04/24/14 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
First guest on the show today is the great Eric Margulies.
He's the author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination, and he keeps the website ericmargulies.com, and you can also find what he writes at unz.com and at lourockwell.com.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Eric?
I'm happy to be back as ever.
Ah, well, good.
Hey, man, so I'm not trying to be too whiny about it or anything, but I'm a little bit scared about what's going on in Ukraine here, because I'm doing my little thought experiments and stuff with the little I know about it, and it sort of seems like the government of Kiev is going to try something, I don't know, really stupid, really violent, to seize control back from the towns in rebellion in the east, and that this very well could at least, quote unquote, depending on your point of view, force Vladimir Putin's hand and, you know, give him the excuse at least to invade eastern Ukraine and maybe go all the way to Odessa and maybe further and who knows what, and then God knows what the Republicans and the Democrats and the Brits and Germans and whatever other madmen in play here might do about it.
And so I wonder if you think I really have cause to worry.
Is there something important that I'm missing or what the hell is going on here?
No, your fears are well taken, Scott.
I'm just back from Europe.
I heard firsthand from some senior Russian diplomats.
They were saying that this is the closest the U.S. and Russia has been to a nuclear confrontation since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
Whoa.
Well, now, let me ask you this.
Did you ask them, well, but what about when Reagan ended detente and went back to brinksmanship?
This is worse than that.
Do you think this is worse than that?
It is.
I don't know.
I can't compare the two, but I know it's bad because what we're doing is we're pushing Putin into a corner.
Dangerous thing to do with a nuclear armed power and run by very smart KGB men.
The chances of a accidental war beginning are growing by the day.
Man.
All right.
Well, so I guess if we can go back through the pieces of that, is it OK?
It seemed to me, for example, one thing here is the phone call that was leaked of Timoshenko, the gas princess, saying, you know, how much she hates all the pro-Russians in the East and screw them and this and that.
I mean, that seemed like so politically damaging right there that she she might as well have said, I hereby relinquish any, you know, presumed legitimate authority to rule these people whatsoever.
She is declaring them out of her protection in a way like that.
And then but now they want to insist.
And this is the Timoshenko being part of the American coup junta in Kiev there.
But now they seem to be really trying to push their luck.
Are they really going to?
To I mean, some people have been killed already, a handful at least, not to diminish their deaths, but, you know, it's only a few so far.
But I mean, do you think that there's going to be a severe, you know, invasion of the east or a real attempt to to raid and and and take back all of these occupied buildings with force?
Yes, I think the chances are high that it will happen because the U.S. military is now run by these golden haired boys from special operations.
And they think they're the masters of the universe and they can do everything and, you know, send in some seals or some Delta Force.
And they can take out anybody who the Ruski send think they want to send in.
So there's I mean, we have been using these guys.
We use them in Libya.
We use them in Syria, in Iraq and Afghanistan.
So there are no Praetorian Guard.
And so they are being used, as I understand it, already in the fighting in eastern Ukraine.
Not many.
We're accusing the Russians of doing exactly the same thing using their small numbers, the special forces.
But any one of these clashes could develop into a major and escalating situation, particularly if artillery and aircraft are involved.
Aircraft start fighting with each other and missiles are used.
It's it's like fighting in a in a firecracker factory using firebombs.
Oh, God.
Well, now, so wait a minute now.
Let me get a little bit of clarification there about the Joint Special Operations Command already in eastern Ukraine.
That would be Delta Force or Navy SEALs.
And who told you that?
Military sources.
U.S. military sources?
Yes.
Yes.
And I just want to be clear, because you were saying earlier you had been speaking to some Russian diplomats.
Quite right.
No, no.
This comes from the American side.
The Russians are, by the way, claiming the same thing.
They're saying that there are disguised U.S. forces operating there already.
Can you tell me anything more about that, about JSOC there, Delta and or Navy SEALs or whoever?
No, that's all I know.
What I can say, there was a report yesterday that came out in England where I was that the Poles had been training Ukrainian fighting units to send over and that these fighting units trained by and armed by the Poles spearheaded the attacks in Kiev.
Well, what paper was that, can you say?
Do you remember?
I don't.
I think it was in the Telegraph, but I wouldn't swear my life.
No, I'll try to Google it up during the break.
Yeah.
Well, and speaking of Poland, so now the Americans, and this is a big part of the setup that I should have set up at the beginning, Eric, because they're sending planes and troops to not just Poland, but some of the other states are getting some troops and some planes, not enough to fight a war with, like you said about the Navy showing up in the Black Sea.
It's not enough to win, but it's enough to pick a fight.
What are they doing?
They're just reassuring.
This is reassurance to our NATO allies at one cost.
Yeah, but gunboat diplomacy, showing the flag, you can't push us around.
It's highly dangerous, particularly in the United States.
Particularly a Navy-U.S. warship in the Black Sea, which is a very narrow, small area.
Accidents can happen.
We sent one in there, by the way, during the short little war in Georgia, too.
It's like the Russians sending a destroyer into Long Island Sound or into the Gulf of Mexico.
You know, it would make the Americans crazy, and I'm sure the Russians are reacting with almost as much fury.
Yeah, and then so...
Well, let's say that there's a major assault on these towns in the east.
Do you think that Putin will really go through with invading the east and keeping...
Yeah, he might.
He might.
Well, he's very explicitly...
He usually keeps his word.
Whatever he says he's going to do, he does.
He did not hesitate to kill 100,000 Chechens who were fighting for their independence from Russia, using the most brutal tactics, including heavy artillery and heavy bombers and fuel air explosives.
So he's no Shrinking Violet.
He could use the same thing in eastern Ukraine, claiming he's fighting pockets of die-hard fascists, digging them out.
I don't think he will, but I'm saying that he could.
Yeah.
Well, and then so I don't know.
I mean, I guess Obama's already said we're not getting into any military excursions in Ukraine, I think was the term he used.
And some of the others have said so, too.
In fact, I guess some of the implied language from just yesterday was, well, you know, we draw the line at our NATO allies.
They sort of said, go ahead and invade if you're going to.
We're not going to war over Ukraine at that point.
But I wonder if that would really that position could really withstand the politics and the news cycle within one or two days of an actual Russian invasion, whether that would have to change, whether they're NATO members or not.
Could Obama politically, never mind the threat of the real consequences, but could he face the political consequences in the most immediate term of not doing something stupid?
In an election year, who lost Ukraine?
All the Republicans, none of whom could find Ukraine on a map, would all be screaming that to high heaven.
And when Bush would be a Bush, Obama would be accused of being a wimp.
But on the other hand, the Russians, I don't think want war, but they want to try and muscle and intimidate the West out of an area which, by the way, until 64 years ago, or at least until 1964, was Russian and has been Russian for hundreds of years.
It's not like the Russians are invading the Ozarks.
This is traditional Russian territory.
And certainly all Russians think that it should come back to Russia.
And Putin is also talking about Moldova and Little Russia or White Russia.
What's he saying about Moldova?
You're talking about the Transnistria or whatever all that?
Yeah, he's saying that that should revert back to Russia if its people want it, which they clearly do.
And Belarus, very close to Russia, too, is called White Russia.
There are a lot of its people, not all, but a lot want to reunite with Russia.
There's a lot of nostalgia for the Soviet Union.
Most people were better off under the Soviet Union, except for a small minority.
So Putin says that he will stand behind these people.
All right, well, hold it right there.
We've got to take this break.
And we'll be right back, everybody, with the great Eric Margulies, ericmargulies.com, also lourockwell.com, and unz.com.
His books are War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
One sec.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm on the line with the great Eric Margulies.
Ericmargulies.com, luerockwell.com, owns.com.
And now, Eric, I wanted to play for you this short clip, if I could, of the ridiculous Victoria Nuland, U.S. ambassador to Europe, basically, Undersecretary of State for European Affairs, on the Amanpour Show on CNN yesterday.
It's, I think, just less than a minute.
In Kyiv itself, some of the barricades around the Maidan have come down.
But you can't compare the situation in Kyiv, where now everything that is still being held by protesters is being held with licenses and with the agreement of the government of Ukraine, with the agreement of the Rada, or with regular leases from the owners of the building, which is, you can't compare that to what's happening in eastern Ukraine, where you have armed separatists wearing baklavas, carrying very heavy munitions, holding government buildings, refusing to allow monitors in, refusing to allow journalists in, kidnapping journalists.
In fact, I think you saw, Christian, that there were four or five journalists kidnapped in Slavyansk, and one is still being held today.
This is not a comparable situation.
Well, so there you go.
The right sector and Svoboda Nazis that rule the streets of Kyiv have permits and licenses from the coup d'etat government to do so.
So they got morality on their side, and the people in the east who are refusing to respect their authority are the ones who are way out of line here.
And did you hear?
Backed by a foreign power, it turns out, too.
Yes, and people wearing baklavas on their head, as Mrs.
Nuland pointed out, which is interesting, because I thought they wore balaclava helmets that dated from the first Crimean War, not Turkish pastry on their heads.
That's really too bad.
And of course, if she said it right, she's still just talking about the uniform of my local sheriff's department, these paramilitaries with their black masks.
We're paramilitary, Matt, in the States.
But the point is that the level of invective between the U.S. and Russia now has become childish.
It's kind of a schoolyard thing, and they're trading accusations about trivia while they're at the same time sort of getting geared up for what might blunder into a war.
Well, and, you know, I don't know.
We talk about this all the time, stupidity or the plan.
And most of the time, it's just a stupid plan.
And these people in D.C., they've got high self-esteem.
And so they think that they ought to do, actually do the thing that they think they ought to do, which they certainly should not.
But they're just they're such buffoons.
And the thing is, I mean, I don't know, maybe it's just always like this.
Maybe it's all of history is just nothing but George W.
Bush is one after the other.
But it seems like there's a profound idiocy in the American policy in Eastern Europe here where, I mean, they're really, you know, like you said, you're comparing this to the Cuban missile crisis, you know, not maybe not quite that bad, but close or at least the worst crisis since then.
And and for what?
So that they can, you know, try to freeze the Russians out of a few pipeline routes.
But even that you're talking small percentage of them compare percentages compared to all the different pipeline routes there are out of the Caspian Basin and out of Russia into Europe, etc.
Right.
I mean, this is madness what they're doing.
It is.
I'm missing it.
There's something smart going on and I can't tell.
No, there isn't.
Whoever wins the crisis, whoever loses the crisis will be the big winner because the winner has got to undertake the thirty five billion dollar life support financially of bankrupt Ukraine.
And it's it's a hot potato that nobody should grab.
So no, you guys take it.
No, no, no, no.
You can't.
So that's one factor.
The other factor is the Obama administration's foreign policy, in my humble view, is being run by amateur, angry amateur women that owed awful Susan Powers at the at the U.N., who thinks she's some sort of later day Christian missionary and who has to save little black babies in Africa.
She's very militant.
Susan Rice is a national security advisor who is an angry pit bull with no historical or international knowledge.
We've had the angry Hillary Clinton stirring the pot.
Again, a woman of very little world knowledge who's angling for her own presidential nomination.
So down the line.
So we do not have a sophisticated foreign policy team such as we used to.
Yeah, well, they are all a bunch of incompetent boobs, but you seem to think it's actually the boobs, the literal ones that make the difference here.
What's that?
They are that they seem to be the people that Obama is listening to.
The they're liberal, liberal Amazon Avengers.
And it's scary.
These these people do not deserve to be in the jobs they currently hold.
Well, and here's the thing, too.
They're all Democrats.
And so that means that all day long, all they hear, they don't hear you and they don't hear me or any of this.
All they hear all day long is the National Review calling them cowards and sissies.
And you might have saw the other day, David Brooks, of all people, said that Barack Obama has a manhood problem.
He hasn't killed nearly enough people, which he's got to be somewhere right around one hundred thousand by now, you know.
But they'll always be endlessly attacked from the right for not being tough enough, no matter what they do.
So from there, they can only move to the right, you know, or stay in the same place at best.
Attacked by these chicken hawks on the right who will dodge the draft during the Vietnam War and ever send their sons into the military, which is particularly sickening for me as a Vietnam era vet.
I listen to these guys and I just want to get ill.
Yeah.
Well, now, so what about the Germans role in all of this, Eric?
Because Germany ain't America and we just don't get too much of an analysis of what all are the splits between their interests and ours.
We know that, you know, they preferred to put Klitschko in power there.
And Nuland overruled that.
That was the leaked phone call and all of that.
But are they just a minor satellite of the American empire in this case, or they've got their own scheme going on here?
Sort of seems like maybe we're aiding and abetting a German policy that may be very against America's interest.
I write extensively for the German media so that I realize that, yes, if you do a search for me, you'll find all kinds of my stuff in German.
Germany is playing a very clever game.
Germany lives next to Russia.
It was destroyed by Russia in World War II.
It's being very cautious.
The Germans have no respect for American foreign policy or American understanding of the issues.
They have Germany's largest exports go to Russia.
And the Germans are not about to endanger this and their jobs and their economy and everything else.
Well, in my last column that I wrote for Spain last week, I quoted Bismarck.
I was staying with the Bismarck family in Marbella.
So I had him very much on the mind.
The great Iron Chancellor Bismarck said during the dispute in the Balkans in the 1880s, he said, Bosnia, I think, was not worth the bones of one Prussian grenadier.
And that's how the Germans still feel, rightfully so.
So they don't want to get involved in any kind of fracas.
And they're scared of provoking Putin.
And they need Russia for oil and gas.
And the Germans just see no benefit to themselves whatsoever to stirring up this hornet's nest right next door.
It's all right for John McCain out there in Arizona or wherever he comes from to say that, you know, to see a ruckus in Europe.
But Germany is a borderline front line state.
Right.
Well, that's good, you know, to the degree that they have any say in this.
It's good.
You know, I guess I had read that they were reluctant to follow through with some of the sanctions the Americans are pushing and that kind of thing.
And now very quickly here.
Oh, I'm sorry.
We're about out of time.
But are there any of these other little NATO states that are standing taller than they really are and talking tougher than they would without America backing them up in this situation?
Poland is trying to provoke a war of fighting because they hate the Russians so much and they want to see them driven back.
Ditto the Bulgarians and the Romanians, because they're all scared to death and also the Serbs quietly.
The rest of them know they don't want to see this.
They want peace and more business.
Yeah.
Well, I would like to see peace and business.
Overcome this.
I mean, really, it's got to be being said in some of the precincts of American foreign policy leadership that, come on, guys, we don't really want to overdo this, do we?
Maybe I'm just I'm I'm a hopelessly naive patriot, I guess, at the end of the day, Eric, for believing that.
Anyway, thank you, sir.
Eric Margulies, everybody.
Eric Margulies dot com.
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