Alright y'all, welcome back to the show, Anti-War Radio on Chaos in Austin.
Next is Eric Margulies, he is foreign correspondent for Sun National Media in Canada, he's the author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj, regular expert guest on this show.
Welcome back, Eric, how are you?
I'm great to be back with you, Scott.
Well, it's good to have you here and you've got a great article that's running on LewRockwell.com today called, Seeing Through All the Propaganda About Iran and, you know, I haven't, honestly I haven't been keeping up with every little Twitter and detail coming in from there because, well, mostly I think there's a lot of hype about it and also, I don't, well, I'm not too sure that that's where the truth is to be found, you know, weeding through Twitters and so forth.
I've kind of been waiting for the Eric Margulies's of the world to, you know, write up their impression and that kind of deal.
Seems like it's pretty readily agreed that the Ahmadinejad faction stuffed some ballot boxes and so forth, I guess it's still not exactly proven one way or another whether that made the difference, sort of seems to me like he stole an election he was already going to win anyway, is that about your take on it?
Well, that's exactly my take on it, Scott, and what Ahmadinejad, who's reviled in the West, he's a great Satan in the West, and we're seeing a flood of wishful thinking in the Western media supporting the protests against him, but he won by 11 million votes and pre-election polls showed him leading, heading for a landslide victory, there were perhaps up to 3 million votes that were brought into question according to the latest reports we're getting.
It's not a decisive factor, and what happened, as far as we can ascertain, was not so much purposeful stuffing of ballot box, but Iranians can go and vote in different voting stations, apparently there are no controls on who can move around, so a lot of people did just this, they voted in multiple places.
Nevertheless, there was a major irregularity, the opposition was right to squawk like crazy, but I don't think it's going to change the results.
Well now, how many people, what's the death toll in the uprising that came, well sort of uprising, all the marches and demonstrations and everything that happened for the week following, how many people have been killed, do you know?
I really don't, I haven't been keeping track of it, the numbers are not large, but they're making a lot of noise, there have been maybe 25, 35, I really, I couldn't tell, the latest was this girl who was killed apparently by a stray bullet and has become a martyr, and you know, the western media is in there giving up all pretense of objective reporting, and is cheerleading for the latest flower revolution, velvet revolution, as they call them, of heroic downtrodden, liberty-seeking Iranian people trying to fight off the evil Islamists who've been oppressing them.
This is a comic book version, as is so much of our foreign affairs reporting, it ain't true, and it clouds actually what's going on in Iran.
Well, I want to know what is going on, let's start with who's this guy Mousavi?
Well, Mousavi was one of the figures of the original Iranian revolution, he was a hardliner, he was involved in the military, he was a close associate of Khomeini, the founding leader of the Ayatollah, and he's a fixture in the establishment.
But what's happened is there's been a split in the ruling establishment, and in part caused by Ahmadinejad, who's a big mouth, and who's gone out of his way to irritate westerners, he's caused a huge uproar among Jews everywhere by seeming to threaten Israel, to wipe out Israel, he never said that, but his ill-chosen words led to that, he's being accused of wanting to stage another second holocaust, and he now questions the holocaust, and he seems to be challenging the West over the nuclear issue, he's intemperate, he's adolescent, he's often downright foolish.
And Iran's more wily Islamic politicians within the establishment, notably Hashemi Rafsanjani, the former president, are fed up with Ahmadinejad, and they want him out.
But what we're seeing, too, is a class split in Iran.
On one side, the people demonstrating in Tehran are mostly young, 60% of the population is under 30, they're westernized, they've all got cell phones, they want modern fashions, they're fed up with the strictures of the Islamic regime.
On the other side, you have the farmers, country folk, military, pensioners, retired, orthodox religious people who are very strong supporters of Ahmadinejad, they don't like the city folk, or they feel they're spoiled and westernized, and so this is a Kulturkampf, as the Germans call it, a culture clash, as much as it is a political clash.
Well now, of course, a lot of people speculate about the influence of the American government here in covert action, of course, Andrew Coburn, and then Seymour Hersh, and then the Washington Post and all them, Brian Ross at ABC News talked about the covert action finding by George Bush authorizing the CIA to spend all this money and that kind of thing, but what effect, if any, do you think that that has here?
In fact, you know, maybe you could address this as part of your answer, too, I had Phil Giraldi on the show, I think a week or two before the election, we were talking about Jandala terrorist attacks there, and the possibility that the U.S. was doing this because they wanted Ahmadinejad to win, not because they wanted a color-coded revolution to install the friendlier guy, but, you know, try to create that reaction against America leading up to the election, the same way they did in 2005, when Bush said, you people better not vote conservative, and then they all did.
I don't know if our government, in Iran at least, is capable of such sophisticated maneuvering.
What is true, we've had the most remarkable outpouring of hypocritical BS coming from the American and British and French media, and Canadian media, over Iran, and from our politicians saying, oh, they're suppressing dissent, the poor Iranians, and, you know, nobody mentions that we had just rigged an election in Lebanon, the U.S. spent a couple hundred million dollars buying votes in Lebanon to rig the election, yes, and in supporting the pro-Western coalition.
Well, I remember reading that that was a great victory, but I didn't know about the covert action part.
Well, our media, of course, is not poking into it, but there were stories, even in our media, about how much money was changing hands.
Or let's talk about Iraq or Afghanistan, where the U.S. runs, quote, democratic, unquote, elections, where no party that opposes the U.S. presence there is allowed to run.
This is hardly a paragon of democracy, but what's never mentioned is the amount of money that has been spent, authorized, Congress voted in recent years, voted money to overthrow the Iranian government.
It was the first time, to my knowledge at least, that the U.S. Congress had actively voted funds to overthrow a foreign government that we recognized diplomatically, and a member of the U.N.
Pakistani sources, intelligence sources, tell me that we in the U.S. have spent $400 million recently in subversion in Iran, arming extremist groups, we would call them terrorists if they were operating against us, and in trying to stir up the pot in Iran, giving communication devices, the Voice of America, the BBC, all the Western media have launched a media blitz in Iran to stir up and support the uprising.
So we have been doing it.
We did it in Ukraine.
We did it in Georgia.
We perfected the techniques there, and now we're doing it in Iran.
But meanwhile, we're saying, oh no, we don't have anything to do with it.
Well, you know, it's interesting, because it all kind of depends on how you phrase it.
Like on one hand, it seems impossible that, you know, the way that, for example, Ahmadinejad or Ayatollah Khamenei would phrase it, that, you know, oh, the CIA is behind all this, or whatever.
If you think back to Serbia, and Ukraine, and Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan, and even in Lebanon, where it didn't quite work out, all these color-coded revolutions, they weren't all just rent-a-mobs like Iran in 1953.
I mean, the people actually at least felt that they had all been screwed out of an election, and there was a young versus old thing, an east versus west thing, and all these different things at play.
And of course, the NED can pay a few million dollars, bring in some jumbotrons, and some color coordination, and Madison Avenue thing to kind of give it cohesiveness, but to what degree can the West take blame or responsibility for what's going on in the streets of Iran, do you think?
Well, the West has taken advantage of unrest that was there.
The West didn't create it, but it's certainly been abetting it, and stoking the dissatisfaction in Iran.
We've been trying to overthrow the Iranian government since 1979.
Remember we sent Saddam Hussein and Financin to invade Iran, one million casualties.
It was caused, as you mentioned, to go over to the Mossadegh government.
How many Americans remember that Britain, our glorious ally, invaded Iran in 1941?
And aggression every bit as egregious as Germany's invasion of Poland.
Anyway, the Iranians remember.
We don't.
And they're mad at the West, but the younger Iranians are mad at the Islamic establishment, which is very retrogressive and feudal or medieval in certain ways, and it's a generational thing.
They want to be liberated.
As I said, they're fed up with Ahmadinejad, who's often an embarrassment to his country, and they're tired of populist politics.
You know, we see the same thing in Thailand.
It's not just Iran.
We've seen this battle between Thaksin Shinawatra in Thailand, who's also another populist politician, with all the farmers behind him, and the city folk hate him.
Well, we seem to see this phenomena going on.
But we are fanning the flames in Iran.
Look, we've had Iran under economic siege since 1979.
We attacked their banking system, their export system, their oil industry.
We've done everything we possibly can to overthrow their government except to drop a nuclear weapon on them.
And now we see this wonderful opportunity to really jump in and cause hell.
Yeah, well, the neocons announced before this thing, Daniel Pipes and Max, Not Enough American Blood Has Been Shed Yet in Afghanistan, Booth, both wrote that they wanted Ahmadinejad to win because he's easier to demonize and easier, basically, to have an excuse to start a war.
Well, the director of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, said exactly the same thing.
They're rooting for, yeah, they're rooting for Ahmadinejad, which I think is just hilarious, because it reminds me of the Soviet Union in the 1930s, when the Kremlin would suddenly make a 180-degree policy change, and all the other communist minions and apparatchiks who'd been parroting the party line out in the boondocks were suddenly caught flat-footed, and the didn't realize their policy had changed.
Well, this is exactly what's happened, while Ahmadinejad is being held up in the United States as a great Satan, here are these neocons and hardline Israelis who say, no, no, no, we want him to stay on.
It's just the way Israel supported Khomeini during the 1980s and sold him $5 billion worth of arms when Iran was fighting Iraq.
There's a lot of double-dealing going on here, and as I said, a ton of hypocrisy.
Well, you know, that's really interesting, too, the whole Iran part of Iran-Contra and the Israeli part of that, and I guess $5 billion worth, I think you may be implying this went far beyond their role in Iran-Contra, but if the Israelis and the Iranians were able to get along after the revolution through the 1980s on that level, if Dick Cheney was able to go there in the 1990s, and I guess to Qatar or whatever, or UAE, and give speeches denouncing Clinton for his unfair sanctions against the very reasonable people of Persia that he wants to do business with, why is it that we are stuck in this fantasy, you know, you talk about a comic book or whatever about the situation on the ground there, how about the comic book that Iran is a threat to America or even to Israel at all?
Well, it's a nonsense to America, for sure.
It has no capability or intention, any more than North Korea is going to launch a nuclear weapon at Hawaii, as we were hearing this week.
I really like that one, I thought that was funny.
I mean, why?
Anyway, that's for another program, but Iran might be a potential threat to Israel if it gets missiles and nuclear warheads, but Iran only wants nuclear weapons because Israel's pointing nuclear weapons at Iran, and Pakistan has them and India has them.
You know, let's talk Middle East regional nuclear disarmament, that is the security answer, not this existing arms race.
But anyway, Iran is not a threat to the United States, in fact, Iran should be a major US ally.
Well, I mean, they're certainly our best friends in Iraq and could be our best friends in Afghanistan in the war against the people there, I don't know if that's a good thing or not, but at least it shows that they can be worked with.
Well, you're quite right, Scott, we're playing footsie with Iran in Afghanistan and in Iraq big time, while fulminating at them from Washington.
You know, a lot of it is domestic US politics.
You've got the Christian groups who are angry at Iran because they're Muslims, and you've got the Israel lobby, which I guess until this week was beating the drums against Iran, but now that they hear Ayatollah Pipes and the head of Mossad saying, calling, let's make nice to Ahmadinejad, I think they're confused.
They're as confused as the US government right now.
Well, you know, one thing is clear is that this Ahmadinejad guy is terrible.
I mean, you look at the way that he has refused to provide cages to serve as free speech zones for the people of Tehran, he's depriving them of their rights.
Well, yeah, he's a fundamentalist, populist politician.
He's a war veteran.
He was a much decorated war hero.
He's a real hardliner.
He's very bad as a representative for Iran.
But as I said, a lot of Iranians like him.
You know, they believe they're surrounded by hostile outside forces, and only a really tough guy can defend them, reminds us of America under George Bush.
The two of them had an awful lot in common and used to feed off each other.
Well, and isn't all this stuff about Iran's nuclear weapons program just a bunch of hype?
I mean, it seems like a pretty bad situation that the entire conversation about Iran is based on the premise that they're making nuclear weapons and we got to stop them.
King Obama said so on TV today.
And yet there's an official fatwa declaration that nukes are un-Islamic and that they don't want one.
And so far, there is no evidence, and in fact, no indication, according to the IAEA, that any of their nuclear material has been diverted to a military or other special purpose, as they call it.
They're enriching to industrial grade.
Even if they wanted to begin making bomb-grade material out of it, they'd have to kick the IAEA out of the country and tell the whole world what they were doing basically before that, which would still give us years, if not months and months and months, if not years, to bomb them before they get a nuclear bomb.
I mean, it seems like the whole structure of the debate just accepts the premise that it's impossible, that really they just want a civilian nuclear program so they can sell their oil and run their local electricity off of nuclear.
I mean, they have domestic sources of uranium and everything.
It seems like an opportunity cost kind of a situation, or at least it could be.
There's no evidence that it's not.
Well, Scott, 16 other nations are doing the same nuclear enrichment for power, which Iran is doing.
And yes, the Combined U.S. Intelligence Agency says there's no evidence, as well as the UN, that Iran is working on a nuclear program.
But Washington is saying, well, how do we really know?
Under a mountain somewhere hidden away, they've got a secret program, and they've got to prove that they don't have nuclear weapons.
It's like we did with Iran with Saddam Hussein.
Prove you don't have weapons of mass destruction.
I think I saw that Chuck Norris movie when I was a kid, Delta Force II, I think, a secret nuclear program in the mountain in Iran, I think, in 1985 or 6.
Well, but the thing is that so Iran doesn't have nuclear weapons now.
It could in the future.
And I think logically it may be likely to do so.
And why not?
As I said, everybody around Iran has nuclear weapons.
Who came down from Mount Sinai and said that only Iranians are not allowed to have nuclear weapons?
I mean, it's just an egregiously unfair and unsustainable position.
And one of these days, the Iranians, if we push them hard enough and keep up the war drums against them, they're going to develop a nuclear weapon, because they look at North Korea and see that for all our huffing and puffing at North Korea, now that they have the nuclear weapons, we're not about to send the Pennsylvania National Guard to go and invade North Korea.
Yeah, well, what's going to happen now?
I mean, it seems at least at this point that the protests are dying down and it's a done deal and the Ayatollah is going to, I mean, there are further developments to, it's not over yet, I mean, but it doesn't look like there's going to be any kind of regime change in Iran at this point.
How much more difficult does this make it for Obama, assuming he even really wants to try to work out a deal with them, to do so?
I mean, or is this going to just play into the hands of all the John McCains of the world?
Well, Scott, one of the reasons that Iran has been developing its nuclear program so slowly, to the surprise of many nuclear experts that's been at this since, you know, 1980, is that there's great confusion in the upper ranks of the badly splintered Iranian government over whether to go ahead or stop or what way, what kind, and this is going to get worse.
You know, the whole Iranian political system is designed, like the American political system, to prevent the emergence of a king or a despot.
So power is dissimulated amongst many, many different areas, and it's going to make it more difficult.
There's a big split in the current leadership in the political establishment.
Keep our eyes on Hashemi Rafsanjani, and remember the name Ari Larijani, two figures who are going to wield very important power, and they are going to be moving against Ahmadinejad, I think.
So it's like watching, you know, six men fighting under a carpet, where we're not going to see lots of action, but we don't know exactly what's going on.
But it is going to be harder for Obama to try and negotiate with Iran, and I don't think he would have ever gone anywhere anyway.
The Iranians are very stubborn and very wily, and they're determined to go ahead with it.
So the U.S. is going to have another major headache with Iran.
I'm just writing my column on the subject now, and you know, Iran has been a curse to the United States, and it's going to continue that way unless we start adopting a more mature policy.
Can you tell me very much about this guy Rafsanjani?
They say he's very rich, but I wonder, you know, what he does for a living.
Well, he was a cleric, but he was also a businessman, and very much in the clerical establishment, a pillar of the Islamic revolution.
But he's also, he's the man of the bazaaris, who run the bazaar, which are sort of like the business class in Iran, merchants and traders.
And he's grown very wealthy in that business, and with his connections, his opponents keep accusing him of being corrupt.
He's in his 70s now.
So he's not a spring chicken, but he's very wily.
He's bitterly opposed to Ahmadinejad, and he thinks he screwed up Iran's relations with the Western world.
But also inside Iran, there's a big fight going on, because a lot of this is about economics.
Ahmadinejad, as I said, is a populist.
He's spouted all kinds of extreme left-wing economic solutions.
He's brought in very big subsidies for all kinds of gasoline, bread, sugar, etc.
And Iran's economy is staggering, also worsened by the Western boycott.
Rafsanjani represents more the right-wing economic free marketeers, if you want to call them.
And so they're fighting it out on this very bitter economic issue, which is affecting everybody in Iran, because the economy is in very, very serious trouble.
So if you had to guess, do you think it's going to end up where the faction that lost here is going to gain more power in the meantime before the next election, or it'll be more of a backlash and more of a reactionary, even worse kind of Ahmadinejad government?
Well, I think everybody in the leadership has been wounded by this battle.
And nobody has won, but everybody's been damaged.
Certainly, Ahmadinejad has been damaged, but the supreme guide, Ali Khamenei, has also been damaged, because his authority has been challenged for the first time.
And he's shown to be what he is, a weak leader.
So it's not impossible that he could be removed at some point by the Council of Guardians, which is run by Mr. Rafsanjani.
Ahmadi's authority is undermined, his charisma is certainly hurt.
I think we're going to see confusion and sniping and things going on in Iran for a long time, while the West continues to stir the pot.
And upon some of these groups that have been rioting in the street, we'll go underground and start launching violent action.
Yeah, well, I don't know.
I'm so cynical about American intervention that I probably sound like I'm really crass and what have you.
I think that having a dictatorship or a police state and authoritarian government is bad enough, but then you put right-wing religious clerics in charge of it.
I pretty much would like to get on my soapbox and complain about theocracy around the world and why the Iranian dictatorship ought to not shoot its people in the street and so forth.
And yet, I'm not really in any position to make those kinds of moral claims coming from where I'm broadcasting from.
Well, Scott, as I've been saying, it's very unpopular.
Iran remains the most democratic government.
It's not.
It's a 50% democracy, 50% theocracy.
But it's the most democratic government from Morocco to India.
Forget Israel, maybe Lebanon, you know, and Turkey, but within the Muslim world, within the Arab countries who the U.S. supports, who are really almost American protectorates, no one is allowed to run for office in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Morocco, Jordan.
This is what the farce is, that we're criticizing Iran while the countries that we control not only don't allow any expression, the slightest expression of democracy.
But you remember the one guy who heeded calls to run against President Mubarak in Egypt?
He actually came out and announced he was going to run for president.
He was probably beaten up and thrown in jail.
Yeah, along with all his supporters in the street.
Exactly.
So, I mean, what hypocrisy?
Iran at least allows elections, which, by the way, they have held more elections in their region than any, than most Western countries.
I think they've held 10 since the election.
They have been pretty fair and pretty well-run, the elections.
And don't forget, you know, Chicago and Louisiana are not the acmes of Swiss-style elections, either.
Yeah, or Florida.
Florida, yeah.
Well, they've had pretty decent elections, and there were fierce debates on television in Iran and public criticism.
You know, when did you last hear anybody criticize the king of Saudi Arabia on Saudi Arabia?
Nobody who still has his head on his shoulders, that's for sure.
So we are, all our little despotisms in the Middle East are completely denied democracy, and we're criticizing Iran for being 50 or 60 percent of the way there, but not doing it right.
Yeah.
Well, hey, as long as I've kept you over time here, can I keep you longer and ask you about AFPAC?
I, those words, I can't say no.
Big Brother calls it AFPAC.
That's Afghanistan and Pakistan.
I guess they have a point that it's a phony line, that Durand line between the two states there, drawn by the British back in the days.
What's the mission there?
What the hell is even, who's the war even against in that country, other than, you know, the people who are getting the bombs dropped on them?
But who and why?
Well, Scott, I'm going to be with Dr. Ron Paul on Thursday in Washington discussing this very question.
What on earth are we doing there?
Well, we are getting sucked into a widening war.
This is classic Vietnam-era mission creep, we used to call it in that day, where the mission keeps expanding and expanding.
And, you know, we can't win the war in Afghanistan.
Well, we better invade Pakistan, where all our troubles are coming from.
And it's madness at this point.
What we've done is we've now stirred up a second war in the region.
We are a rented Pakistani army.
We're paying them a billion and a half dollars a year.
God knows how much in secret payments.
Has just created two and a half million refugees.
We did it.
And we wonder why people in that region hate us and wonder why we're getting terrorist attacks against the United States.
It's a mad policy.
And unfortunately, the military appears to have completely taken these decisions away from the civilians in Washington and is running its own war.
And it's a charge of the light brigade kind of war.
It's not going to succeed.
Well, you know, a few people wrote about this.
Forgot who I'm paraphrasing at this point, but it was a criticism of Stanley McChrystal's testimony before the Senate, where he defined, oh, hell, maybe it was something you wrote.
Anyway, McChrystal defined success in Afghanistan as the degree of protection provided to the people of Afghanistan.
So it's kind of a very vague sort of thing where, you know, we're going to stay there for 30 years and there's going to be a Disney World and all this crap like they used to say before the invasion of Iraq.
Well, you know, if our generals there are smart, the politicians are smart, they're going to start laying a trail of crumbs now of saying, well, you know, we're there, but not forever.
And we have to think about an exit strategy.
We were beginning to accomplish our mission.
They've got to leave us a line of retreat so we don't run with our tails between our legs.
We can make a dignified withdrawal from Afghanistan the way we're claiming victory in Iraq.
You know, we're not out of Iraq.
We're still going to keep troops there.
But essentially, we didn't really win that war, but we don't look like we've lost it.
And that's very important.
The problem is we are now tearing apart Pakistan.
We are driving Pakistan into a civil war.
We're financing it.
So we bear total responsibility for it.
We're forcing its government to wage war against its own people.
The government does not want to do it.
But they're bankrupt.
They live on our money.
We've arm-twisted them to doing that.
And we have now raised what we call Taliban on the northwest frontier.
It's not Taliban.
It's, as I've been saying on this program many times, it's the Pashtun tribes.
There are 50 million of them.
They're very, very hardy people.
They're not easily intimidated.
And we have stirred up a major tribal uprising without really understanding what we're doing or what we're getting into.
Well, and at least the last number I heard was that as the result of this, I guess, so-called Pakistani assault, although, as you say, it is on America's orders, there are 3 million refugees.
So I wonder, like, what kind of cause and effect sort of ripples are going to come from that?
I mean, you're going to have a bunch of people who are from the wild and crazy, untamed Islamic areas now all fleeing into the cities, right?
Well, we're yelling at the Iranians.
Imagine the nerve of Washington yelling at the Iranians for shooting at some of its people in the streets or beating them over the head with truncheons while we have unleashed the Pakistani army against its own people, these Pashtun tribes.
And as you say, created two and a half or three million refugees, killed thousands, and have now created a war situation.
Which situation is more egregious, I ask you?
Well, and, you know, the whole, as you say, the mission creep thing here, none of these people, I guess, maybe the rotation in the jobs is always so quick that these people don't ever get to see the effects of the things that they do or something, or they just don't care at all, I guess, is more appropriate.
But there's the whole thing in the New York Times, the discussion about, well, maybe we need to start bombing inside Quetta, which I think, to my understanding, is in the southern part of Pakistan.
And, of course, the point being that, well, we bombed the hell out of them in Afghanistan, so they fled to Pakistan's northwestern tribal areas in north and south Waziristan.
So we bombed the hell out of them there.
Well, now they fled to the big cities in Pakistan.
So maybe it's time to start doing targeted airstrikes in Quetta.
Well, am I even saying it right?
Yes, Quetta.
I'm amazed to see the New York Times has become a jihadist and beating the war drums in today's editorial for more military action in Afghanistan.
I mean, what the hell doesn't the liberal, ultra-liberal New York Times have beating the war drums on Afghanistan, except it did the same thing over Iraq?
Few one thinks the New York Times has been taken over by the neocons, which is probably the case.
But you're right.
The war, we fight them on the border.
They retreat.
We go deeper, deeper, deeper.
This is exactly what I meant by mission creep.
And we don't have the soldiers to do this.
We're trying to get the Pakistani army to fight our war for us.
But it's not going to work.
And one of these days, the soldiers are going to turn against their own officers, and there's going to be a big revolution in Pakistan, and we're going to create a really huge regional problem for us.
It's such a dangerous area, I can't begin to tell you.
And we're blundering around there like drunken elephants with no knowledge of what's happening on the ground, saying we're fighting Taliban when we're stirring up a tribal uprising, and the Indians are watching this with growing interest.
You know, this is the thing, too, though.
I mean, reason is completely broken down here.
We're talking about a policy, a military policy that's not even a political policy.
It's simply a military policy.
And what you're telling me, basically, is that it's all based on the land of make-believe.
It might be the situation on the ground, as described by Sean Hannity or something, is the basis for the war.
So they're what?
They're just warring against Pashtun tribesmen indiscriminately, and they have no end in sight.
They have no plan that this is the reason why we're doing this, and it's going to last this long, and this is even who we're trying to kill, not those guys, but these guys, or anything?
Or you're telling me that, basically, they're just saying, look, go and kill people in that part of the country, and then we'll see what happens after that.
It's a policy of ignorance and arrogance.
Same thing that led us into Iraq.
We don't, you know, even a British general from Iraq said, we're culturally ignorant.
We really don't know what's going on in the area.
I just read again in the New York Times that they're calling for more training of Afghan troops.
We need to build an Afghan army.
Well, the Soviets tried that.
They had 260,000 Afghan communist troops, and they were useless.
And they need more training.
Well, Afghans have been at war for 30 years.
The last thing these guys need is more training.
What they need is loyalty to a government and respect for a government.
And we buy loyalty.
We rent loyalty.
And we've created in Kabul another little Saigon, you know, sort of filled with hookers and bars and all kinds of highly paid consultants and the soldiers on leave.
And that has nothing to do with the rest of the country and is becoming a little isolated fortress.
And I think we're going to see the same thing happen there that happened in Saigon.
Wow.
So where the the cape wearing puppet regime in Kabul, in Afghanistan, is this minority government that couldn't possibly hold up without America supporting it.
We're basically taking what was, you know, more or less the legitimate structure of government in Pakistan as far as those things go.
And we're turning it into the same kind of cape wearing nonsense puppet regime that we have in Kabul.
We're sapping the last of the legitimacy out of the well, so-called legitimacy out of the Pakistani state, turning it over to, I guess, nothing but war to replace the state where it is now.
Very well said, Scott.
That's that's exactly the case.
Our money always corrupts, you know, absolute money corrupts.
Absolutely.
And we have we have corrupted Afghanistan, which is already up to its years in corruption.
But now it's the icing on the cake, the mixed metaphors.
And we we bought them lock, stock and barrel.
And a lot of Pakistanis are humiliated by this.
And it's a situation that we know you can only rent people.
You can't buy them permanently.
And by the way, we're doing this on every dollar that the U.S. government spends.
Fifty percent of it is borrowed money.
Well, yeah, I mean, of course, that's the whole thing.
China's paying for us to wage this war on their western border.
I don't know how long that's going to last.
Not long.
You know, the Indians, India was too smart to get drawn into this.
We were trying to bribe the India to send troops to Afghanistan.
The Indians wouldn't have any part of it.
But the Pakistanis did willingly.
Well, and that's oh, I know what I was going to ask you was about the nukes.
It's been.
Let's see, I guess I've been interviewing you on the show for a few years now, and it's probably been a year or two, even since we really discussed this, at least in detail about.
And the last time we did discuss it, your point of view was that the crazy so-called the people who would like to take these nukes and and, you know, act like a madman with them is basically impossible.
Don't worry about all the conflicts and crises in Pakistan.
The idea that the Pakistani military is going to lose control of those nuclear weapons is the furthest thing from what you ought to really be worried about.
It'd be very, very hard for anything like that to happen.
But then it's been a while.
Is that still, you know, on the outlandish side of possibilities?
We are not seeing what the line goes in Washington.
The jingle amongst the neocons, the jingle amongst the neocons is that turbaned kooks with Muslim nukes.
That's not the case.
Pakistan's nuclear weapons remain, as I said before, under extremely tight army control.
They're nowhere near the frontier, the northwest frontier area.
They're all in Punjab, in the center of the country.
They're incredibly heavily guarded, and they're all protected by electronic systems so that they're called permissive links, supplied by the U.S., by the way, so that you cannot activate one of these nukes without all kinds of special secret codes and stuff like that.
No turbaned jihadi from the northwest frontier is going to be able to trigger one of these nuclear weapons or even break it open to get at the warheads inside.
The danger, in my view, is not that terrorists, jihadis, or anybody are going to seize these weapons.
It's that, A, the Pakistani army splits at some point when the soldiers get fed up with being America's rent-an-army, and younger officers stage a coup and then grab some of these nuclear weapons.
That's a potential danger.
The other danger is that India is getting more and more involved in Afghanistan.
We've permitted it, the United States.
And Afghanistan is Pakistan's backyard.
It's like a Russian army coming into Mexico, just across the border from the Rio Grande.
And the Pakistanis are very upset about that.
And the Indians are moving in.
And if Pakistan begins to wobble or disintegrate, there's a very high chance, as I've said in the past, that India could intervene, may even try to destroy Pakistan as it destroyed East Pakistan in 1971, which is today Bangladesh.
Well, at the same time, there's some coup general in the Pentagon who's got a red line on a piece of paper somewhere that says, if this, then we invade and try to steal those nukes ourselves.
That's been discussed for a long time.
The Israelis have been trying to cook up strikes against Pakistan's nukes with the Indians, where Israel was very influential.
And that could provoke a nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India.
Indian intervention in Pakistan could certainly provoke a nuclear exchange.
I mean, that, to me, is a much greater danger than the idea of loose nukes, which, after all, have to be delivered somehow.
Pakistan has no long range delivery systems.
All right.
Now, I know this is silly, but I wish it wasn't or something.
So I'm going to go ahead and ask it anyway.
Is there any chance that Barack Obama is trying to get the Pakistani government or, you know, some kind of American special forces group or something to finally just catch Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden so that he can do the right thing and end this thing?
Because, you know, as evil as the guy's got to be in order to be able to become the president, like, at least this guy's not George Bush.
He understands that the imperial car is driving off the edge of the cliff here or something.
Might he be a smart enough imperialist, a good enough manager of the American empire that he's just trying to get those last two guys so that then they can say that they won?
Because, you know, they say, like you said before, declare victory and leave.
They can't declare victory as long as the two Goldstein brothers are on TV like that.
Well, you know, I've said from the beginning what they should have done is gone and made a deal with Taliban to go and hunt for Osama bin Laden and Zawahiri.
Is it too late for that now?
No, I don't think it's too late.
It's still possible to do.
But, you know, I think even if bin Laden were captured or killed, the U.S. would still stay on.
There are other things driving the U.S. imperial presence there.
And Obama, one of Obama's chief advisors on the region, you know, sits on the Saban think tank.
They're hardened neocons.
They want the U.S. in that region fighting.
And I don't think they're going to withdraw whoever they capture.
I wish it was the opposite case.
Yeah, well, you know, I heard and this guy is a double talker, you know, I don't know exactly what your estimation of him is, but I saw Zbigniew Brzezinski talking about, yeah, we need to declare victory, figure out a way to declare victory and get out of there because we don't want to get bogged down in that area.
But then I thought that was his whole shtick was this is the giant arc of crisis.
And he's like that one old British imperialist theorist that says you have to occupy Central Asia in order to be the dominant power and all this kind of stuff and that they want to stay there, all of them.
No, I've interviewed Brzezinski.
I have a very high respect for him.
I think he's one of the smartest foreign affairs brains, if not the smartest in Washington.
And he's like me.
He's an old geopolitician and he does talk in the heartland and all this kind of stuff.
But in essence, he's right.
We should get the hell out of there and find a way of doing it quickly.
And I don't think Brzezinski or anybody else pretends that we can dominate that region militarily much longer when we don't have any soldiers or money left.
Are there any indications that this assault that they're doing now is actually even attempting to target any Arabs, you know, Egyptians and Saudi friends of Osama that might be hanging out in those mountains or?
Or on one hand, you're saying these guys know that they're up against the wall, that they're out of money, they're out of troops, they can't do this.
And yet the policy is we're going to continue doing this forever, even though there's not even a purpose here at all.
They don't even know what the hell they're doing, except continuing to kill people.
Well, they're going to send more troops.
It's what my friend, Arnaud de Bourgh, graphically cited a French expression, which is to flee in advance, instead of running away from a problem, you run even quicker towards it.
And that's what they're doing there.
They're making it worse.
I think it's just that there's no policy thinking in Washington.
And somehow the leaders, they're convinced that we're fighting terrorism.
America's prestige is on the line.
We can't lose this war.
We got our asses kicked in Iraq and we can't anywhere.
We can't stomach another defeat.
We've hung our hat on this whole terrorism issue.
You can't declare, you know, that it doesn't exist anymore.
We've dragged their NATO allies into the war, too.
What are they going to say if we bug out?
They're going to say, who the hell needs NATO, America?
Go leave us alone.
So that's the best I can summarize the influence on President Obama, who's a smart man and shouldn't be committing such a stupid policy.
Yeah, well, that's a bunch of bogus excuses, you know, a bunch of prestige to shore up what's illegitimate anyway, an overseas empire.
You know, whoever, you know, that's the whole thing, too.
I mean, if they just said to us, look, we replaced the British.
It's our job to rule the world now.
OK.
And they were honest about it.
I don't think the American people would even be for it anyway.
They always have to dress it up as self-defense or guaranteeing liberty somewhere or something in order to justify women's rights and school for little girls and whatever.
Well, exactly.
But you're going to rule the world.
Afghanistan is not a good place to focus on.
And for God's sake, you know, fighting a war like this for oil that's costing us, I don't know, Afghanistan's cost forty six or forty eight billion dollars so far.
You could buy a hell of a lot of oil for that money and not not have to worry about it.
But, you know, the military industrial financial complex in Washington has got its heart set on this war.
And you never hardly ever hear anybody in the U.S. saying, you know, pull out of Afghanistan.
Obama has declared it a good war.
And most Americans still believe because of too much media propaganda that it is, in fact, a good war.
Yeah, well, that's certainly true.
And especially now that the Democrats are in charge of it, it's not like most right wingers are anti interventionist by default.
You know, you got to propagandize them for 10 years in a row to get them to be non interventionist.
Well, that's right.
The Democrats are doing just as badly as the Republicans are putting out a shameful display authorizing these wars.
Everybody's scared to be called unpatriotic or un-American.
I've certainly been called that all the time for criticizing our foreign policy.
I'm not a politician.
I can take it.
But the politicians don't have any guts.
They don't want to face it.
Yeah, well, the longer we put off dealing with the truth, the harsher it's going to be when it all comes due.
Well, that's exactly right.
And and we are going to be in bigger trouble there.
You know, look, all these crises are running together in Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kashmir, Iraq, this whole area.
This this area wasn't boiling until recently.
And now we're in one big mess in this area.
We don't know where to turn first.
And we certainly the last thing we want is for congressmen or senators from South Carolina to be making policy in that part of the world that they couldn't even find on a map if their lives had to depend on it.
Yeah, exactly.
Watching the Republicans in Congress is just shameful.
You know, actually, this is a little bit of good news.
And maybe we can end the interview with a little bit of good news, which is this article in The Huffington Post about how Ron Paul is the most famous and popular U.S. congressman in the world and how he's interviewed on foreign television stations all the time.
And, you know, I think the real reason for that is because most people's governments are at least as bad as the American one, and they're all pretty anti-government.
And so they really like the way he talks.
But also, it's because there is no real intellectual opposition to the Democratic consensus in the imperial court right now, except him.
I mean, all the Republicans have is Mitch McConnell and Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh, who are all a bunch of know-nothing, pro-torture, you know, idiots that nobody has any respect for.
So here Ron Paul is coming out ahead as the intellectual leadership of the Republican Party, at least for now.
Well, I've written a long time ago, he's the only major politician in the United States who's telling people the truth and who dared to tell Americans the truth.
And yes, he is respected abroad very much for that.
And but I don't know how far he's going to get.
I certainly applaud him and support what he says.
Yeah, I mostly think he's doing what he's supposed to be doing, which is giving speeches in the House of Representatives and voting no.
I think that's probably his best role that he can do.
I'm glad we have him.
I'm glad he has the guts to stand up.
I wish more of our politicians did.
All right, everybody, that's Eric Margulies.
He is the foreign correspondent for Sun National Media in Canada.
You can check out his website at ericmargulies.com and you can find his most recent article, Seeing Through All The Propaganda About Iran, at lourockwell.com.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today, Eric.
Great pleasure, Scott.
Cheers.
