08/19/09 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

Alright, everybody, first guest on the show today is Eric Margolis, you all know him.
He writes for Sun National Media in Canada.
He is author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
His website is ericmargolis, just spell it like it sounds there.
It's ericmargolis.com for Eric Margolis' website.
Welcome back to the show, Eric, how are you doing?
Good to be back with you, Scott.
Lots of stuff going on there out in the world.
Yeah, well, I want to start with this.
Maybe I'm confused.
I mean, what the hell?
I haven't really traveled the world like you.
You've covered, what, dozens of wars and all this terrible stuff.
Is there such a thing as a Palestinian?
Because I was reading in the paper here that according to Mike Huckabee, there's no such thing as a Palestinian, Eric.
Well, of course, there's a Palestinian.
The word Palestine is the Arabic word for Philistine.
And as we all know, the Philistines have been around for a long, long time.
In fact, there's a debate raging about whether Palestinians predated the Hebrews, which many think they did.
Anyway, it is a nationality.
And one of the reasons it's a nationality is because there are five and a half million of these people who think it's a nationality and call themselves Palestinians.
And we're a new nation, too.
So we can't go around telling people who they aren't.
Well, it seems strange to me that Mike Huckabee, on one hand, says that there's no such thing as a Palestinian.
And then he apparently seems to think there are a bunch of people who live in the West Bank and in fact that they are terrible oppressors who won't just let the Jews live wherever they want.
Well, Huckabee's comments typify the pinheaded understanding of the complexities of the Middle East that's promoted on the Christian extreme, dare I say, neo-fascist far-right.
And it's a combination of what the Israeli right wing has been telling them and misinforming them.
And Sunday school teaching.
These people, and you can start with President Bush, too, who was one of them, have only a childlike or less than a childlike understanding of the Middle East.
And they're responsible for a lot of problems we have in that part of the world.
Well, in case, in fact, a case in point, there was a time in the beginning of the Bush era, perhaps if I remember right, Eric, maybe you can help me out, even after September 11th, where Colin Powell hadn't been completely shut out yet, and he said, hey, listen, we really need to move.
Now is the time where we really have all this political capital in the world.
We can really move and settle this Palestinian thing.
And Bush, I think, even publicly criticized some of the settlements in the West Bank.
But then what happened, according to Walt Mearsheimer, was that Tom DeLay came to the White House and said, listen, I represent every born-again crazy in this country.
And how dare you?
You're going to knock it off right now, or we're going to withdraw all our support for you.
And so Bush said, all right, then.
Well, even crazier was that when the Israelis announced that they were pulling out of the Gaza Strip, there was a great ruckus on the Christian extreme right, sort of Karl Magnum right wing, and the White House had to send a senior aide to one of these American Christian associations to patiently explain to them that even though the Israelis were withdrawing from Gaza, this would not undermine biblical prophecy, because they thought that Gaza was part of the biblical prophecy, and that if the Israelis still didn't have control over the land of biblical Israel, the Messiah wouldn't come, and Armageddon wouldn't happen, and the world wouldn't be destroyed.
Well, that would be a disaster.
Just terrible.
So, I mean...
And clearly, when Sharon withdrew, quote-unquote, from Gaza, he wasn't giving up Gaza to the people of Gaza.
He was removing the last of the Jewish human shields that were protecting the Gazans.
And then they just turned it into a giant prison by the sea.
Exactly.
They were clearing out unwanted people.
Human garbage, as I call it.
They made it into a human garbage dump, and they're probably planning afoot to do the same thing with some of the Palestinians on the right bank.
But what is scary, coming back to Huckabee, is that here's a man who's a reasonably intelligent man, and yet he is so profoundly ignorant, it is frightening, and it's a strain of ignorance that runs through some of the highest levels of our country, as well as the common folk out in the heartland.
Well, and he's such a socialist on domestic policy, I thank Jesus for naming him Huckabee.
Otherwise, we could be looking at him as president right now, maybe.
You know, he's got a perfect compromise for that left-right thing there.
No, you're right, you're right.
Because he's really not like a Tom DeLay right-winger on domestic policy at all.
He's a total pinko.
But when it comes to this weird stuff in the Middle East, thank America's far-right Christian community for being one of the factors, that and the Israel lobby are the two factors that have been blocking any kind of peace settlement in the Middle East, which has gravely damaged America's interests.
Indeed.
Well, and I mean, that's the thing, even, you know, you don't have to be a partisan of Colin Powell to see that he was being more reasonable than the neocons, and was saying that, hey, listen, one of our major, you know, problems driving terrorist danger against the American people is the unresolved issue of Israel and Palestine, and the permanent occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
Something's got to give, let's do something about this.
I mean, it's no hyperbole at all to say that this is, you know, one of the centerpieces of why people want to travel to America to kill us.
In fact, I'll even do better than just making a gratuitous assertion and refer you to Terry McDermott's book, Perfect Soldiers, he's an LA Times reporter who did the biographies of the pilot hijackers, the real ringleaders of the 9-11 hijacking plot, and they hated America because of what Israel was doing in Lebanon and Palestine.
Simple as that.
Absolutely.
They made it very clear, but there's been a massive cover-up in the United States and in the media, and this whitewashed 9-11 commission and things like that, to find any possible reason under the sun except for the real one, and because nobody wanted to dare talk about it.
Even I, I think it was six days before the 9-11 attack, and I had no knowledge it was coming, I wrote in my own column, I said that, you know, unless America changes its policy towards the Palestinians and the Middle East, that their attacks are going to begin against the American homeland.
And in fact, there's even a clip on YouTube of FBI agents testifying before the 9-11 commission and being asked, well, why did they do this, and the FBI agent said, well, you know, honestly, and you can tell these guys are just basically cops, I don't think they were the high-enough level political appointee types, they were actually just federal cops, and they were like, well, you know, when you go back and you look at all the paperwork of these guys and everything that they've said through all these years, what they're really angry about is American one-sided support for Israel over Palestine.
And that didn't make it into the commission report, but the under-oath testimony is right there, they asked the FBI, Al-Qaeda hunters, hey, what's these guys' problem, anyway?
And they say Israel, obviously.
I have nothing but profound contempt for the 9-11 commission and the whitewash document that it produced, and I think the rest of us feel the same way, too.
But we know it's about Palestine and that issue, and this problem is going to go on.
My mother, who was a journalist, predicted 50 years ago, in a report to the State Department, she said if America doesn't do something about the Palestinian problem, this is in the early 1950s, she said in 50 years this problem is going to blow up in our face.
Now, tell us more about her, because I think we've discussed this, but it's been a few years.
You told me before, your mother was a journalist in the Middle East, in the immediate post-war world?
In the early 1950s.
Yes.
She was one of the first women to travel there by herself and report, and she had a particular interest in the central Middle East.
She interviewed all, most of the leaders in the region of the Arab states, Nasser and King Hussein, Sadat, and she quote-unquote discovered that there were 700,000-800,000 people living in tents, and living on food handouts from the U.S. that nobody ever heard of before.
These were the Palestinian refugees, and she began writing about them, saying that not from a political viewpoint, just from a humanitarian viewpoint, she said there's a whole country that's been thrown out of their country and lost everything they owned, and they're living in tents because of what the United States did, and she said it's our responsibility to make these people whole, or do something to end their suffering and misery, and if we don't, they're going to turn against us.
In fact, she said the whole Middle East will turn against the United States, which is exactly what happened.
And I think what you told me before was, there was no reason, in fact, that the people, Arabs and everybody in the Middle East really loved America before that.
People say now that, oh, you know, well, Islam is just this terrible expansionist religion who will never take no for an answer, and will cut off every resister's head and force them to convert, and so we have to defend ourselves from their aggression and whatever, but they used to love America right before this mess.
That's quite right.
That's quite right.
In fact, I have a whole chapter in my new book, American Raj, which is all precisely about this question of how during the days of President Eisenhower, whose picture hangs behind me on my office wall as we speak, when Eisenhower was President, we loved the United States.
I mean, we were the cat's pajamas for the entire Muslim world, and a lot of the rest of the world, too, particularly the Muslim world, because we Americans were seen as liberators, and we're going to bring everything that was good, modernism, jobs, democracy, decent institutions, etc.
This didn't happen, unfortunately.
Well, and we had kicked the British Empire out of our country, and then under Eisenhower, kicked the British out of their countries, basically, right?
That's right.
But I guess just like the people of the Philippines back in the 1890s, they realized, oh, the Spanish are leaving, but what's that battleship on the horizon with the red, white, and blue there?
You know, at least the Filipinos still have a great deal of affection for the United States, even though we killed hundreds of thousands of Filipinos in the, quote, pacification of the Philippines, as it used to be called.
We did some good in the Philippines, and Filipinos recognize that, whereas in the Middle East, I think when the day finally comes that the Americans are gone, nobody's going to be able to say that they did much good in the region, or in the entire Muslim world, for that matter.
All right, well, now let's get to your new article.
It's at LewRockwell.com.
We're featuring it in the Viewpoint section today at AntiWar.com.
Fake elections won't bring peace to Afghanistan.
Now, Eric, seriously, I have to object.
If George Bush and Dick Cheney were still in power, this would be a bogus election.
But our Lord and Savior, Barack Obama, who is flawless and wonderful and is going to buy me a free doctor, is the one in charge while this election's going on, so therefore it's not a fake election.
What's your problem?
Well, I'm distressed to say something bad about St. Barack, but it seems that Obama is continuing the same policies as the Bush administration in most ways.
There's a withdrawal been announced from Iraq, but the more we look at it, the less it looks like a withdrawal.
It looks more like a sort of a masquerade to keep the troops on there, and in fact, if anything, Obama's taken a much more aggressive attitude towards Afghanistan than even the Bush administration did.
It's not the anti-war president that liberals expected.
We find an increasing hard-line policy, and what really concerns me, too, Scott, is that I was always complaining in the Bush administration that the Pentagon, we have militarized foreign policy.
State departments have been cut out completely, and hopefully it would have ended, but no, it hasn't ended, and now we see that the strongman in the Obama administration is Mr.
Gates over at the Pentagon, who seems to be the point man for American foreign policy, while Hillary Clinton is left packing the glad hand in Africa that nobody cares about.
Well, it does seem that way, that really the Pentagon is the government of this country and the world now.
People talk about one world government like it's at America's expense, which I guess it is in the real sense, but the Pentagon is the one world government, not the U.N.
Well, I would add into that the Wall Street as well, because it seems to me increasingly, and to a lot of other people who are looking at it, that when President Eisenhower warned us against the military-industrial complex, we now have the financial military-industrial complex, and the finance industry and Wall Street, and look at the recent bank bailouts is a perfect example, that that's the real government in the United States, what the Italian philosopher Pareto used to call the iron law of oligarchy, well, that's the iron oligarchy that's now controlling American policy.
Look at all the men around Obama and the people who brought him to power, and his main supporters and advisers and things, all come from the financial oligarchy, or almost all.
Well, so what about this election?
This guy, Hamid Karzai, has been a loyal puppet.
I remember when he was just the interim president and he swore he wasn't going to run for election at all.
Well, now they're having another bogus election this week, right?
Yes, yeah, on Thursday.
And well, what this election is about, there was one before in 2005, this one is designed not so much for Afghan voters, because most people in Afghanistan believe and understand that the winner of the election on Thursday is going to be whoever Washington says it will be.
Washington controls everything there, and controls the election as well.
But the election is designed to tell Western voters in the US, Canada, NATO, in Europe, that things are hunky-dory in Afghanistan, and progress is being made, and stability and all these wonderful buzzwords, nation building and democracy and freedom is coming to Afghanistan.
And women's rights.
And women's rights, key issue, women's rights.
But this election is rigged.
In fact, Washington has been lambasting Iran for improper election procedures, but the elections held first in Iraq, and now this one, and the last one, and this one in Afghanistan, made even Soviet-run elections look more wholesome.
Well, you know, that's a theme we keep hitting on when I interview you on this show, is America adopting the Soviet model of governance.
And that was one of the first things I learned about the Soviet Union, I think, when I was a kid, was, well, they have elections there, but there's only, you know, one, or if you're lucky, two guys from the Communist Party on the ballot, so it doesn't matter, the whole thing is a joke.
And, of course, that sounds like what we're dealing with now.
But see, there's this article, like, for example, in the Christian Science Monitor on this story here, this guy, Abdul Rashid Dostum, is now in alliance with Hamid Karzai.
Now, I know you covered the Holy War against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan back in the 1980s.
Is this guy an old friend of yours?
He's not a friend.
If I had a gun, I'd shoot him right between the eyes.
The man's a monster.
He's one of the leading war criminals from the, over the recent decades in Afghanistan.
He was an arch supporter of the Communists, key ally of the Soviet Communists, and now Russia and Iran, Turkey to an extent.
Well, I thought, now, most of the Northern Alliance guys, they fought against the Russians, too, right?
Not necessarily exactly on the same side as the Pashtun Mujahideen.
These Tajiks who are from the North, who formed the Northern Alliance, when they were fighting, when the war was going on against the Soviets, we have now understood, in retrospect, that they were going through the motions of fighting against the Soviets, but actually did very little fighting.
Or, in the case of one of their leaders, Ahmad Shah Massoud, was actually in cahoots with the Russians, while pretending to be a Mujahideen, he was actually sabotaging attempts by the Russians to attack the, attempts by the Mujahideen to attack the Russians.
So these people, the Tajiks and the Uzbeks from the North, have long been in the pockets of the Soviet intelligence services.
Tostam and Abdullah, the Tajik leader, they have very unsavory records.
Well, and now, Michael Scheuer has an article on antiwar.com today, where he brings up the question of India in Afghanistan.
This is something that we've talked about before, too, in trying to understand the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI, their role in support, or tacit support, or blind eye support to certain degrees of the Taliban, at least at certain times, because the most important thing for them is that India is never able to consolidate power in Afghanistan.
America is going to leave eventually, India is going to remain next door.
They would rather keep them only next door on one side.
Well, India, Michael's right, the Indians are hard at work, and have been for the last few years, expanding their influence in Afghanistan, both as a way of sticking it to the Pakistanis, their traditional enemies, and also expanding the influence of greater India.
India has its eyes on Central Asia and on its energy resources.
India is an importer of energy.
So the two logical places for India to look are the Gulf, where America is still the big 800-pound gorilla, and Central Asia, where things are not so secure.
India is doing its best to destabilize Afghanistan, to uproot Pakistani influence, and to implant its own influence among the Tajiks and the Uzbeks.
And America's cooperating with that.
America is cooperating with it.
It's deeply, closely aligned with India now, since this nuclear pact, blessing India becoming a nuclear power, even though it violated all the American imposed nuclear guidelines.
And the Indians, as I think we said on the last show, are opening their first airbase outside of India, in Tajikistan, which is just to the north of Pakistan, is causing great concern in Islamabad.
Now, I don't know if you saw Jusser Armando's article a couple of articles ago, where he talks about this guy Biddle, is it Stephen Biddle, I think, who was General Petraeus's advisor, and I forget which think tank he's from, but anyway, the article is, Why Are We in Afghanistan, is Justin's article.
And this guy Biddle has written, oh, in the Americaninterest.com, he's got an article about why America is in Afghanistan, and basically he's trying to convince us why to support the continued war there, but he admits, he's honest enough to admit that he's basically out of reasons why we ought to do this, and what he's basically left with, I think, is that Pakistan has become very destabilized, and there's a danger of militants being able to overthrow the government in Pakistan, or at least forever prevent the government in Pakistan from really holding any kind of monopoly on power within their so-called borders, and so therefore the bad guys might get the nukes someday, or something like that, and I was just thinking, it seems maybe it's too simple, but it seems to me that the American war in Afghanistan, and now in the northwestern, well, not just now, but in the northwestern territories of Pakistan, is the thing that is destabilizing Pakistan the most, and that this would be reason number one to end the war, rather than to expand it.
That's irrefutable logic, Scott, of course.
Well, dammit, I mean, this is the last excuse the guy's got left!
Well, we're like the boy with the finger in the dike now, we can't, oh, if we leave, Pakistan's going to collapse, we've got to stay there, you know, the commander of British forces I read just yesterday said that, warned his men that they may be in, the British army may have to be in Afghanistan for the next 40 years.
Not four, but 40 years.
And it's just incredible, you've been seized by a neo-colonial impulse.
I love it, I say let the British have their empire back.
Here, you can have it.
That's right, Kipling warned them against it, but no, we're doing the same thing.
We have a whole institutional bias now in Washington, military men, politicians, etc., so we've got to stay in our part of the world, we've got to stay there, we've got to kick ass and show these people how things are done.
Hey, who are the biggest dope smugglers in Afghanistan, is it the bad guys or the good guys there?
Oh, the government, the government.
We like to accuse Taliban, but Taliban is involved only in small farmers, because that's how they survive, they get food for their families.
The big drug dealers there are the Northern Alliance, which is the power behind Karzai, these Tajik warlords, who are in cahoots with the Russians, and they really, they and other local warlords, run the drug trade, and there's no way you could smuggle truckloads of morphine base out of Pakistan without cooperation of the police and the senior government officials.
They have to go across the border, and then they go into Pakistan, and senior Pakistani officials are also deeply implicated in the drug trade, like Mexico, it's spreading very fast.
Well, so, you know, I've been trying to, I've always just assumed, I think I've told you this before, I've always just assumed that any time the American government has boots on the ground in a country where drugs are produced, they're the ones in the driver's seat of the whole game, because that's the way it's always been since before I was born, so why think, you know, it would ever be any different, but I've been trying to collect, you know, more and more footnotes, I, you know, to actually prove my case about what's going on in Afghanistan now, I have seen that Karzai's brother, supposedly, is like the ringleader, and then he sends it all, like Sabel Edman says, through the Turkic countries to Europe.
Well, yeah, but I think that is, that is the secondary route, the primary route is out through Pakistan to the port of Karachi, and that's where most of it goes, that's why I mentioned Pakistani officers implicated in this, but there's no doubt that the Afghan government, our Afghan government is up to its turbans in the drug trade, and sustained by all this drug money, and we're closing our eyes to it, in spite of the little theater we put on about eliminating drugs, we don't do it, because this is sustaining our war, it's shameful, but as you rightfully noted, we got involved in the drug trade in Vietnam, and in Laos, and in Central America, and I'm sure that a couple of years from now, books will be coming out about how we were involved in the Afghan drug trade as well.
All right, everybody, it's Eric Margulies from Sun National Media.
Let me ask you about Kurdistan, Eric, boy, it seems like times are tough there.
If I can try to, you know, set up the question a little bit for the audience, get everybody up to date, basically Kurdistan is this little area in the north of Iraq that was protected by America throughout the Clinton administration by the no-fly zones, and was basically autonomous, protected from Hussein's rule during that time, and there's this city called Kirkuk, and all around Kirkuk is a bunch of oil, but Kirkuk isn't really in Kurdistan, or at least not where Kurdistan has been for a while, and since the war, the Kurds have been, in 2003, the Kurds have been trying to go ahead and take Kirkuk for their own, they call it our Jerusalem and all this, and meanwhile, there's a bunch of Arabs who had been cleansed by the Kurds back in the day, and then a bunch of Arabs have been relocated to Kirkuk by Saddam Hussein, and now the Kurds are kicking them back out again, and they're supposed to be this election, that they keep putting off, or whatever, about just how autonomous they're going to be, and at least some people seem to think they're at the point right now where the American troops are standing in between these two sides, and maybe they'll have to decide real soon whether to stay in the middle or get out of the way, and let the Peshmerga and the Maliki army fight.
You know, the American, senior American commanders in Afghanistan are just saying now, I'm sorry, in Iraq, that, well, you know, the U.S. Army, even though it says it's going to withdraw, may have to stay on in the Kurdish areas to keep order.
Well, I'll tell you, as I see it, I see the United States is in the process of midwifing the birth of two new states.
One is Kurdistan, Iraqi Kurdistan, and the other one is South Sudan, both of which incidentally have oil.
And in Iraq, the U.S. is deeply in bed with the Kurds, has been, as you notice, for a long time, since the Clinton administration.
But now, this is the American plan B. If Iraq collapses or splinters, we in fact have divided Iraq already into three parts, Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish, that they'll go out of the wreckage, they'll go with the new state of Kurdistan, which is also increasingly aligned with the Israelis, who apparently have a lot of intelligence agents there.
There's been a lot of talk of Israeli air base in Kurdistan.
Hillary Clinton, when she was running for president a year ago, said, yeah, well, we might keep air bases in Kurdistan for the long haul.
So there is that Kurdistan movement.
I have great sympathy for the Kurds.
I always have.
I've written about them in my books.
They are the world's second biggest tribal people, after the Pashtuns in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
But of course, the Kurds are split up.
There are lots of Kurds in Turkey, about 22 percent of the population, and in Iran.
And this idea of a united Kurdistan is a huge problem, could destabilize the entire Middle East.
But there's no doubt that the U.S. has got some plan to take Kurdistan out of the wreckage of Iraq, and set it up as an independent American oil protectorate.
What's going to happen about Kirkuk, though?
If they have this vote in Kirkuk, and the Kurds decide that they want it, and Kirkuk belongs to Kurdistan, then that's going to mean war between them and the Shiite government that America's installed, right?
Yes, it could.
Very dicey situation.
I think, frankly, the Shiite government, Prime Minister Maliki was installed by the U.S. in another rigged election, has just called for a national referendum on asking U.S. troops to leave.
This is going to be very interesting.
Suddenly, the puppet is showing signs of independence, and Washington is not happy about it.
I'd like to see a real, honest referendum in Iraq and Afghanistan.
We should challenge the White House to this.
If you're such a great champion of democracy and freedom and everything else, let the Iraqis and Afghans vote on whether they want you.
Polls that have been taken there show that 60-70% of people in both countries want the U.S. out.
Right.
Well, and in Iraq, they always have.
It's basically the Kurdish population, which has been relying on us all this time.
That's right.
Very pro-American.
And of course, I should not let it go without saying, and I guess you can correct me if I'm wrong or fill in some detail, but at the same time that Clinton was backing the Kurds in Iraq, he was also backing the Turkish war against the Kurds all through the 1990s in that country.
That's right.
We often have this kind of duplicitous policy.
And a final note on the Kurds, you know, that region around Kirkuk and Kurdistan used to be part of the Ottoman Empire.
And the Turks are the same way.
They don't have any oil.
They need oil.
They want oil.
And if Turkey had oil, it would become a significant power.
And they're saying, well, we're not going to let the Iranians ever get hold of that oil.
If Iraq collapses, we're going to move in there.
And what we have to do is drive our army down the road about 100 kilometers and we're there.
So you have to factor in possible Turkish intervention.
Yeah, well, it'll just be a war between America's ally, Turkey, and America's ally, Kurdistan, and America's ally, Iraq, and America's enemy, Iran.
Squabbling children, right?
Great.
Well, I'm with Maliki.
Let's have this referendum the day after tomorrow.
I mean, what are we waiting on?
How about forget the opinion of the Iraqi people.
Let's just go right now.
Everybody on your truck to Kuwait.
How about all the American soldiers in Iraq all just start walking toward Kuwait, driving their trucks toward Kuwait and refuse to fight from now on?
What about that?
That's being too sensible.
It's un-American.
Of course that's the solution, but unfortunately we're hooked on this imperialist impulse.
So we're staging this fake election, rigged election, in Afghanistan this week to validate our continued military occupation.
I wish the Taliban had challenged them to an open, free vote with real international supervision.
You know who would have won the election?
The Taliban.
But you know who's banned from the election?
By the Americans?
The Taliban and its allies.
And what they've done is they've taken, they say, okay, we're going to hold an election, but anyone who opposes our presence here is not allowed to run in the election.
So the only people who are running are the people who are Stooges and Quislings and people who are on the U.S. payroll, or people who hate the Pashtuns like the Tajiks of the Northern Alliance.
That's not an election.
That's a beauty contest.
A real beauty contest.
And you know, tell me a little bit more, give me some real, you know, coherent argument about how it is, in your opinion, I know it is already your opinion, but how it is your opinion that Afghanistan is never going to be a modern nation-state with a capital city and a parliament and a monopoly on force, and how it's a tribal society, and how divided the different tribes that live there are, and how this whole premise, at least that they're selling the American people, that they're going to create some kind of modern women's rights western nation-state in this land the size of Texas and Central Asia, landlocked Central Asia, is just a damn lie, Eric.
Well, it is a damn lie, but it's easy to carry it on when you live far away.
People who've been to Afghanistan and know what the place is like, and I don't mean the little bubble of Kabul, which is like the bubble of Saigon was during the American occupation.
You go there and you think everything's wonderful, there are casinos, there are hookers, there are bars, there are restaurants, there are women running around without veils, but that's not Afghanistan.
That's little America under the bubble.
Get beyond city limits and you're in a country that's living in the 14th century.
And it's, you know, Pakistani ambassador said to me a very good point, he said, you know, you Americans, he said, you're an engineering people, you like to build things, he said, and you like to fix things.
If something's wrong, fix it, and fast.
He said, well, there are problems in this world that can't be fixed.
There's certainly that you can't fix.
And I'll tell you, the backwardsness of Afghan society, the mistreatment of women, animals, let me add, too, the corruption, the cruelty, the ugliness, and everything else, cannot be fixed, at least not in our era.
So certain things we have to accept.
We're not armed social workers.
We're not there defending women's rights, believe me.
We're there about oil and gas.
And carrying on this pretense, it's painful to see.
And it's making, driving America to the far right, maintaining these imperial fantasies.
South Sudan.
Let's talk about South Sudan, Eric.
South Sudan.
South Sudan.
Okay, wait, wait, wait.
Now, here's the thing.
Save Darfur.
But that's up in the northwest, right?
Correct.
That's a whole separate issue, that all right-wing Christian church groups have jumped on Darfur as a morality play between evil Arabs and poor Christian blacks who are being persecuted.
Well, it's a hundred times more complicated than that.
But let's turn to South Sudan.
While the Darfur mess goes on, Sudan is Africa's largest country in geographical size.
Not population, but geographical size.
And the British, with their infinite wisdom, simply took all kinds of different tribes and people and put them in one country, ensuring a mess forever forward.
The problem in Sudan is that southern Sudan is primarily animist, that is, traditional African religions, and with smaller numbers of Christians.
And they have been in revolt against the north, which is predominantly Muslim Arab culture, even though they're almost as black as the blacks in the south of Sudan.
Very hard to tell apart in some cases, or at least for a foreigner.
Well, now, there was a civil war there, but then they worked out of peace in 2005, right?
Right.
A civil war that sort of went on for years, and supposedly up to two million people died over 20, 30 years, and a peace agreement was signed.
And next, I think it's in 2011, the agreement stipulates that South Sudan is allowed to vote to secede, if it wants, from Sudan, or to stay.
And the feeling is that it will secede.
And meanwhile, there are all kinds of intelligence agents and oil people and diplomats and things from the U.S. in South Sudan, the capital, Juba, who are working to make sure that Sudan is broken apart, and that part of its oil-rich region, which is in the south, goes to this new state, which will be another American protectorate.
Well, so, as far as you know, is the Save Darfur movement just a front for these oil companies who are trying to just get a foothold in that country one place or another?
No, no.
I mean, there's genuine concern in the U.S. and Europe about Darfur, because it's got a huge media play, but nobody really understands what's going on in Darfur.
And you have this great deal of propaganda that's been put out by both right-wing Christian church groups and by left-wing aid groups, like Oxfam, and neither has painted an accurate portrait of a very complicated conflict that is, in its most simplest form, in Darfur, between sedentary, more or less African farmers and nomadic, so-called Arab herders.
I just read a book about Gordon and Sudan in the 1880s, and the same problem was going on back then.
So it's nothing new, but it's very complicated, and it's an area that is, in large part, not really in government control, even though the government gets blamed for all the problems.
And the Western powers have been stirring the pot there, because there, and just to the north of there, is reputed to be oil and uranium.
Oh, even in Darfur?
Even in Darfur.
Ah.
That's the first I've heard of the uranium, but that's certainly the first I've heard of the oil there.
I thought all the oil was in the south, but so that's a whole other problem.
Well, and from the American Empire's point of view...
There may be.
Pardon?
There may be.
There's a speculation.
I see.
Although, here's what there definitely is, right?
Chinese, in the south.
Yes.
Chinese are very active in Sudan's oil business, because we wouldn't touch it.
We're boycotting the wicked evil Sudanese, so the Chinese just move right in, and they're now taking up the lion's or the dragon's share, if you like, of the Sudanese oil business.
And then you don't know what you've got until it's gone.
Now the American Empire wants the ball, because the Chinese picked it up.
Exactly.
And also, Sudan, you know, is very underpopulated, and it has still...
It could feed all of black Africa, just that one country.
There's a lot of fertile farmland, but it's very poor, and it's not developed.
Wow.
So, is the future of AFRICOM full-scale invasion, basically, of that continent?
I think...
I forgot who it was that said that what the Africans have going for them is they really don't have that many resources to be exploited, and their central governments are so weak that it's hard to take them over.
Well, that was the thought, but not so much anymore, because the enterprising Chinese are now discovering that there is gold in them, in our hills in Africa, and there are resources that have been overlooked, and governments are cheap to buy in Africa.
And also, the U.S. military, the Pentagon, as we were just saying, is getting deeply involved.
You know that we have an African command now in the Pentagon?
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, and we've got special forces running all over West Africa and the Horn of Africa.
Somalia.
Somalia, and Ghana, and Mali, and...
So, gradually, we're getting sucked in.
Why do you think Hillary Clinton was in Ghana?
Two reasons.
Oil, and because we want to set up military bases there.
Now, Blam, now I need, like, two more minutes here, because what she also did when she was in Africa was she went to Nigeria and warned about Al-Qaeda getting a foothold in Nigeria on the West Coast, and this is something that...
There was an article by Sebastian Younger in January 2007, and I interviewed him on the show all about it, and it's about how Shell Oil steals all the oil out from under the land of the local tribal people there.
It doesn't compensate them one bit, but they pay off the central government of Nigeria to steal all the oil.
Meanwhile, they pollute all the Niger Delta, and so they poison all the native fishing ground of the people who live there, so they're going to war, and they got badass Eastern European fully automatic rifles, too.
And so now this is Al-Qaeda, because they're threatening Shell's interest in stealing their oil out from under their homes.
Well, we see Al-Qaeda under every rock.
It's ludicrous.
Nigeria is the world's most corrupt government, and it needs a lot of healing, but I just don't think the guys from Washington are the ones to do it.
Yeah, boy.
Can't you just imagine a bunch of marines and speedboats going up and down, you know, like fighting in Louisiana or something?
Well, exactly.
It's a pretty scary thought.
Golly.
All right.
Well, I guess we'll all continue to cheer it on.
Thanks very much again for your time on the show today, Eric.
Great to be back with you.
Talk to you soon.
Bye-bye.
All right.
Take care.
Bye.
All right, everybody.
That's Eric Margulies, Sun National Media.
We're at the top of the world.
American Raj.
There you go.
I guess our only hope is complete and utter and total financial devastation.