Eric Margolis, journalist and author of American Raj, discusses the imminent US entry into Syria’s civil war; the questionable evidence that Syria’s government used chemical weapons on civilians; parallels to the Bush administration’s propaganda campaign before the 2003 Iraq War; the possibility of Russia entering the conflict; and escalating violence in Lebanon including car bombs outside Sunni mosques.
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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And our guest today is Eric Margulies, author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
His website is EricMargulies.com, spelled like Margolis, EricMargulies.com.
And you can also find him at LewRockwell.com, in fact, including, I think, today he's got a piece there at LewRockwell.com, this one about Pakistan.
Welcome back to the show, Eric.
How are you doing?
I'm happy as ever to be back with you, Scott.
Well, very good.
I'm very happy to have you here.
Now, man, war with Syria, I don't know, something's telling me it's just too stupid to be done and yet it seems like they keep saying that the boats are on their way and the cruise missile bombardier guys got their laser targets sighted.
And what the hell's going on over there?
It certainly looks like we're heading towards war.
This is the latest example of what some of the rogue journalists have been talking about for years, which is the growing use of alleged humanitarian interventions for more or less great power purposes.
And we saw it started in Somalia under the Clinton administration, but we're seeing it in spades now in Syria, where the U.S. and Britain and France are close, could be within hours from now, of attacking Syria.
Not invading, but certainly it seems like bombarding.
Well now, all the plans for war short of invasion, they've got to kind of have some sort of game in mind other than just a few airstrikes, right?
Are they going to go with this thing where they try to carve out a safe zone and all that?
Because I always thought that the generals thought that that was really stupid, that that was the kind of thing that over at AEI they thought was smart, like say to do that in Iraq back in the 90s, but carve out a safe zone?
The generals are against the idea totally, as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs has made perfectly clear, General Dempsey.
But there's political pressure in Washington to do this, and it's very strong.
So the dogs of war are about to be unleashed.
The U.S. tried to overthrow the Assad regime as a way of sticking its finger in Iran's eye, and it did so for the last year by fomenting and arming and sustaining the various rebel groups.
The result is over 100,000 dead people.
What's ironic is that having been in part responsible for 100,000 deaths, the U.S. is now about to go to war because of a couple of hundred deaths allegedly caused by chemical weapons.
Yeah, well, they're behind the coup in Egypt, where they just massacred 1,000 people in the street, at least.
That's right.
I've been saying for a while it's part of the pattern of growing.
We're back into a period of colonialism again, neo-colonial intervention in the Middle East, and the players are exactly the same.
It's the British and the French and their big brothers, the Americans.
They knocked off Qaddafi, who had been an ally, and now they're going...they knocked off Iraq, leaving carnage and wreckage in their wake.
They've destroyed Libya, they've destroyed Iraq.
Now it's Syria's turn for being non-cooperative, for not obeying Washington's orders regarding Iran.
But what they hope to do is cripple the Syrian army, shoot down the Syrian air force, blow up its airfields, to the point where the advantage that Syria had over the rebels...
Remember, the rebels are losing the war, so America is intervening now to try and prop up the rebel faction, even though it's scared that all these rebels may be wild men, al-Qaeda and everything else, Washington is being drawn into this war as a participant.
Right now, on the casualties, you know, I don't know, I guess there are not a whole lot of journalists with access to Syria, and haven't been.
It's been a couple of years of this, but that 100,000 number, to me, sounds kind of high considering just comparing it to the history of the Iraq war, where it took at least a good year and a half or two for there to be 100,000 killed there, and there was just no denying it.
There were bombings going off all over the place, it was at least low-scale civil war from almost the fall of the statue on, the pulling down by a tank of the statue on.
The number of casualties in Iraq, Scott, is a deep mystery, and kept so by the US government doesn't want that figure ever to get out.
The sort of generally accepted figure, you're right, is like 100,000, but French and other European investigators who've gone in have come up with a figure in Iraq for as high as a million.
Oh yeah, no, I would agree with that, but I would, my understanding was it got that high by 2008, but it took until, you know, 2004 or something was the Lancet study that said 100,000 was in the fall of 2004.
Right, well I agree with you, Scott, that 100,000 figure which I just cited sounds like an awful lot, but that's the one we're using.
We have to beware of all information coming out of Syria, because most of it is painted, it's propaganda.
It comes from either Syrian rebel front organizations who are mostly run by the US and Britain, or else like, you know, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, they've got all these five dollar names on their titles, but in fact there's one guy who's turning out propaganda, so their figures are very suspect, and on the other hand, the Syrian government, like all Arab governments, has done a totally lousy job of presenting its case and countering some charges which are often ludicrous.
Well, you know, I'd buy some tens of thousands of casualties, fighters and bystanders, and you know, it's also a question of who dies in a battle versus excess deaths because they get caught at a checkpoint, or because they get sick because there's not clean water, or the former distribution of medicine has fallen apart, and these kinds of things, which the high Iraq numbers are counting all that, the excess death rate.
Well, that's right.
It's very hard, and there's no, or almost no, neutral organizations there these days.
You know, even groups like the United Nations, their figures are suspect because the UN has become so much part of the US foreign policy machine.
Non-government organizations like Amnesty International, Oxfam, I think they all have an axe to grind, too, they're not very reliable, so it is very hard.
And most of the journalist reports we're getting out of there are Western journalists who are beating the drums on the side of the Syrian rebels, so there's more confusion.
Whatever the case, a lot of people are getting killed there, and the US, against the advice of its generals, is slowly getting involved there, as the Republican Party beats the war drums in Congress, and as the Friends of Israel push with all their might to get the US to go in and completely demolish Syria.
Well, now, let me ask you this.
It seems like, when there's so many reports of thousands of Saudis, and even Chechens and Afghans, I've been reading, Afghan Taliban going to Syria to fight.
I guess it's easier to fight on America's side than against them, and all you've got to do is just travel a little bit west, and the sides change.
So, anyway, jihadis from all over the region, apparently, are going, obviously from Libya, as well from Iraq, going to Syria to fight, and I wonder, at what point does the number of foreign jihadis going to travel to participate in this thing make it not really a civil war anymore, but instead just a mercenary job by the Saudis and the Americans, and their Zawahiri-ite acolytes?
Scott, my take on that is that the number of foreign jihadis is still not that great.
They make a lot of noise, they cut off heads, they eat people's livers, but in numbers, they're not there.
But the media loves them, because they wave their guns and they wear masks, and they look really scary.
But there are a lot of opponents of the Assad regime, like, you know, the mainstream Sunni majority, long repressed in Syria, has taken up its guns, and there are a lot of people who really dislike him.
But there are just as many Syrians who are supporting the Assad regime as a non-religious dictatorship they would prefer than an Islamic state.
Yeah, it's sort of, let's see, I think the way Pepe Escobar broke down the numbers, it's almost a 50-50 split, or maybe the Sunni Arabs are a bare majority, but the kind of city-dweller Sunnis, and especially the ones that really have money, the business class, those guys are tied to the regime, and it was in question, it was a big question at first, whether they were going to go ahead and side with their fellow Sunni Arabs, or whether they were going to side with the regime, and apparently they've stayed with the regime the whole time, so that makes all the Sunnis who actually have any power, or already had any power, in coalition with every other faction, which does not want to fall to the Nusra Front, or the Islamic State of Iraq, and the Levant, or the Al-Farouk Brigades, or anybody on that side.
You're very up-to-date on your extremist groups there, I compliment you.
Well, the Northern Storm Brigade, that's John McCain's friends, and then, he's the guy saying, we can vet the rebels, don't worry about it, but then all you had to do to vet the Northern Storm Brigade was just type in Northern Storm Brigade, and the first thing that comes up is the Time Magazine piece, where they videotape these guys saying, yeah, we're veterans of the Iraq War, where we were killing Americans.
Well, that's true, it's become another jihadi international group, but the American policy is always very short-sighted, and often self-defeating.
You know, this chest-beating, military chest-beating, I don't know, when was the last time that we had a successful military conflict?
Not Iraq, because we killed Saddam, but we demolished Iraq, and we're not running Iraq, which is what the purpose of the war was, and Afghanistan, we're getting booted out of there.
I guess you have to go back to Grenada and Panama as the last highly successful military operations.
Hilarious.
Panama.
Yeah, does Kosovo count?
Kosovo was more of a pan-European effort, and you know, I put Kosovo as a separate issue, because that really was, in my view, a humanitarian mission, and I was very proud of the U.S. for doing that.
You know, at some point in the last, in Kosovo, there were 800,000 Albanians who had been expelled into the woods in the wintertime, and were facing death when the U.S. intervened.
So there you have a very good claim of humanitarian mission, and the U.S. really had no major strategic interests in the Balkans that I could detect, so that's a different issue.
So what we're looking at in Syria here is the old 19th century colonial politics, and the Western military interventions are always sparked by some kind of outrage.
Somebody's head's cut off, there's a massacre of Christians, or something like that.
And now we see this weird story, strange story, of chemical weapons that, you know, I find it so hypocritical, because first of all, Vietnam is still suffering from Agent Orange.
We deluged the whole country with these poisons, these toxins.
Secondly, we, and I saw this firsthand when I was covering the war in Iraq, we, the United States, and Britain, with help from Italy and Germany, supplied all the chemicals and poison gases to Iraq to use against the Iranians.
Well, your assertion is confirmed today in ForeignPolicy.com, exclusive CIA files prove America helped Saddam Hussein gassed Iran, subtitle here, Eric Margulies was right all along.
Really?
I didn't even know that.
No, I made up that last part.
Oh.
Thanks, Scott.
Should have been, though.
I was, I found British scientists, technicians in Baghdad who had been making, working on germ weapons for the Saddam regime, who'd been sent there by the British government to develop germ weapons for use against the Iranians.
So, what hypocrisy.
Now, the US very wrongly started backing this rebellion against Assad in Syria, and so we are largely, you know, in good part responsible for all the deaths, or many of the deaths, as I was saying, and now we're worrying about the deaths from chemical weapons, what about bullets and bombs, don't they count?
Yeah, well, the whole thing is ridiculous, really.
The whole question of weapons of mass destruction always comes up, and it's such a bogus concept where they're trying to conflate sarin as, look, nobody wants to die of sarin gas, right?
It's horrible.
But, to compare that to an atom bomb or an H-bomb is a lie, you know what I mean?
I mean, if you could create Ebola virus that could be airborne and could last in the sunshine and could really take out a whole nation or something, then I'll go with, you could call that a weapon of mass destruction.
If you could make a germ bomb that was that effective, although I think that's probably pretty difficult to do.
Only the Americans and the Russians and the Brits and Israelis could do it.
Scott, they have a weapon which is called fuel-air explosives, or thermobaric explosives, and this was developed, actually, by the Russians, and they used it in Chechnya against the Chechen independence seekers.
Now the U.S. has been using it in Iraq and in Afghanistan, and it is a bomb that first releases a cloud of explosive vapor, like gasoline, and then it's spark ignites it.
There's a huge explosion with enormous downward pressures, and it's very effective against dug-in people or in bomb shelters, bunkers, etc., because it literally burns up the oxygen in the area and blows out people's lungs from overpressure.
It's a horrible weapon.
It's the closest thing to a nuclear weapon that we have.
It's used extensively.
What we're seeing in Syria may have been the result of the casualties of such a weapon, a thermobaric weapon.
That's interesting.
Nobody has brought this up yet.
There's certainly been footage of explosions so big that some people thought they must be nukes, just because of the shape of the mushroom cloud, although I sent some footage to Dr. Prather, and he said, where's the flash and where's the radiation signature?
So no, that's not a nuke.
Conventional explosives can also cause mushroom clouds.
Right, yeah, if they're big enough.
That's what he was saying.
I think in this one clip, it was actually the bombing of a weapons depot, too, which really did the trick.
Scott, what worries me as a veteran, cynical, cautious journalist, is these pictures of the casualties of the alleged gas bombing that's being used as a cause of belly now to invade Syria, these pictures, all the bodies are so neat, and they're all laid out perfectly in little rows, and I don't know, there's just something about it which says, a caution light flashes.
I'm not denying that this awful crime happened, but it's just too damn convenient, and why would the Syrians do this just at a time that the Americans are hovering offshore, saying, you know, if they cross the chemical weapons red line, we're going to go in there and take them out?
Right, well, and of course, as Gareth Porter pointed out on the show the other day, there's no footage of the attack happening at all, and from everything I've seen, I've tried to look at YouTube, a few different versions of it, I didn't see anybody dying from it either, and I even have an article here somewhere, it's in Euronews.com, where they have quotes of experts saying, well, geez, it seems like all the doctors would be, if regular civilians trying to help were ignorant enough to expose themselves to it, I guess that'd be one thing, but where's their reactions?
But especially doctors would be wearing protective gear, they would not be messing around with people who had been successfully killed with sarin, unless they were at least trying to protect themselves as much as they could.
Or they didn't know what it was, that's possible too.
I guess so, but he was saying, you know, they would be having problems, if someone got a lethal dose of sarin and then you picked their body up and started dragging them around, you would now be attacked with sarin too.
Well, you know, this could just as well have been caused by chemical weapons, crude chemical weapons that were being assembled by the rebel forces too, and one of them blew up, or a shell hit them, or a shell hit a tank full of chlorine, anything like that.
So there are many other possibilities to start a war, which the U.S. will invariably deeply regret over such a skimpy thing with very little evidence.
You know, people are going to say, the first thing is, I put out I think a thing on Facebook yesterday, that they found Saddam's weapons of mass destruction at last, they're being used by the wicked Syrians.
You know, it's funny, I saw Michael Moore actually pointed out that it was James Clapper of recent perjury and sworn testimony before Congress about NSA spying fame, who back in 2003 was pushing the meme that all Saddam's chemical weapons that hadn't existed in space time since 1991 had been moved to Syria, and that's why we can't find them.
Well, right, well we've heard that from the neocons, and from Clapper, and cover their shame.
He's certainly not of the George Washington school of veracity, this man should go and hide his head for shame for what he's done, but the whole thing smells to high heavens.
The U.S. looks to me, though, like our armed forces are going to go in there, and we're going to kill enough Syrian soldiers, tanks, and aircraft, so that the rebels can now regain the military initiative, which they were losing very rapidly.
This is our desperate attempt to save the war that we started, which is now being lost.
Now, do you think they're going to really try to kill Assad and overthrow his government at this point, or do they just want to bog the thing down and drag out the stalemate further, prevent the rebels from being completely defeated?
Oh no, they'll try and kill Assad.
Killing leaders has now become fashionable again in the U.S.
In other words, you're saying once you start shooting tomahawk missiles, regime change is on, that's it, no more of this, we're going to arm the rebels a little bit more, etc., etc.?
That's the U.S. objective, but the U.S. has been talking about this since the days of Dick Cheney and Bush, in conjunction with the Israelis.
The problem is that while you can overthrow the Syrian government, who are you going to put in power there?
There is no clear successors to this, and as we were saying earlier, they have a bunch of wild men there running around, but they don't have a respectable government to put in power in Syria.
And so they've known this all along, but they're doing it anyway, I mean, that's the whole thing.
I saw some clips here somewhere, Hillary Clinton, more than a year ago, saying, hey look, there's no one really to back except the allies of Hamas and al-Qaeda, and I'm not sure that's a good idea, and also, who are we going to replace them with?
The best they've been able to do is come up with these bogus groups of exiles with all their various acronyms, but nobody takes them seriously, in fact, they have to immediately turn on America and endorse the al-Nusra Front in order to have any credibility at all, which is still doesn't win them any real friends, you know?
This is true, and putting together sock-puppet governments is very difficult.
They don't have a Karzai on the shelf there to suddenly trot out and put on a little cape and hat and say he's the new leader of Syria.
They will find somebody, somebody will emerge, but I'm afraid that Syria is going to become like Lebanon.
I covered the Lebanese war in the 1970s and 80s, and it was an absolute nightmare, barbaric beyond belief, and Syria is clearly headed this way.
In other words, even if the Americans can put someone else on the throne, or somebody else puts somebody else on the throne, the war is just going to grind on, all the different hardened and armed factions.
That's right, and is America really ready to get stuck in a war like this?
You can only do so much through air power.
Look, we failed in Afghanistan against lightly armed mountain tribesmen.
We failed in Iraq, and now we're going to fail again in Syria.
I mean, you know, if first you don't succeed, lose and lose again seems to be the policy, and it's not the Pentagon that's pushing us into this.
It's the Republicans, it's the Israel lobby, it's the military industrial complex guys who are lusting for war, seen as a way to spark the economy.
Yeah, great.
See, what we're going to do is we're going to take all your money, and we're going to explode it, and that's going to make you rich.
Also, we're going to kill people with it.
That's right.
The Israelis are actually the ones, as I've said in the past, the only victor of the Iraq war was Israel.
The Israelis are going to do very well out of this whole business, too, because the destruction of Syria, which looks like it's going to happen, is going to create a power vacuum in the region.
It's going to cement Israel's control of the Golan Heights, which it has no intention of ever returning to Syria.
It was seized in 1967, and suddenly this whole area of Syria now is open up to, what shall I call it, Israeli influence.
Israel's right-wing Likud party has never defined its borders, and may have ambitions in the area.
We don't know.
With the Egyptian army back on the leash by the U.S., and Syria and Iraq completely destroyed, Israel is left sitting pretty and the only unchallenged power in the region.
Well, that's the whole goal of the Clean Break policy, right?
That's right.
Its principal author, David Wilmeser, put it in the companion piece, I always forget the name of it, Dealing with Crumbling States, or something like that.
And he says, what we want to do in Syria is expedite the chaotic collapse.
That way we can better control how it turns out at the end.
Well, this is the extension of the theory from the 1920s and 30s of the Zionist ideologue Jabotinsky, who said, quite rightfully, that Arab countries are all a brittle mosaic.
Give them a couple of good raps, and they'll fall to pieces, and we'll leave Israel as a dominant power.
Just to recap here for people just tuning in, it looks like we're about to walk right into a big stupid war that everybody involved on the American side knows better than to do it, and they've all said so out loud, and they're going to do it anyway, and based on what we've got to say is an obvious hoax here.
If it wasn't a hoax, then how come there's no footage of it actually happening?
You know?
Come on, something strange is going on here.
Not that they're doing a very good job at it, because it looks to me, Eric, like they're saying they timed this thing for the UN inspectors to arrive in town, and then they're saying, oh no, you know what, it's too late, because Assad says, yeah, let the inspectors go and look at it.
They'll vouch for me, and then now they're saying, oh, you know what, it's too late to have the inspectors go, but then the inspectors went anyway, and so I don't know who they think is running this show or how many different agencies are trying to run it at the same time or what, but there's a big problem with this costus belli.
Does it matter?
It doesn't look like it's really going to hold them back.
It doesn't.
It looks like a decision that's been made by the Obama administration to attack Syria, finally.
I mean, there's been great debate about it, and with the advent of fierce neocons like Susan Rice, former UN ambassador who's now the national security advisor to Bush, one trembles that these fierce people are really going for war.
I confuse this president with Bush all the time, too.
They all look alike to me, these presidents.
They do, and they're fostering the suspicion that the president is not the real power at all, merely a figurehead, or in a large sense, and that there are deeper government, national security circles, etc., who are really making the policy.
I can't be more specific than that, but one has the impression, but Scott, I'm worried about another thing with this developing crisis.
Syria has S-300 Russian anti-aircraft missiles, which are very, very effective, state-of-the-art missiles.
They may have Russian crews to operate them, just as happened in Egypt in 1970 along the Suez Canal, and we may see Russian missiles being fired at American aircraft.
The Syrians have anti-ship missiles, again, Russian, modern Russian anti-ship missiles may be fired at American warships off the coast.
So we are looking at a very scary possibility of a confrontation between Russia and the United States, and let's remember that Russia is as close to Syria as northern Mexico is to the United States.
I'm seeing flashing lights saying, Cuban Missile Crisis.
Well, could it really be that bad?
But I'll preface that with the story that Wesley Clark ordered an attack, if people remember back during the Kosovo thing, Putin, I guess it was Putin, got smart-alecky, basically, and said, oh, you're going to start bombing Serbia, huh?
Well, we're going to go ahead and put Russian troops at the Pristina airport, and what are you going to do about it?
He beat us to the punch.
So Wesley Clark apparently wanted to bomb them, or send in troops to attack them on the ground, anyway, something, and supposedly Sir Michael Jackson, the British general, said no, belay that order, or whatever, overrode his commander, the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, and said, I'm not going to start World War III for you.
And then also, of course, John McCain and Dick Cheney wanted war with Russia in 2008 over the war that Georgia started over South Ossetia.
And so, they really are that bad, some of our leaders.
They really are that, well, look at the Cuban Missile Crisis, for example.
Well, they're like caricatures of the old Soviet claims that, you know, imperialist ruling circles were running Washington.
Well, some of these Republican frothers at the mouth certainly meet the goal.
Now, the danger here is we've been kicking sand in the face of the Russians for a long time.
And we've been treating them like some third-rate banana republic.
The Russians are bad as hell, Putin is a very tough man, I mean, the KGB runs Russia now.
And he's not, you know, at some point he's going to dig in his heels.
We challenged Russia over bringing NATO to its doorstep.
We tried to set up Georgia as a Western client state.
We are causing unrest in Moscow by funding opposition groups through our non-government organizations.
We're up to a lot of mischief, and the Russians are mad as hell, and Russia's last ally in the Middle East is Syria, and now we're trying to overthrow Syria.
So, if I were Putin, I would challenge the United States directly on that.
I hope you won't, but he's under pressure, certainly, from the Russian military establishment and others to do so.
Russia is not a paper tiger, even though its military has declined a lot, and Russia may decide that Syria is going to be their line in the sand.
Man, well, don't worry, right, because there's a room full of CIA analysts and they'll decide whether it's a risk worth taking or not, is that how this works?
Margulies' number one rule of foreign affairs policy for the U.S. is, don't get in a confrontation with a nuclear-armed power, because you never know where it's going to go.
You would think that that would be easy enough, that we wouldn't have to turn to the experts expert like you to get that kind of advice.
Hey, no conflicts with nuclear powers, alright, well, mutually assured destruction, that's what they call it.
So how hard would the Russians fight for their base, for their ally, and do or do the Americans not understand that?
The Russians do not have lots of military forces, the strong military forces in the region.
Doesn't mean they couldn't move forces south from Russia to Syria, but the danger is that this can create a regional crisis, that is, U.S. try and interdict Russian supply ships delivering arms to Syria, or air deliveries of cargo planes.
Fights over U.S. bombing raids on Syria are countered by Russian anti-aircraft missiles.
What happens if the Russians send fighter planes with Russian pilots, as they did in 1970 on the Suez Canal during the famous war of attrition between the Israelis and the Egyptians?
Some sort of intervention is possible.
It's not likely, because Putin is very cautious, but Russia doesn't want war, Syria is not a vital, vital national security interest to Russia, but we are challenging Russia, and if we rub its face in the dirt over Syria, the Russians are going to get in a very dangerous mood.
Well, and I'm sorry I should know more about it before I bring it up, but I believe I just saw a piece by Doug Bandow, a recent piece, referring to the fact that they're trying again, the Obama administration is trying again to push to bring Georgia into NATO.
I'm not sure of that, because the situation with the new president there is a bit confusing, but I know for sure that there was a joint operation by the U.S. and Israel to bring Georgia into NATO.
Israel, the U.S. was supplying most of the intelligence cover there, and the Israelis were arming the Georgian armed forces, and they had a lot of advisers there too, but this policy changed after the ouster of Shakeshvili.
Yeah, well, Kerry was saying something about, I think the Bandow piece is in the OC register behind the paywall where I can't see it, but I can see one of my Google News results here is from the national interest, quoting John Kerry in May, saying, we're supportive of Georgia's aspirations, but I guess that doesn't mean that they're really pushing for it.
Again, I wouldn't be surprised, I'm sure there's a faction or factions in Washington that want to beef up the Georgians again, and it's a great way of getting back at the Russians.
That's crazy.
I mean, I don't know, I guess the new guy's not as crazy as Shakeshvili was.
Shakeshvili was a pompous fool, and he, you know, can you imagine, we were sending warships into the Black Sea off the Georgian coast.
Imagine in a crisis, let's say over Cuba or Mexico, if the Russians had sent naval forces cruising off New Orleans.
Yeah, and that was the thing too, as they say, oh, we're just delivering humanitarian aid in our giant warships.
Right.
So, it's dangerous stuff that's a little boy's playing with matches, and it should not be allowed.
I wrote recently, I said our most important foreign policy goal is to maintain good relations, proper relations with Russia and also with China.
Yeah, definitely, especially on the nuclear weapons issue and getting rid of them as much as possible.
And now, so Obama has backed down on the anti-missile missiles in Poland and the radar station in the Czech Republic though, right?
They called that off in exchange for some Iran sanctions or something?
Well, I'm not sure, I think this project still has some life in it, and there's talk of doing it a different way, but I'm not up to date on it.
All right, okay, so now, back to the Middle East here and Syria, and the blowback, we've already seen Hezbollah from southern Lebanon intervene on the side of the regime and help them retake the town of Qusayr, I guess you'd call it, back a few weeks ago.
And then now, well, there's been news out of Lebanon about attacks here and there, but the latest I saw was that Hezbollah has hunkered down this whole neighborhood and turned it into a giant fortress due to all the threats against them and whatever, so I don't know if anybody really knows who all's who there in Beirut right now, but is it possible that the Syrian mess is going to turn Lebanon back into what Lebanon was, 75 through 90 or whatever?
The danger is less acute than it was back then, but it's still very real, and Lebanon is an armed camp, again, another fragile mosaic, and now they're exchanging car bombs.
Somebody put in a huge car bomb, as you were just saying, in the Hezbollah neighborhood in south Lebanon, in south Beirut, and a devastating bomb, and then another bomb blew up in the heartland of the Sunnis, who were opposing Hezbollah, but also supporting the rebels against Assad, a huge car bomb in Tripoli, obviously messages, it was either sent by Hezbollah or by the Syrian intelligence, one way or the other, it's very scary, and it's horrible that these huge bombs go off in civilian neighborhoods in front of mosques, it's the most gruesome and bloody-minded behavior, worthy of Iraq.
If I could, let's go back real quick to where we were talking before the break, that trail of thought which we kind of left off, interrupted by the commercials there, but we were talking about the clean break policy, and you were explaining how it goes back almost 100 years now, that in order to create Israel, the best way to secure it would be to just give all the Arab states a nudge and they'll all fall apart, that kind of thing.
It seems like, okay, I can see how from a David Wilmser point of view and a Benjamin Netanyahu point of view, that's really smart, even circa 1996, because a World Trade Center bombing here, a Kobar Tower attack there, but now that it's 2013, it seems like if these guys are reading McClatchy newspapers like I am, I mean the Likud party government and their coalition partners there in Israel, if they're reading McClatchy and they're seeing the Al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and all this heart-eating loonies up there fighting and doing suicide bombings and whatever, that they might have a change of heart about whether smashing Syria into warring pieces is really even a good idea at all.
Because I can see how Syria as a state, well that's a state, and so obviously that's more powerful than warring tribes in a smashed, failed state if that's their goal, right?
But you can't control these guys who are cannibals and suicide bombers and stuff like that, and it seems like it might be, from a Likud point of view, really more of a security threat to have a bunch of al-Qaeda wannabes or whatever you call them up there in Syria than Bashar al-Assad, who after all, you know, he tortures people for George Bush, he helps invade Iraq for George Bush's father, he's not that bad as far as, you know, he hasn't really done anything about the Golan Heights and the Sheba farms and this, that, and the other at the disputed northern border there of Israel.
So why, why do they persist in this folly?
Come on, it doesn't make any sense.
Scott, that's a very good question.
This is the debate that's been raging in Israel for almost a decade, and is it better to have a stable state on your border that is not threatening, or are you going to deal with all these different crazy factions?
Well, look what they just did in Egypt!
They said, let's have a military dictatorship there!
That's stability we can count on!
That's the kind of stability that is more dependable.
But on the other hand, there's a fraction in the Likud party, a large part, and it's more right, even more right-wing allies, that sees the disintegration of Syria as a very tempting benefit, because Israel, you know, we remember how Israel began supporting the Lebanese Christian fascist Falange movement, became its patron.
Well, they could do the same thing in Syria, and start expanding Israeli influence in Syria, a broken Syria that's run by warlords and things, and it's tempting for the greater Israel people.
It's not tempting for more sensible-minded military people who don't want to get involved.
Listen, I've already kept you away over time, and we've got to go, but thank you very much for coming on the show, as always, Eric, I appreciate it.
My pleasure, thanks, Scott.
See ya.
Everybody, that is the great Eric Margulies, he writes at ericmargulies.com, spelled like Margolis, ericmargulies.com, and you can also find him at lewrockwell.com, l-e-w-rockwell.com.
His books are War at the Top of the World, and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
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Why does the U.S. support the tortured dictatorship in Egypt?
Because that's what Israel wants.
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Because that's not what Israel wants.
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Because it's what Israel wants.
Seeing a pattern here?
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