08/03/09 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

In other words, I love you.
Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio, Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
We're streaming live worldwide on the internet at chaosradioaustin.org and at antiwar.com slash radio.
And our next guest is Eric Margulies from Sun National Media in Toronto, I think.
And author of the new book, not so new, kind of new, American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
Welcome back to the show, Eric, how are you?
Great to be back with you, Scott.
Alright, so what's going on in Central Asia?
Seems like there's a giant war.
What's going on over there?
This guy Stanley McChrystal is running things.
Is it, well, what do you think is the major motivation of the American Empire?
Is it just the generals who want to keep their bases?
Is it which pipeline runs which direction?
Is it trying to pick a fight or contain Russian China or just killing little brown people because it's fun?
What is the point of this?
Selling airplanes, that's important.
Tell me.
Excellent question, Scott.
It can't be about protecting us from Al-Qaeda terrorism.
No, there are hardly any left.
You know, I was in Washington recently and a number of congressmen, Republican congressmen, were asking me the same questions that you pose off the record.
That's funny.
The Republican congressmen are like, hey, why are we fighting this war that we've been starting and supporting and paying for this whole time?
I said, I don't understand who is really giving the marching orders.
Now, I know that General McChrystal's request for maybe 23,000, 25,000 more American troops, on top of the 63,000 who are already on the way or in Afghanistan, is a wreak of Vietnam era deja vu, mission creep, we used to call it.
Wasn't it just 20,000 in the headline a few months back?
Oh, well, we're going to escalate a little bit by 20,000.
Now you're telling me they added 30,000 of that now?
Another however many?
I'm losing track of the tens of thousands.
25,000 odd, that's what he requested.
Some 23,000 I think were just sent recently or some are still on the way.
So the American commitment is leaping and add to this now Air Force units and logistics units and all the tail to support them that goes back to the states.
So you have a rapidly growing commitment and it costs about roughly $330,000 a year to keep one American soldier in Afghanistan.
Well, and for what?
Oh, for what?
Well, we're defending freedom, we're defending the free world.
Everybody in the audience is nodding and clutching their yellow ribbon.
Continue, please.
I have nostalgia for the Cold War when I hear these expressions.
It makes me feel warm and fuzzy, but it has nothing to do with reality, of course.
We are there, if you ask me, we're there for two reasons.
First of all, because of oil politics.
We want to get our hands on and dominate the last great untapped source of oil and gas, which is the Caspian Basin, which is right next to that area.
And Afghanistan is one of the few transit points through which these resources can be taken out.
And that's been our policy for a long time.
The other thing is that we blundered into this war foolishly, and there's great concern in official Washington that if we are seen to be defeated, if we get our butts kicked there, as we have in Iraq, that this will cause not only a huge loss of face for the United States, but it's the old story, you know, people won't respect us, everybody will be jumping on us, the dominoes will fall, it's going to be a disaster.
Yeah, saving face, we've got plenty of face to save at this point.
Well, you know, it seems to me that during the Bush years, which sure is nice to refer to those in the past tense, I've got to tell you, during the Bush years you heard complaints from people like Zbigniew Brzezinski, I think, that Iraq is a diversion from the real war, and I don't even think he bothered saying on terror, you know, the real war is that arc of crisis up there, America must, I guess, to paraphrase him, stir up the Muslims to destabilize the region so that we can control it, right?
I mean, basically all those stands are controlled by former Soviet guys who are still in power, and the US wants to make matters worse, basically destabilize the region so that we can control it, right?
Well, we certainly want to keep our communist allies in power in the region through what I call the patrolist stance, and that leads us to getting in bed with some of the most reprehensible leaders there, for example, like the head of Uzbekistan, this nice place where they boil political opponents alive.
We're chastising the Iranians for electoral irregularities, and yet we firmly back and pay and bribe all these little central Asian totalitarian states, and think that that's just fine, and we're getting deeper and deeper there, and this is causing, turning many of the Muslims against us, but also getting the Russians riled up.
Well, so is it really the case then that the stands are more part of the American sphere of influence than the Russian one at this point?
Yes, definitely.
The US has bought its way into these areas.
The dollar goes a long way in Uzbekistan or Kyrgyzstan or Tajikistan, so a few million dollars, which is peanuts for the US military, which is spending, I don't know, $12 billion, $15 billion a month in Iraq and Afghanistan, buys a lot of loyalty, but long run it's stirring up tremendous opposition by Islamic and nationalist forces, just the way there was against the Russians.
We've simply inherited the Russian empire, or leased it in Central Asia, and we've leased it, and now if we withdraw from it, it'll be a great strategic defeat.
We have to fight to the last American soldier for Tajikistan.
Yeah, well, you know, it's been amazing to me to watch, and it's always a little headline here, there, and the other place, the continuing, or maybe they're finalized now, but the negotiations that went on for about at least a year there about whether we're going to be able to keep our air base in Kyrgyzstan, I believe it is, and the Russians have one right over the hill, and correct me if I'm thinking of the wrong stand here, but the government was trying to kick us out, and I guess the Pentagon just went over there, I don't know if they have their own printing press or what at this point, they just went over there and bribed those guys until they finally gave in and let us keep our base.
The heroic and freedom-loving Kyrgyzstanis finally accepted an offer they couldn't refuse.
You're right, from the Pentagon, we upped the ante by I don't know how many million dollars, and suddenly they saw it our way.
So the Americans and the Russians will both have bases there, the U.S. and Manas, which is very important for resupplying the Afghan war effort.
Well now, so they talk about this new embassy going in Peshawar, I believe, in Pakistan, is that right?
Yes, in Pakistan.
And I guess they're already comparing it to the biggest embassy that one country ever built in another that's already going on in downtown Baghdad right now.
What do you think that that really means?
How do you read that?
What is America's intention inside Pakistan?
Well, they sort of had a stake going on there, although Obama and Holbrooke and Clinton decided to have their Prime Minister Zardari launch this civil war against the northwestern areas there and create this giant crisis, which of course led to the anti-Christian pogrom of the other day, as one example of blowback already.
But I mean, what does it mean that they want to build this massive new embassy inside Pakistan?
Our relations with them have always been guys with briefcases and military advisors and CIA spies, not massive American bases in their country, right or wrong?
No, that's right, Scott.
During the unlamented Bush administration, I often wrote about how American foreign policy had become militarized, and it was the Pentagon that was leading and not the State Department.
Well, here's a new example under Obama of more militarized foreign policy.
We see the U.S. pouring military assets into Afghanistan, where the big bases are being built near Kandahar.
There's new installations in Peshawar right on the border, right by the Khyber Pass.
We see Secretary Gates standing next to the Israeli defense minister, threatening war.
We see Secretary Gates of the Pentagon threatening war against Iran, whatever happened to the State Department, whatever happened to policy.
Anyway, it's the war leaders who are making policy, and we are going in hammer and tongs into Pakistan.
Now we're laying the base for a much bigger conflict.
Well, so it's all geography, right?
It's all about, I'm trying to think, like if America's the Soviet Union, as you said, we have our own domino theory and everything else.
If we're them, then what we want to do is have buffers everywhere, control states between this state and that state, in order that they can't get at each other or get at us, which I guess means, you know, our ownership of the Indian Ocean or something there.
But, you know, all these lands, basically there's this sort of triangle of Muslim lands with the eastern border there of China and India, and then a northern border of Russia.
And this is the whole part of the world that America's trying to conquer.
Now, Injun country, as they call it over at the, is it the Brookings Institution, Robert Kaplan?
Well, yes.
In fact, I just saw an interesting comment by one of your guests, Michael Scheuer, who said that the Brookings, who wrote in a column, he said that the Brookings Institution is kind of spearheading calls for a greater involvement in Afghanistan.
Well, of course, the Center for American Progress and the Center for New American Security are both the new kind of Democrat think tanks or whatever, their version of the AEI, I guess.
And they're talking about a 10-year plan for at least Afghanistan.
Of course, it's all in the name of making a great democracy for the women there and all that stuff.
That's right.
Well, Scheuer wrote that the Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman identified Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq as the three main threats to Israel.
So these institutions in Washington are now beating the drums because they now throw Israel into this messy equation.
And we really have a complicated situation.
And they're continued threats, of course, against Iran, as well as Americans making them.
Well, give me some crystal ball about Pakistan.
I mean, is America going to destroy Pakistan into little pieces and have a war and occupy the place and the worst nightmare coming true there?
I think it will.
You were supposed to say no, no, no.
Well, my French readers call me Cassandra, you know, the Greek seeress who kept prophesying misfortune.
I think we're like a bull in a China shop.
We're rampaging through there.
We have our little beady eyes fixed on only one thing, and that's the war in Afghanistan.
And we are pretty heedless of the damage that we're causing in the region.
Pakistan is a smoking volcano.
We just ignited this war you mentioned against in Swat, displacing over two and a half million people.
You think people there are going to forget that?
No, I don't think they're going to.
Thank us.
But we're so fixed on winning this war in Afghanistan that we've created that we're trampling Pakistan underfoot.
And Pakistan is starting to come back apart at the seams.
I just got an email from a fellow journalist in Pakistan who had been to Balochistan.
We talked about this one time on the show, the western province of Pakistan, telling me how dangerous it was to go through the streets of Balochistan if you were not dressed like a Baluch, that you could be shot or stabbed there, and about spreading rebellion in Balochistan against the central government in Islamabad.
Well, to paraphrase Michael Shoyer again, the former head of the CIA's bin Laden unit, he wrote in his book, Imperial Hubris, at the dawn of the Iraq war, or no, I guess it was a couple of years after, 2005, late 2004, I guess, that the United States is completing the radicalization of the Islamic world, which is, of course, what they're trying to do is, you know, the action is in the reaction, is lure us into full-scale warfare from, you know, I guess, Jordan to India.
And it's working.
And it's, on one hand, destroying our empire.
It's like driving it off the edge of the cliff and hastening its destruction.
But at the same time, is, well, it's making the average Baluchi a little bit more hostile to anybody who might be a stranger in town.
This kind of thing, I mean, like you said, what do you think is going to happen?
We drive 2 million, 3 million people out of their homes.
Nothing?
You're going to have radicalization and reaction all over the place.
That's quite right.
And the war in Afghanistan is spreading.
It's intensifying very rapidly.
You know, when American generals in the field, when the U.S. commander in Afghanistan is fired preemptorily and then replaced by this blood-drinking General McChrystal, who very shortly afterwards calls for 25,000 or 24,000 more American troops as reinforcements, this is a sure sign that the military is panicking.
And they see disaster looming up unless they do something.
And as I said, the disaster is going to blow back onto NATO because if the U.S. is whipped in Afghanistan or is forced into an unseemly retreat, believe me, it's going to undermine America's control of NATO, which means America's domination of Western Europe.
Well, all right, let me change the subject to the Sabelle Edmonds story.
She's got a new thing out where she says the Americans were working with the bin Ladenites, not just, you know, jihadists in general, but actually working with bin Laden and his group right up until the September 11th attack.
Now, the article doesn't say that she claims that, you know, the CIA did it as an inside job or whatever like that, but, you know, there's reference made.
Luke Ryland's article about it makes reference to your interviews on this show where you talk about how the CIA at least turned a blind eye or whatever, I'll let you characterize it, but there was some level of cooperation as the bin Ladenites were training Uighurs, the Muslims in Western China, for possible use against them.
And I guess the way Luke characterized it was that it sounded like your story coincided sort of with her story that al-Qaeda was basically working with Pakistani and Saudi and American intelligence ultimately.
I don't go that far.
I saw the article, too, and I think they didn't quite use the sense that I had intended, and that was that there were tenuous contacts, as far as I understand, between the CIA and bin Laden, certainly between Saudi intelligence and bin Laden.
But, you know, that is the job of intelligence agencies.
Here I jump to the defense of the CIA.
It's their job to be in contact with everybody behind the scenes and to know what's going on, to have a finger in every pie and stir every pot.
So there is nothing wrong with that, but what happened was that after 9-11, I believe that the CIA suddenly shredded all the papers and fired all the agents and things like that who had any connection with their contact with bin Laden.
I've seen it before in the famous case of Edwin Wilson, the convicted arms dealer in Angola who was wrongly persecuted by the government when they changed policy once again.
So it's quite possible it happened.
I mean, certainly Pakistani intelligence was in very close contact with bin Laden, probably still is, but to say that the CIA was funding him or directing him is not accurate in my view.
Well, what about in the larger sense, still even by a couple of degrees of separation, the CIA intentionally kind of helping the larger jihadist movement along in those Central Asian states?
I mean, I guess you say now all those former Soviet dictators have been bought off, but I guess, was that the case then?
And did they think that it would be a good idea to continue to use the model, for example, backing the KLA in Bosnia?
And I don't know specifics of American support for the Chechen rebels, although I hear tell that there's some of that.
I'm not aware of any U.S. support for the Chechens.
In fact, the U.S. sold out the Chechens under President Clinton by declaring them terrorists and by financing Boris Yeltsin's campaign in Chechnya in exchange for Russia giving the U.S. a free hand in the Middle East against Iraq.
That's a different issue.
Yes, I believe CIA was cultivating bin Laden and a number of other jihadist groups in Afghanistan for going up and overthrowing the communist governments, the Red Sultans, as I call them in my book, War at the Top of the World, overthrowing them and overturning these regimes.
In fact, when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, it made a great hue and cry for all the terrorist camps that were found.
But that was just not true.
Most of the camps in Afghanistan where jihadists were being trained were run by Pakistan's intelligence service.
They were training fighters to go and fight in India and held Kashmir.
And the second biggest group was the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which was being trained and funded to go and overthrow the government of Uzbekistan with American CIA backing, discreet.
But I guess certainly since 2001, all that's over now.
Oh, yes.
The minute 9-11 happened, suddenly you can just picture the scene in Langley, Virginia, where somebody says, what the hell?
Who's paying off these?
Why are we paying money?
Well, look, to these jihadists, the United States government was supplying the Taliban regime in Kabul with millions of dollars, I think the figure was $22 or $24 billion in aid, right up until four months before 9-11.
And the money was cut off not because of terrorism, but because the Taliban gave the contract to build an oil pipeline to an Argentine consortium, which infuriated Washington and they cut off their stipend.
Right.
All right.
Now, I guess let's talk about India.
Part of the politics of the current war in AfPak, as the Democrats call it, as you say, is about the direction of these pipelines.
And Gordon Prather has written a lot about, he's a previous guest on the show today.
He's written quite a bit about the deal that the Bush regime made, Connolese Rice made with the Indians, that they would get all the ultimate exceptions to the nonproliferation regime and they would be able to remain outside of the nonproliferation treaty and yet be still treated as completely equal nuclear partners with the United States and all this.
And I think you and I have discussed before that this was basically a big bribe to the Indians to not participate in, was it what they call the peace pipeline, or is that a different pipeline?
Can you get a little more detail on that?
Yes, there is a pipeline that's due to run.
In fact, work has begun on it, I understand, from Central Asia down through Pakistan.
I think it's called the TAPI pipeline, and down through Pakistan, but it's supposed to have two arms that branch off, one that's supposed to go to Iran and one that's supposed to go to India.
I'm sorry, not Iran, Pakistan, one to India.
The Americans were very upset, I'm sorry, there was an Iranian branch too, they were very upset that Iran would benefit from this.
They tried to thwart it, they tried to get the Indians to block the Iranian section of the pipeline.
That was one aspect of the nuclear thing, but the real motivation, in my view, behind America's deal with India, which I think is a very, very negative deal on nuclear issues, was that the U.S. is building India into a major nuclear power, because what we're doing is, India has a shortage of nuclear fuel.
It doesn't have enough for civilian and military reactors, so we are now supplying fuel for the civilian reactors, so that India has ample fuel for its own military reactors and can go beyond the 60 or 80 nuclear weapons that it has.
This is going to have one major effect, and that is, it's going to alarm the Chinese.
We've made very quiet about it so far, but I understand from my Chinese sources, there's huge consternation and concern in China.
Well, and what beef does India have with China, other than they've been neighbors for thousands of years?
Well, I'm glad you raised the question, because again, in my book, War at the Top of the World, it's all about one section on possible future war between India and China.
They have thousands of miles, or at least well over a thousand miles, maybe 2,000 of undemarcated border in the Himalayas.
They fought a war in 1962, which the Chinese won very handily.
Their Chinese army came within almost sight of Calcutta, and they have a tremendous confrontation over Tibet, which India feels threatens Indian security.
Chinese missiles on Tibet and air bases look down over India, as from a tower.
There's a great confrontation over Pakistan, which is China's most important foreign enemy, and there's growing confrontation over Burma, which is becoming very important to Chinese strategic thinking.
So there are many, many flashpoints for these two countries, besides growing economic rivalry.
Well, and I wonder how successful the American bribery of the Indians can be when we're working counter to them in other ways, like there's a renewed threat, of course, for sanctions on any Iranian imports of refined oil products, which I guess means all the gasoline in their whole society or something, because they hardly have any refining capacity at all, if any.
But the Indians do a lot of the refining for them and make a pretty penny skimming off the top and selling it back, and that's a pretty big deal for America to be coming and intervening in now.
How long do you think that we can get away with operating, keeping everybody under our sway while at the same time bullying them every other way?
Well, India's going to be a tough customer.
The Indians are very smart.
They know exactly what Washington is up to.
They know this nuclear deal was designed to put India in a somewhat subservient position or make it obedient, and the Indians don't want any part of it.
So they're going to end up getting the better of this deal because they're going to take what Washington's giving and they're not going to give back very much.
India's very prickly about foreigners telling it what to do, and it considers itself a major world power in the area, and they're not about to let Washington boss them around.
But talking about sanctions on Iran, the U.S. still already has a lethal set of sanctions on, and that is on aircraft.
We deny Iran any new aircraft or aircraft spare parts or engines.
The result is that Iran has had to buy ancient Soviet third-hand airliners, Tupolevs, and they've had a steady series of crashes.
There was one, I think, last weekend or a couple of weeks ago that have killed hundreds and hundreds of Iranians when these planes fall apart, crash.
And it's really a lethal policy, and we've stopped Europe from selling Iran any aircraft because of American components.
So there's something very punitive already.
If we cut off gasoline to Iran, well, didn't we do that to Japan in 1941, I think?
We did.
We cut off gas and aviation fuel.
Iran has many ways of reacting, not the least of which, of course, is shutting down some of its oil exports.
Well, and I'm not sure how it works in the post-World War II era with the brave new world of American empire and benevolent hegemony and the new U.N. systems as compared to the old international law and what have you, but I don't think that this has changed as far as I know, but I'm not really the expert.
But isn't a blockade an act of war?
I mean, isn't it basically at least pseudo-war, something that's clearly deadly, as you explain there with the example of the airplanes, but it seems like it's war only.
It's targeted simply at the civilian population.
It never affects the government, really.
That's correct.
A blockade is an act of war under international law.
We saw what it did to Iraq, where the Iraqis were not only starved, but they were denied chlorine to purify their water system.
Their sewage systems had been destroyed by the United States in 1991 and their water purification.
They were even denied lead pencils, unless somehow Saddam turned a lead pencil into a nuclear weapon.
I mean, it was ridiculous and it was ferocious.
And the U.S. obviously has found this to be a very effective technique.
It is an act of war.
The graphite and the pencils being part of Saddam's nefarious post-1991 nuclear weapons program, right?
That threatened the entire world, yes.
And we're now hearing the same story about Iran.
You notice, you watch the American media, and even though the U.S. intelligence community says Iran has no nuclear weapons you hear every night on American television the threat of Iranian nuclear weapons.
Absolutely.
Well, that's what Anti-War Radio is for.
We just finished talking with, well, that's what AntiWar.com is for.
We just had Gordon Prather on the show to explain just how true that isn't.
I'm glad you're there.
Well, I'm glad you're here.
And we're actually already over time.
But thank you very much for your time on the show today, Eric.
It's been a pleasure, Scott.
Eric Margulies, Sun National Media, author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj.