prevent.
Well, we were talking before the show about, you know, right after the attacks on October the 7th, there was pretty much worldwide sympathy for Israel.
I mean, they were attacked.
They lost a number of citizens.
Now, not as many as they claim, probably a few hundred.
But there was worldwide condemnation of the Hamas attacks.
And that quickly turned to horror when you had, yes, a few hundred maybe Israeli civilians killed in the attack.
And people were horrified when the retaliation was 25,000 civilians in Gaza.
And so they had the sympathy of the world.
They squandered it with this wildly disproportionate retaliation.
And now here we are in the situation.
And it opens up the door for those people who have a conspiracy of why this is going on.
You know, whether it's 9-11 or whether there always will be another theory.
But in this case, they knew that it is said to be known that the Israelis knew this was planned because they have the best surveillance system in the world.
And so I have no trouble believing that they knew about it.
But you just can't know the details because I had a hard time trying to accept the fact that our policies before World War II actually maneuvered us into the war for good reasons, you know, to get us into war against Japan.
And so I have trouble believing people would do that if they know it's going to go to war.
But, you know, there's so much deliberate bombing and escalation.
Otherwise, if they didn't have a goal, type of conspiratorial goal, they have to be pretty stupid.
Deliberate Bombing And Escalation 00:05:26
But maybe it's a combination.
Yeah, maybe it is.
Well, I just want to bring up one small thing before we close out because we're getting close to our time.
I noticed here that Tony Ions gave us five bucks.
We appreciate that, kicking in a little bit of money.
Very kind of you.
Apologies to others in the past few days that have, and I hadn't seen it on my screen.
That's a long story.
But if you put up that last clip, I just want to bring up one final thing, which is Gonzalo Lira, born in California, American journalist living in Kharkov.
He died over the weekend.
Now, this is from an article I wrote about it as an update to RPI subscribers.
And I'll put a link in and ask you to please subscribe for free.
Of course, we'll never share your information with anyone.
But anyway, born in California.
Now, I listened to a lot of his broadcasts.
He was living in Kharkov.
And what he did is he was seeing what was happening around.
Now, now, this is the time when Zelensky was sainted.
He was more worshiped probably than Jesus Christ here in the U.S. when he came to D.C.
And Gonzalo was saying, hang on a minute, things are a little different here than they're being reported in the U.S. I'm here on the ground.
This isn't the plucky little democracy that we're hearing about.
Things are not going that well.
Well, what happens to him is he was arrested.
He was arrested twice.
The second time they arrested him, he detailed the torture that he suffered under his Ukrainian captors.
He tried to escape, and they caught him a third time.
They put him in a dungeon, and sadly he died over the weekend.
He had apparently contracted double pneumonia in October.
He had a collapsed lung.
He was not being treated for it whatsoever.
And he finally, sadly, died at age 55.
And the point that I made in my article, Dr. Paul, is that the State Department or the Biden administration could have saved this American's life with one phone call.
We understand you're holding an American who has been jailed for justifying the Russian attack, i.e. criticizing the narrative.
We would like you to let him go because regardless of how you feel about what he says, we believe the values that we're professing would allow him to say whatever he wants.
Nobody did that.
Victoria Newland, I'm sure, sat there gleefully, joyfully watching him die, and that's what happened.
It's sick.
You can't rationalize and say, well, those are the Ukrainians, and they have a record of being careless with civil liberties, but it was a combination.
They wouldn't have done that without the permission and the encouragement from the U.S.
And that is the case.
Besides, we silence people here.
We participate in this.
We participated in Assange.
And a lot of key people around the world.
And we've assassinated people.
Both of our political parties have assassinated foreigners because we didn't like their activities.
And in this country, oh, they don't shoot everybody, and they don't put everybody in prison, but they cancel them.
They destroy their lives.
And they do get in prison too for other reasons.
But that, to me, is really a sad story.
And that's why I think a little bit less of globalism where we operate and think we own the world.
Because, you know, let's say things go badly for the United States Empire.
And the empire disappears and we don't have the wealth and we don't have the reserve currency of the world.
Somebody else is going to do it.
It's the principle of the whole thing.
Who should be taking care of it?
Should it be our local government, our federal government, our state government, the world government, the United Nations, everybody else?
How about responsibility being on the individual?
But that's selfish.
Thinking, individuals get to make all they get to keep their own money?
Oh, my goodness.
Where are you guys coming from?
Well, I'm done, but I would just, before I forget, help us for free by hitting like and by hitting subscribe.
Let us grow our channel.
It's easy to do, and we appreciate it.
So over to you.
Very good.
And I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
There are a lot of problems going on.
There's an election going on in Iowa.
Some interesting things will happen, but the world problems will not be solved in a short period of time because I still think they're looking in the wrong places.
They're looking at just very principle of interventionism and management of people.
And it doesn't work.
The argument ought to be, should there be any government telling individuals how they should live and what they should do with their lives?
And as long as the rule of non-aggression is followed, people ought to be allowed to take care of themselves, keep what they earn, and also suffer the consequences if they make mistakes.
And they cannot always crawl to the government and say, I tried it, I can't help you, so help me out.
No, freedom demands responsibility for assuming that you take care of your own problems and also enjoy the blessings of liberty.
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