02/21/14 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

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All right you guys, welcome back to the thing here.
I'm Scott Horton, this is my show, The Scott Horton Show, and we're lucky enough to have Eric Margulies back on today.
He writes at ericmargulies.com, spelt like Margolis, ericmargulies.com.
He's the author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination, and you can also find his articles, you can find them at ericmargulies.com, and you can also find them at lourockwell.com and at unz.com, unzunz.com.
Welcome back to the show, Eric, how are you doing?
I'm fine, and I'm always glad to be back with you, Scott.
Well, good deal.
I'm very happy that I have you around to explain to me what the hell is going on in the world, because there's a lot of it, and since you've seen it all already, and reported it all, you're about the best at explaining, especially when it comes to far-off lands like Ukraine.
So I guess the big news is, according to CNN anyway, that the public square is empty, a truce has been called, an agreement has been made that they're going to have elections at some point later in the year, and that the president's going to give up some powers to his prime minister, and I'm not exactly sure who worked the deal.
You got better details than that, but apparently the the spiral out of control has halted.
Then again, I think I heard something too about there was a big fistfight in the parliament about whether the deal was really on or not, or what, so tell me what you think.
Well, it's very good news.
You know, it's an imperfect deal.
It could break down, but it stopped the rush to what looked to me like possible war.
I mean, we were really in a dangerous situation.
Not only was Ukraine facing civil war internally, and the army was about to intervene there.
We don't know what would have happened with the army.
It might have broken apart or moved against the people, but the US and Russia were on a confrontation and on a collision course over Ukraine, with last week the White House speaking of consequences if the Russians didn't pull in their horns and stop supporting the pro-Russian Ukrainian government.
Very dangerous talk.
Obviously you don't remember as far back as the Cuban Missile Crisis, so there was an enormous amount to be worried about, but fortunately cooler heads prevailed and a compromise agreement brokered by the European Union was put into effect, and it's a big success.
And now the EU doing this, is this the kind of thing that the Americans were trying to thwart, or this is them finally getting their act together and doing the gluing that the Americans were pushing them to do, and we're trying to, in fact, we're growing impatient with, and we're ready to push them aside as revealed in that leaked phone call between the American ambassador to the EU and the American ambassador to Ukraine last week, or two weeks ago?
Well, it was a delicious moment for lovers of irony, because as you say, Victoria Nuland, our neoconservative assistant secretary of state for European affairs, was recorded in Ukraine talking on the phone, which she should never have been doing, when the question of the EU pushing forth their program of compromise, she said, fuck the EU, you know, we'll do it ourselves, and we'll issue threats.
Well, this is a perfect example of the lack of IQ that's prevalent in our foreign policy right now.
This woman should be fired, and Europe deserves congratulations for its patience and perseverance.
Well, and you know, in that thing, they were really just arguing about the EU isn't moving fast enough, right?
So is this really what she was trying to get them to do, or not, do you think?
Well, no, Scott, in fact, I wrote a column about it.
I think there's much more to it than that, because what she said, epithetally, perfectly demonstrates the neocon arrogant attitudes towards Europe.
Europe is old Europe.
It doesn't matter what Europe says.
You know, the dumb run of Donald Rumsfeld, old Europe, I did during the Gulf War.
Europe is jejun, it's a spent source.
We don't have to work with Europe or listen to them.
They're just a bunch of pathetical fogies.
Well, the neocons don't like Europe because they are not anxious to let us have our wars, and they are sometimes even mildly critical of Israel, and put these two things together, and it's anathema to the neocons.
But at least the latest foolishness from them has been shown up by these events in Ukraine.
I hope earnestly that this process will stick.
Ukrainians are hotheads.
There are a lot of angry people there, but I think even they realized that they were approaching the abyss.
All right.
Now, a friend just sent me a link to an article where they say that, or I guess they're quoting the BBC as saying one of the stipulations of the deal is that the 2004 constitution will be restored, and then what that means is that all the police power is handed from the president over to, or I mean actual control of the security forces, is handed over to the parliament, which in other words, according to this writer here, this is basically giving up everything that Yanukovych, that's how you say it, has basically capitulated entirely.
I don't think so.
No, it could be, but I don't read it that way.
Some of his powers have been reduced.
I don't know what level of control he's going to have over parliament.
We have not seen it yet, because there's a temporary coalition government until elections, which will be fairly soon.
If the prime minister comes from his party, then he'll still have substantial power.
If it doesn't, then he'll be forced into what the French call the cohabitation, where you had a president and a prime minister of different parties.
You know, it's funny, when I was hurriedly typing your name into Google to pull up your website, it pulled up a picture of you with the gas princess, with her princess haircut and everything, Yulia Tymoshenko, at some dinner party or something.
Lovely Yulia.
A very charming and attractive woman.
And they're letting her out of jail now, they said.
I've heard that, and I certainly hope so.
She was thrown in jail by the Yanukovych forces on trumped-up charges, we think.
She was charged with some kind of financial peculation and hanky panky in the Ukrainian gas business.
But it's so complex in Byzantine that nobody really understands it.
It's like running Tammany Hall, City Hall in New York.
It's beyond explanation.
But hopefully she'll be out, because she's been very ill.
She has severe back problems.
But boy, once they let her out of jail, she's going to become a whirlwind.
Yeah, that's interesting.
I'm trying to remember now, I thought that I had read that, what's the guy's name, with the whole poison hoax and everything?
The last guy from the Orange Revolution?
Yulia Tymoshenko is his name.
Right, right.
And then so he and Tymoshenko had a falling out, and I had thought that he had accused her of tilting toward, because they were in the Orange Revolution together as partners, right?
And then she split off, and I'm trying to remember which of them was accusing, I think he was accusing her of tilting back toward Putin.
And that was the fight that got her ended up locked in jail.
Well, it was personal, personal rivalries.
They were, the whole thing was very childish, and not Athenian democracy by any means.
Almost worthy of our own U.S. Congress, for God's sake.
But no, they fell out.
You never know, they might come back.
But Yushchenko kind of was completely, his name was blackened.
He lost all credibility because he did poorly as president.
All right, now, let's see, we're almost out of time here.
So I guess, well, I'll ask for a comment on the media here.
They'll show all the riots and talk about, well, it's the government versus the people out in the street there.
And they really don't care.
They'll go on, they'll carry on, all on the internet and all on the TV channels, too.
They'll just carry on pushing whatever narrative is foisted in front of them for all of us to feast on.
Do you ever notice how bad it is?
Did you notice this time around?
I've been writing for the last 20 years, or 15 years, that our North American media has become as bad and as corrupt as the old Soviet media was when I was covering Russia, Soviet Union.
It has been really disgraceful.
They're obeying government orders.
It's a propaganda campaign worthy of the old Stalinist era.
They've really made themselves look very, very poor.
We'll be right back with more Eric Margulies right after this.
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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with the great Eric Margulies, ericmargulies.com, and American Raj, Liberation or Domination is his most recent book.
And so I was going to ask you, I guess, oh, I had read this thing this morning that was saying all the trashing of Russia, and probably even part of all the hawkish talk on the Ukraine crisis, really anger at Putin for not going along with American plans in Syria.
And then I thought that was breaking news that the Americans had plans in Syria.
I mean, I knew they had activities, but I didn't think that they had a plan.
I was wondering if you think so.
I'm reading in the Wall Street Journal that they think that maybe now they'll intervene against the Mujahideen they've been supporting all this time, Eric.
I think Putin and I wrote the same thing.
Did the U.S. a great favor and pulled our bacon out of the fire over Syria because Obama and his incompetent advisors had foolishly boxed themselves into a corner by threatening Syria and all the red lines.
And if you don't do this, watch out, we're going to get you.
And when their blood was cold, what were they going to do then?
Start a little war in Syria against whom?
Who were they going to bomb?
Well, what would happen next?
They really hadn't thought it through just the way I was saying earlier, these foolish threats against Russia over Ukraine.
There will be consequences.
Putin is just a person to call such a bluff and make the bluffers look awfully foolish.
So, no, I think Putin really did Obama a big favor.
And now, I mean, are they really serious?
What the hell's going on?
I try my best to just, you know, remote view the Oval Office discussion or whatever in my imagination.
What in the hell are they talking about in there where the discussion goes from back in the Mujahideen, somebody decided this is OK, let's work with Prince Bandar on this and we'll go ahead and we'll back this giant Mujahideen force there for the last two and a half, three years now.
And then now they're saying, well, geez, well, not that we need to back Assad like George W. Bush against the Mujahideen, but maybe now we need to fight both at the same time.
A two front war like John McCain was pushing on CNN the night before last.
Are they smoking crack up there or eating, snorting PCP up their nose or I don't know.
Yeah, I think it's like I used to have a T-shirt in Vietnam Day saying, kill them all and let God sort them out.
That was you, huh?
Yeah, that was me.
They're utter confusion in the White House.
They're really, these are know-nothing people who are dealing with a very difficult, complicated, arcane situation there in Syria.
And they shouldn't be allowed, their grown-ups should be handling it, not these amateurs.
And yet they are.
And we have had a reflex, a knee-jerk thing here in the United States since 2001, is that we react to so many threats and problems by military response.
And here we go again.
No brainpower, all brawn.
That is not going to solve the current situation.
And in fact, we're just getting ourselves deeper and deeper because the bottom line is that America's natural ally in the region is President Assad and his regime, his secular regime in Syria.
And we've ended up out of our own stupidity of getting our people who want to drive the United States out of the Middle East.
These are the jihadists who we call terrorists.
They're now our allies, and we really ignited this terrible war in Syria, and we bear a large responsibility for the millions of refugees that it has caused.
Well, and you know, I'm not certain if you saw this thing in the Wall Street Journal, but this is basically the Chalabi plan from 1996 for Iraq, where, you know, we'll do, we'll just invade a little part of it, and that'll be the rally point, and we'll just need like 5,000 guys.
Remember that?
What are you doing?
I do.
I mean, they're saying here they're going to have a limited no-fly zone, and they're going to build up some moderate force, which they haven't found yet.
And I mean, this is crazy what they're talking about here.
I mean, I can imagine an army general being told, yeah, you're going to put just enough guys out there to get killed, but not enough to protect themselves.
And I guess they're going to go along, right?
Well, Patrick, I'll have apoplexy.
Fortunately, our generals are not stupid enough, usually, to support such ideas.
So there will be resistance, I'm sure.
But, you know, after just having stumbled in Syria and getting our pants whipped in Afghanistan, and almost gotten ourselves into a head-on confrontation with Russia over Ukraine, here we are stumbling into Syria.
And as we were saying before, the American media is launching constant propaganda invective and barrages against Putin and against Russia that is very scary.
There's some kind of guiding force behind all of this.
And the American corporate media has gotten orders to go after Russia, bombard them.
And to me, this has all the smell of Europe about 1910.
Yeah, well, I don't like it when you talk like that, because I know that you know what you're talking about real good there.
I'm reading this guy Stephen Cohen in The Nation saying, he was asking kind of rhetorically there in his article, has any Russian leader since Stalin been so vilified in the American media?
I mean, this is really, Vladimir Putin, he's no nice guy if you gotta live under him or whatever.
But think about all of the tens of millions of Eastern Europeans and Central Asians who don't live under him, because the Soviet Union's 25 years gone now.
Well, what Putin has done is he's brought Russia up from its knees.
And Russia's standing up now, it's resuming its strength.
And whereas under Yeltsin, we pretty well gave Russia its marching orders and controlled it financially, this is no longer the case.
And Putin really has made Russia able to support its own interests.
And he is trying to stop Western NATO expansion to Russia's borders, which we promised we would never do in 1991.
But we have been doing, we broke our vow to Mikhail Gorbachev.
And Putin has been very successful with this.
And he's respected around the world for being a competent leader.
And we can't stand this.
So the word is out to attack and bring down Putin.
And also he makes another good target.
The Muslims have failed to step into the shoes of the Soviet Union as a big boogeyman.
Maybe they're gonna bring the old Woloski's back again.
Do you think their plan is still to, or I guess, was it ever really to completely destroy Russia to tear it apart into, I don't know, 10 more pieces or 15?
Well, I don't know.
Somewhere in the bowels of the military industrial complex, there is a plan to undermine Russia, for sure.
Otherwise, we wouldn't be footing around in Georgia, in the Black Sea area, up in the up in the Baltics, Central Asia.
Yeah, I think there is, we'd like to bring down Russia, peel off a few more parts of it, and make it a weak middle power, rather than a significant power that can oppose American strategic policies in the Middle East and Central Asia, and the Caucasus region.
Yeah.
Which, of course, makes what should be all of our number one priority getting rid of all the hydrogen bombs impossible, right?
I mean, if we were a normal country in a normal time, and treated Russia as an independent, separate, upper middle class power that it is, compared to the old USSR anyway, then maybe we could actually have a discussion about getting rid of these H-bombs.
But as long as this is going on, forget about it.
They're not going to give up.
You're quite right, Scott.
This makes it very difficult to conduct any meaningful strategic arms reduction negotiation talks.
And as I've been saying for years, like a prophet in the wilderness, ranting and raving, the most important priority for the United States, diplomatic priority, is to maintain even relations with Russia.
Because Russia has a couple thousand nuclear warheads pointed at us.
We cannot afford to be on bad terms with a country that can wipe us off the map, start World War III.
It should be untouchable.
Also, with smile and calm relations.
Instead, we're going out of our way to irritate and to annoy Russia.
We've just sent warships into the Black Sea.
Imagine if Russian warships were sitting on Lake Ontario, hysteria that there would be in the States.
So, no, we're antagonizing Russia, and we're giving the Russians, even though we may not mean to destroy Russia, we're giving a lot of Russian security people the idea that we're back to our old Cold War plans of tearing down the Russian Federation.
Man, they should give Putin a regular column in the New York Times.
I thought he was really good there.
He is very good.
He has a right sense of humor, you know.
He does.
I don't like some of his brutal policies, and he's surely an autocrat, but the way he destroyed the Chechen independence movement was really bloodthirsty.
On the other hand, he's a lot smarter than our Western leaders, and he shows it, and he's a man who's literate.
Well, he's typical.
The KGB, from whence he came in the 1990s, were the creme de la creme of Soviet society.
They were well-educated.
They knew what was going on, and they eventually, as I was told when I was at KGB headquarters, that they were eventually going to overthrow the Communist Party and take over running Russia.
Well, there you go.
I bet you wrote about that before it happened, too, didn't you?
I did.
Of course.
All right.
That's Eric Margulies, War at the Top of the World, American Raj.
Those are the books, ericmargulies.com, lourockwell.com, unz.com.
Thanks very much, Eric.
Appreciate it again.
Cheers, Scott.
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